TOO MUCH
mimesis
With eric arnaL
VIDEO 2025
[TRANSCRIPT]It’s coming from a very—from a place of pain really.
So it becomes more difficult to talk. Whatever you say is kind of policed in some way.
This sense of removal and distance. A conscious decision to almost say something without saying it.
There were ways for me to say the things I wanted to say without actually saying them, and in fact by making other people say them somehow.
Yeah I’ve really wanted to induce a sense of suspicion within the work. I don’t know if that makes sense—that this pain that is being represented or that is being constructed somehow is constructed. Or like to what extent can you trust your own feelings or assumptions, which somehow feels a lot more painful. Yeah, being put in this position of kind of—
—but feels a lot more painful for the audience or for the maker, do you mean?
—for the audience.
Okay, this could go two ways, and they’re sort of related, which is funny because it’s kind of what you just did. There’s a sense of this salvation having failed to some extent. But then there’s another sort of element—maybe that’s what I mean about the asceticism—it’s kind of like an acceptance of this situation, this thing that must be endured.
Maybe sadness isn’t quite the right way to describe this. It’s more what would come after sadness. It’s almost like what comes after the point where the pain is unbearable, like to the point where you can’t—that it has to go—it has to become something else in order for you to be able to live with it. And so almost it becomes something that’s—not that has no emotion but that’s in some way more distant, less open.
I actually like protein bars more than regular candy bars. There’s something about their chewiness or something.
Yeah I don’t usually have them. Maybe I should.
…a response to the huge impact of what had happened. And the shock and the sadness and the sense of the lack of possibility in life—that it wasn’t any longer possible to think of life as this thing that goes on, if not forever than for the foreseeable future. So I definitely think that it’s about dealing with psychic pain and the loneliness of these kinds of experience. And something that happens when—well it’s what you said actually—it’s when you get to a stage where you know that there’s no really significant healing or salvation. I mean, like all these things, sometimes the thing said at the beginning is the most important thing. So this idea of failed salvation, and I think that that is what I’m trying to think about. How do you live without the hope of healing? I’m not talking about medical, physical healing. I’m talking about something else. And can you even really talk about it? Can you ever really find a way to state that experience of pain? I don’t know. I think it does in a certain way go beyond the ordinary names and ordinary language.
I always get this sense of something that’s a bit—that is too much to even deal with—that it’s somehow there but it’s like you can’t stare directly into the sun. You can’t stare directly into certain things. You can’t. It’s too difficult. It’s too painful—it’s always present because you can never get rid of it—but it must be sort of held back. You can’t just let it loose.