Inner Lights - Nina Vurdelja

INNER LIGHTS: DARKNESS

It is hot outside and the air is dry. Not many of us are waiting for the performance in front of the cinema “Svetlost”. Svetlost means light and this place is meant for watching, but today we are here not to see.

We enter blindfolded, the stairs seem massive and dark gets darker. These hands holding me are soft and small, I trust them completely. They get me seated and I wait.

Soon I will encounter chaos and some intense force that I throw myself to.

I am being overwhelmed by this unknown, undistinguished dynamics; the stimuli coming one after another-smell of baby powder, sound of classroom, taste of alcohol, raindrops on my skin- build up a stream of life like a floating illusion, a phantasy.

This discomfort of a limited ability fuses with excitement, expectation and release. My imagination takes its account, creating vivid colours, images and shapes in front, or behind my eyes.

Yet, there is noone ti share this with. I acknowledge people in this common space, still I feel alone in this darkness of mine.

My body trembles between tense stiffness and rapid, sudden movement. I stay seated, I am given a donut, I feel oil and sugar melting underneath my tongue.

Invading soundscape continues, bringing up shallow imitating sounds of more or less recognizable outer world that I now only feel detached from. This mimezis of life feels contraproductive: it calls for its opposite. And it comes, soon enough: an end. That taboo word: death. It comes as sound, smell and touch. Again, this banal representation ceases to provoke what it stands for: nothingness.

Whose experience is this? Mine? Of an unknown other?

The same soft hands take me out of darkness at the street.
Simulacrum is over, like a dream that I have just awaken from.

Unutrašnja svetla [Inner Lights], PATOS, Smederevo

Autor kritike: Nina Vurdelja

29.8.2015.