'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'
Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen
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Photo credit: students of A Mundzuku Ka Hina, communications workshop. |
A life conditioned by the dictates of competition and consumption cannot but bring great social differences along in its train. When we ascribe symbolic values to a consumptive life, ideas will conform to ideals in which our moral duties are the rights of others on us.
The subtle way social disproportions are perceived as if a causa sui, something wherein the cause lies within itself creates a world of facts based upon competitive abstractions that endlessly rehearse on a Procrustean bed.
The salto (flying somersault) performed by the boy, who depends for his survival on a rubbish-dump, breaks with this gesture the conditioned life. What he breaks is to function, which means to think, alike a certain ‘life-design.’ His action shows the incompleteness of our relationships in an abstract world.
His jump is a jump into a space of non-facts.
In the suspension of the movement is the liberating being of lightness.
Dear Keith,
ReplyDeleteImages are so interesting because they tell so much about ourselves, but sometimes so little about others.
For 'us' it is rather difficult to imagine that kind of life where a rubbish-dump becomes the plane on which to evolve life. Which also means to fall in love, to get married, to raise a family, to share sorrow and joy; in short: where one is.
The other persons disinterest for the flying somersault, seen from your vision, might also be apprehended as a natural gesture, as something common which is thus left unnoticed.
The salto is a full movement, a completeness, and the students who made this picture might have intended to give expression to their wholeness? Remains that an image does not stay with the photographer, and the truth and untruth of the image is always made up by the spectator.
Thank you for your impression and highlighting the abstract numbers, which might shed a light on a foolish world that in the image resonates but in which the image also illuminates man's capacity to survive, to be creative and I would say, be intelligent?