On the last day of October, the 2nd chapter of vanishings into landscape unfolded at
@la.cave__ – Ca simpla respirație/As Simple as Breathing, a collaboration with two of my fave geeks,
@flaviur and
@anamdeliu .
Together, we read Julia Armfield's Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), drawn by a beautiful line: 'When the earth was young, it rotated so quickly that part of it flew off into space, leaving the Pacific as its scar.' – as it made an arch of connection between two of the most mysterious landscapes: the vastness of the cosmos and that of the ocean, accesible to us only by technology.
Because, once you cross the Kármán line, the Earth’s atmosphere thins and darkness spills over, oxygen fades and gravity releases its hold. Here, everything floats following the gentle pull of celestial rhythms. Beneath the sea, though, past the midnight zone, floating gives way to sinking, and the weight of water overtakes the one of the body. In the abyssal and hadal depths (after the god of the underworld) - all dissolves, carried by the lull of shadows and silences. Time refrences here are kept only by the blue light of devices... or do they?
Recounting the story of a space probe lost to NASA in 2013, Flaviu scripted a journey acros celestial bodies, colonial histories of timekeeping, while imagining another possible life rhythm for the small orbiting probe. Ana, on the other hand, dived into the deepest depths of a primordial sea, in a poetic and intuitive choreography that moved beyond light's final reach, to reflecte on the seemingly quiet bio-contaminations woven into our lives, as down and upwards cycles of rhythms.
Strangely enough, this year, scientists discovered that in the ocean's dark depths, mineral rocks are producing oxygen, just as asteroid rocks do in space... perhaps for other kinds of breathing.
📸 Flaviu Rogojan & yours truly