The Narrative of Inadequacy
Based on Daniel J.Siegel’s notion that what we remember are not the feelings we associated with an intense experience, but the narrative we create while undergoing it, I have set out to document people’s remembrance of a moment of sexual inadequacy, while having them face away from the camera.
By resorting to the psychoanalytical notion that a full account is better made without direct eye contact between interlocutors, my intention in placing subjects with their backs to the camera is to depersonalize the experience, rather than portray it as a function of that particular individual. A tableaux of semi-anonymous accounts will form a collective register of a moment where closeness and second-hand notions of adequacy clashed.
Intimacy is a personal and private experience, therefore not subject to public scrutiny. Given that the only witnesses to it are its participants, there is no possible objective account. Yet, more and more media saturates us with pre-conceived notions of sexual expression, doling out clichés and limiting the range of experience, perpetually promoting an imago of seamless interactions.
THE NARRATIVE OF INEDEQUACY delves into the strangeness of physical intimacy, an experience that antagonizes the representative broadcasting that constitutes much of our social interactions in the age of Facebook. While anyone can come across as an ebullient, competent as far as their online identity goes, the directness of naked contact, a declining phenomena amongst our young who increasingly favor the controlled digital dialog, becomes charged and challenges us to deal with the unpredictability of a direct two-way human connection. Therefore, sexual inadequacy proves to be the last frontier, an experience that beckons us to wrangle with that part of ourselves which remains immune to cognitive organization.
As a friend recently asked me “where is the sublime of failure?’, I felt compelled to address the theme of desire in the hands of its mismatched execution.
By resorting to the psychoanalytical notion that a full account is better made without direct eye contact between interlocutors, my intention in placing subjects with their backs to the camera is to depersonalize the experience, rather than portray it as a function of that particular individual. A tableaux of semi-anonymous accounts will form a collective register of a moment where closeness and second-hand notions of adequacy clashed.
Intimacy is a personal and private experience, therefore not subject to public scrutiny. Given that the only witnesses to it are its participants, there is no possible objective account. Yet, more and more media saturates us with pre-conceived notions of sexual expression, doling out clichés and limiting the range of experience, perpetually promoting an imago of seamless interactions.
THE NARRATIVE OF INEDEQUACY delves into the strangeness of physical intimacy, an experience that antagonizes the representative broadcasting that constitutes much of our social interactions in the age of Facebook. While anyone can come across as an ebullient, competent as far as their online identity goes, the directness of naked contact, a declining phenomena amongst our young who increasingly favor the controlled digital dialog, becomes charged and challenges us to deal with the unpredictability of a direct two-way human connection. Therefore, sexual inadequacy proves to be the last frontier, an experience that beckons us to wrangle with that part of ourselves which remains immune to cognitive organization.
As a friend recently asked me “where is the sublime of failure?’, I felt compelled to address the theme of desire in the hands of its mismatched execution.
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