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‘Act of Mending’ is a short film that emerged from my ongoing research ‘Mutual Darkness of Objects’. The work consists of a 30-minute film in which the fragments of a broken bath mat are pieced together.

Condition: In 30 minutes I try to put the broken bath mat back together.

For several weeks the floor of my studio was covered with bath mats. During the cleanup process, while we were coming up with a simple design for a storage cabinet, Ids (my partner) accidentally dropped a wooden beam from his hands that landed on bath mat no. 17 (Monday; 09-11-2021; 08:15:39). The mourning process I subsequently experienced was brief. For the way in which the mat broke resonates strongly with the unconscious actions of Ids, something I also found in my roommate whose ‘vitality’ I wanted to immortalize by fixing the unconscious traces in clay.

The breakage of the bath mat eventually shattered this illusion of immortality.

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Method

Mutual Darkness of Objects is a research documentation, inspired by Object-Oriented Ontology, about discovering and developing a narrative from a non-human starting point. The title refers to the idea that objects never make direct contact with each other, any more than with the human mind, but require a mediator for such contact to occur. This "mutual darkness" or "mutual withdrawal of things, a term used by Heidegger, makes reality only accessible with indirect language, such as metaphors in aesthetics and poetry.

object (as tracer) ︎︎︎ traces (they capture) ︎︎︎ metaphor ︎︎︎ communicative value

Within this research the (non-human) object is used as a ‘tracer’ to trace the worlds it passes through. By observing and analyzing the object in the different networks of actions in which it is engaged, I’m hoping to extract a communicative value out of the various gestures of the object. This hopefully leads to an exploratory dialog between me, the other and the things around me.