It is not knowledge of reality that makes us love reality passionately. It is feeling, the first and fundamental value. As for nature, we begin by loving it without knowing it, without really seeing it, by actualizing in things a love that has its basis elsewhere. Then we search for its details because we love it as a whole without knowing why. The enthusiastic descriptions given of it are proof that men have looked at it with passion and the constant curiosity of love. And if the feeling for nature is as durable as it is in some people, that is because in its original form it is at the root of all feelings. It is a filial devotion; all forms of love have in their make-up something of the love for a mother.

Gaston Bachelard, 1942

Retuning the Viscera

O C E A N   B R E A T H

Video essay on life in the depths of material elements

In Ocean Breath (2020), an audiovisual meditation, I combine images of the sea, breathing sounds and my voice. I contemplate on Gaston Bachelard’s essays Air and Dreams (1943) and Water and Dreams (1942). Bachelard compares imagination with a sound-effects man. Thus, it amplifies and softens. Hearing is more dramatic than seeing. I am breathing in the rhythms of the sea. Reconnecting with the elements. Floating in a warm liquid envelope. Being rocked by the waves of sound. We all will be cured.

Video recorded in Sidi Kaouki, Morocco, 2019 and in the Delta de l’Ebro, Spain, 2020.

References:

Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, The Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas, 2011 [1943]. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, The Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas, 1999 [1942].

In memory of the victims of the terror incident that took place in Vienna on November 2, 2020.

All Souls (2020): https://vimeo.com/481691733

Christina Lammer

ORCID: 0000-0001-9906-4095