Empathetic Storyteller — Interview with Geert Goiris
Title of the document
2020
Fading Senses
Title of the document
2020
‘Fading Senses’ is a research project and a photographic essay where I reflect on
sensory deprivation and environmental anxiety. Solastalgia is a relatively new concept for understanding the implications of the loss of ecosystems on our mental and emotional health. Described as an earth-related state, it reflects the zeitgeist of our time. As an increasing problem in societies, it manifests itself in a feeling of dislocation, a lived experience of the loss of the present. A perspective of a fading world and a state of fading-away is close to sensory deprivation. Absence of senses, one of the biggest human fears, can lead to intra-mental perception, echolocation and memory flashbacks. As I have temporarily lost one of the senses in the past, this deprivation became my intuitive leading guide, which I have applied to the working method and to the visual language. Being strongly concerned about solastalgia’s impact, I asked myself, what happens if we lose our senses? How does it affect our emotional health and memory, in the times of multispecies extinction? Using photography, I create a mental image of an ungraspable sensation to underline human disconnection from the natural habitat.︎Special thanks to my dear tutors Geert Goiris, Peter Boelens, Inge Henneman for their supervision and guidance, to my collaborators: Laura van Lokven, Christophe, Zosia Popławska and Ella-Marie Snelders, for their will to participare in the project.︎︎︎︎Selected: Picks 2020: PHmuseum Editors’ Top Projects of 2020︎Awarded: Photography Prize 2020 Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp ︎︎︎︎Prints on display at St. Vincents.
Fading Senses — Publication (I)
Title of the document
2020
Self-published book (first edition) containing thinking process and research behind ‘Fading Senses’. Ed. 1/1
Smelloss
2020
Inspired by my own experience of temporarly losing a sense of smell, I recreated this sensation in an olfactory installation. Smell memory is a deepest and most saturated that we have, as the amygdala and the hippocampus in our brain are responsible for keeping smell memory and emotions. Smelloss in a shape of an industrial dust, resonate with a scent of a wet concrete blending with a memory of a mossy forest. My experience of losing smell, although very abstract, in 2020 became a common dread and an indicator of COVID-19.︎Ingredients: oakmoss, siberian cedarwood, musk, calone, timbersilk, alcohol.
To Be Antwerp
Title of the document
2020
Exhibition installation at Marcel Nies Oriental Art Gallery for To Be Antwerp (11—12.2020).
