Andrej Medved, poet and philosopher

IN THE HARBOUR

THE QUESTION OF FORM AND EVENT = THE APPROPRIATION OF FORM (THE PHOTO-GRAPH OF NATAŠA SEGULIN)
 

I therefore have little hesitation in presenting rigour as the psychoanalysis of intuition, and algebraic thought as the psychoanalysis of geometrical thought. Even in the realm of the exact sciences, our imagination is a sublimation ... It is of value only insofar as its principle has been psychoanalysed. Intuition must never be a given: it must always be an illustration.

G. Bachelard

Pliant, swirling gulls beneath the rooftop 
of the glassed harbourmaster’s office ... in the cleansed, clear morning, in 
the changed, boundless pigeon-house looking onto the Bay of Koper ... 

Bursting cherries in the airy atmosphere ... and 
transoceanic ships returned to the dormant coastal 
town … Sparrows all around ... and swifts, launching down from the celestial 
 
cones into the sky-blue waters ... Like 
a bird’s niche dammed with an airy effervesce … in a crack 
an elbow and three feet higher than the blocking clouds ... The day in the harbour dawns …
 
In the beginning I believed in the soul (The Sounds of Silence), then I gave priority to pure form (Segulin’s steps in Portorož), finally making a return to the soul as the original Form of all Events (In the Harbour) ... Form is crucial for the understanding of all things and relations between things, our own selves included. Form is present in the history of perception and interpretation of reality as we live it – and in which we live – and has always had a fateful impact on our existence. In the manner of all possible knowledge and understanding (within the history of visual art, literature, within the history of science, philosophy and photography) form holds decisive meaning. Without it, the voice: as figure, image, and Event as “appropriation” of all the secrets and truths of the world, would not exist. It would in fact be void, sublime and abstract, ad absurdum … Form as a visual photo-graph: formation and expression, and clarity and diversity (clara et distincta) as opposed to the obscure – as amydron – and murkiness and indistinctness of form, which does not tell us anything, which discerns nothing … Which leads to the obscure(d), to incomprehension and finally to meaninglessness, to non-truth … Without a new, always renewed and original form, there is no knowledge, art, philosophy, there is no science, recognition, neither is it possible to live in the world. Without form, existence is not possible. When the form of looking, the gaze upon things, “tires”, when it becomes reactionary, debilitating, the old world collapses, subsides with an ingenious cut of some artist, poet, philosopher; the established, obsolete structure and system, the matrix, breaks, shatters: modus operandi, ars vivendi.

In her latest works, Nataša Segulin photo-graphs the Form (the steel rope on the foreship, the mysterious loops in the water, containers, stairs and cranes, wheels and corridors, towers, crosses and pipes and signs in the harbour, heaps of coal), but also the glimmer of clean shapes in the marine mirror and the waving and reflective rays of light in the ebb and flow of the soft water surface, the radiating colour fabric that separates from the other black-and-white (de)pictions ... She is essentially interested in the “poetry” of the circle, clean lines and ellipses and squares, their focal point, their “driving-force”, the automatic spring-function which forms the visual Event ... The Event in Nataša’s photos – as a philosopher would say – is a kind of irreducible singularity, a kind of “clot” which is both representative and the representative body of the representation that the artist now depicts for us. The photograph is an event like the coverage of a void, behind and beyond the “depicted” objects and effects, the event is the essential relation to these effects and now belongs to a relation between the photographer, her external-internal gaze, and the viewer. The event is a way to preserve the symbolic nature of the image, its meaning and “tie” to a connection in viewing the seemingly vacant and vacated contents. The event, set up by Nataša Segulin In the Harbour, supports the form, which is by no means vacant, vacated and hollow, but is emphasized, subjectivized, “spiritual”. There is a kind of nostalgia in all these photographed objects, a kind of wistfulness and melancholy, but this is already the characteristic trait – the character of the one that brings us closer to the relations and effects in the Bay of Koper. The event is therefore, according to Badiou “the silent inclusion of the unknown truth”, for which philosophy finds a very special point, since it relates it to the (not shrill and gaudy) inner silence of the artist herself. ... Her inner gaze is here an instrument through which lumen – lux, light – is embodied, allowing me to be (if you will allow me to split, divide the word again now – Lacan) photo-graphed with the gaze.