Hands don't make magic SABOT / CLUJ-NAPOCA(Romania) 09.10.2015 – 15.11.2015 Handtransfusion
The errand of the hand started millions of years ago. The hand has been an indispensible means of our turning human. It was the opposable thumb that made us able to climb down from the tree, while our distant (?) primate relatives are still hanging – fourfingered – from the branches. Some of them still raise their paws to the life-giving Sun at dawn, like Sun adorers. They capture the beams of the Great Fireball and bathe their faces in them. Now we are capable of radiation, not just adoption. We heal with laying on hands, our caresses are miraculous, the language of affection. We use our hands to communicate, to carpenter our world, create, write, design, and some of us can read with their fingertips. As little kids, we get to know the world by spanning and groping around. Hands, fingers are our most ancient measuring and counting tool, our basic creation accomplisher in the world. We achieve everything we think of with the help of our hands. Nevertheless, in this stroll through life, we still wish to scan this haptic world with our retina. We have neglected our handvision, and feel sorry for the visually impaired, although they have ten epidermal eyes. No fingers know light and shadow, but they still tell the tale of a world beyond colour, a real world of here and now, and not one made up of illusory rainbows.
Nona Inescu invites us for a charmed chirodyssey, an errand of the hand, the continuation of our turning into a hand-mediated creative being through the coded sparkles of her own “waking-to-hand”. Meet this magic chirology!
Nona also wishes to lay hands on the unreachable and untouchable meteor of the future, so she reaches out for it with the projection, the shadow of her hand. The inexorable gravity and material solidity can be defeated by the hands of a creative, shaping shadow-force. A latent telekinetic desire?
Behind a mystery-curtain foreshadowing invisible powers of creation, the hand of a cherub, like in medieval miniatures, launches a fireball into the world with a determined, ritual gesture. This Bowling Ball of the Universe is the primaeval atom of the beginning of Creation and the abyssal bullet of Judgment Day that demolishes our bowling pin-like existence. Is this an allegory of the primordial corpuscule venerated by physicians and treated with sublime thrills and the life-eating black hole, the embodied universal heart of the Alpha and Omega? All this is performed by a fetishized, alienated, sable gloved hand behind the curtain of secrets, which creates and destroys at the same time. The same is true for the handy concrete bowling balls, concealing a 3D beginning of a glove-negative. They entice us – let us grab them and use their destructive powers, because they are meant for treading down anthropomorphic bowling balls, overthrowing our condemned alter egos, our false incarnations.
She recommends nonetheless a meeker method. It is widely known that plants have sap-carrying veins, animals have a blood vessel system, but only humans have existential veins carried in their palms, on the paths of their hand yard. Nona also recommends a chiromantic glove used in a mysterious ritual. It is a human map scribbled onto a pseudo-skin. A metonymy of artificial fate-moulting. A handy, manageable, tangible change of fate at hand. Putting on this chiromagical glove, we may take on a corrected, perfect, standardized line of the head, the heart, of life and fate, hoping that our hidden, time-eaten wrinkles of being would cling to it. Géza Dabóczi
Photo credit Pavel Curagau, copyright SABOT |