Where I rest

WHERE I REST

VIEWING INSTRUCTIONS:

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What is missing are pauses, silences, emptiness. It lacks a few “nothings”, unfilled times and spaces. What’s missing is absence.

Faced with naked existence, which ends up becoming radically transitory, we react with the hyperactivity of production. A society based on performance is not a free society.

One is never as active as when observed from the outside, apparently nothing is done. One is never less alone than when one is alone with oneself.

Suffocating, permanent continuity

The wavering, the unapparent or the elusive are only open to deep, attention.contemplative contemplativeOnlylingering has access to long respiration, to the unhurried.

WHERE I REST

In a society that forces us to constantly produce, to build a future (always beyond reach), which obliges us to be hyperconnected; a world inwhich everything is spectacular - even if the show lasts no longer than the seconds of an Instagram post - the excess of past and future results in a lack of present.

Excess – whether in the past, in the future, whether it is of news, of work, of knowledge..., is the source of individual exhaustion in this world. For the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, the excess of stimuli, information and impulses culminates in the excess of positivity, that is, we are beings built to be in a perpetual movement of production. And this radically modifies the struc-

ture of our attention, which becomes fragmented and is destroyed. This process results in self-exploitation - the exploiter is at the same time exploited. The postmodern civilizing progress and the feeling that nothing is impossible shuffle need, demand and desire - the “triad” of Lacanian concepts - causing in the postmodern individual, the depression of being himself. In the be-

lief that nothing is impossible, everything is achievable through work, through effort, all that remains is to wish for desire.

It is as if existing was always transitory, always being in a state of never being; always movement and never permanence.

I was taught not to stop, to produce constantly. I grew up plugged into this era of techno-scien-

tific and digital development, which understands contemplation as a threat to the production system - in this context that Byung-Chul Han refers to as “performance society” - and, therefore, increasingly questioning the need for a break, contemplation, rest, a presence in me, being.

Thevideos in this publication started from the same point, from a trigger moment, from the percep-

tion that the less information I receive from the outside, the more I perceive the inside; from the understanding that I don’t need to get anywhere, without guilt and without weight, and to allow myself to contemplate, pulling back the curtain of what I built before, eliminating the constant and uninterrupted movement outside, being able to be totally in the now.

“Never is a man more active than when he is doing nothing, never

less alone than when alone with himself,” said Cato, a Roman poet. Cézanne, proposed that “learning to see means familiarizing the eye with rest, with patience, allowing oneself to approach oneself, that is, to train the eye to deep and contemplative attention, to a long and slow gaze”. Finally, I quote Walter Benjamin, when he considers that the state of restlessness does not produce anything new, it only repeats history, whi-

le deep tedium, that is, contemplation, is “a dreamlike bird that hatches the egg of experience”.

nature, I understood that it is possible to find rest, a space of mental clarity. However, reaching such self-communion requires a great deal of attention, after all, we were not created to pause. And, as controversial as it may seem,

From these thoughts, allowing myself to pause and contemplate

there is movement in the pause, a kind of flow, of abandoning the uninterrupted rhythm and rush of the world and returning to oneself, to a time governed by the beating of the heart, in which the only movement is that of the chest rising and falling with each inhalation and exhalation, and that of the blood rushing through the veins and arteries. The only movement is that of being.

Videos / Photos

Ruchita / Ruchita & R. Scott Macleay pages 18 e 62

Text Ruchita

Sound recording/mixing

Creative Process

Musical Composition / Sound Designer

R. Scott MacLeay

Graphic Design / Layout

Kamilla Nunes