dimitris tsoumplekas d.t.

Tempest in a glass

The series of works “Shipwreck with spectator – Self-portrait” borrows its title from Hans Blumenberg’s essay.
In this essay, the German philosopher analyzes the use of metaphors surrounding sea voyages and shipwrecks to illuminate the human condition and the tragedies that accompany it, both personal and historical. And the ethically ambivalent role of the spectator.
“ By virtue of his capacity for this distance, he stands unimperiled on the solid ground of the shore. He survives through one of his useless qualities: the ability to be a spectator.”
(Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator. Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence.)
The self-portrait is an ambiguous artistic strategy that places itself somewhere on the verge between narcissism and self-knowledge, between acceptance and desperation; blurring the boundaries between the roles of spectator and creator. By destabilizing these roles, peril returns.
This series of works uses landscape and object as self-portraiture, and self-portraiture as landscape and object.
“…the symbolic becomes literally immediate: essential danger fro the life of the subject; to write on oneself may seem a pretentious idea; but it is also a simple idea: simple as the idea of suicide.” (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes)
Or as Derrida puts it in “Memoires d’ aveugle. L’ autoportrait et autres ruines”, whoever depicts the self and tries to conceive their reflection, is faced only with their own disappearance. You look at yourself but blindly, because you are already absent, already deserted. The portrait stems from the desert, the self that is depicted – the “Other” – was never really present: it is a specter.
Nowadays, where specters prevail and the construction of “othered” identities has reached new heights through the use of social media, “Shipwreck with Spectator” tries to talk about the face as a mask, the self as place, place as identification, as fate and trauma; about the tragicomedy of growing up and growing old. About the unremarkable nature of human fate.
In an era of multiple shipwrecks, where the seas we swim in have transformed into gigantic cemeteries, the petty personal tragedies of time that passes and flows resembles shipwrecks in a glass – nevertheless: shipwrecks.
And maybe the only solution we have is the one we’ve always had:
To keep on swimming,
to dance in the ruins when Persephone comes out,
singing to the melody of Virginia Woolf:
“We must go on dancing on the burning ruins till we die” (Diary 1936-41)

D.T.
15/3/23