Umbralia: Cracking into the Threshold

This contribution is a collective audio-visual presentation (10min) that explores the idea of thresholds. For Surrealists, the threshold was a significant notion to explore dreams and the unconscious that reveals the literary space in which the ‘natural’ sense of reality is generated by ideologically manipulated standards of normality. In this liminal space (which may be referred to ‘le point supreme’ in Breton’s well-worn term), the conscious and the unconscious, fact and fiction, the personal and the social, collide, exposing what gives credibility to the world in the form of various perceptual clichés, canons and norms. Surrealists incessantly endeavoured to reveal such a literary nature of the norm that is fictitious yet actual in legitimising reality, challenging the normalised perception through a subversive use of the dream and dreamlike imagery.

Drawing on Surrealist imagination that seeks a radical exposure to what resides at the threshold, Michiko Oki (art historian/writer), Silvia Terrón (writer/poet) and Pablo Padilla Jargstorf (visual-sound artist/architect) will collectively present a performative story telling with the audio-visual environment. Oki and Terrón are going to vocalise their texts over Padilla Jargstorf’s audio-visual piece that is specifically crafted through digital/virtual imagining. We will present the threshold as the place where perceptual parameters are constantly shifting, where the boundaries among the verbal, the visual, the auditory and the spatial collide, breaking off fragments to free the imprisoned echo from our fossilised perceptual stigma.

How can we revitalise the thresholds for sensations when our reality is drastically normalised and reduced? We explore a creative methodology to perform the literary/tectonic spaces fundamental to our perception of reality, aiming to reconstitute/rewrite our individual and collective voice in a world increasingly mineralised by representational jargon.