If This is What You Wish For
The idea of constructing a nonsensical dreamlike world where you can create your own rules, freedom to play with subconscious notions of existence, reality, removal from reality by creating different `world, an adventure of the mind... has always been my curious dream. To sail, explore and bend the rules of the temporal world, to re-examine question `who am I`, who are you/we... to explore escape, freedom, danger, risk, placement, displacement and more...
haven`t chosen Alice to represent, reproduce or re-interpret Lutwidge Dodgson`s original story. I am inspired with the writer`s intelligence and inventive approach.
I believe that any question, when you search enough deep, opens far more new questions then answers...
Alice as a metaphor for a `free fall` that leads into an exciting journey...
(Non)sense and (un)real
Alice and her adventure in wonderland have inspired so many philosophical dilemmas. Many of them are of the most difficult kind. However, Alice’s wonderland is before all the space of nonsense, unreal. It is a world that opposes to our sensical, logical and rational world, a world in which things are regular, clearly and distinguishably knowable, explainable, and definable. Our non-wonderland is conceived as full of meaning that can be universally recognized by the superior and divine power of reason. It is assumed that it is so harmonic - the best possible world - that we are forced to postulate a wise architect behind. Alice’s wonderland, on the contrary, is presented as a world knowable mostly by a childish fantasy incapable of rational and logical inference.
Marina’s understanding of Alice is not like many other in which the nonsensical wonderland is conceived and presented as superior to dull and tedious everyday life. She is far away from paternalistic lecturing about the nonsense of the allegedly sensical world. She does not want only to advise us, like so many other, about the need of a spiritual escape from the hypocrisy of our (non-wonder)land. Her Alice is not mere apologies of free nonsense over regular and fixed sense, unexpectedness of fantasy over clarity of reason. Her Alice goes further.
Marina is more concerned with perspectives and dichotomies. What is sense? Does sense oppose to nonsense? Should we say that nonsense is the absence of sense? Or that sense is the absence of the non-sense? Is sense possible without nonsense? What would be the meaning of sense if there was no non-sense? Or, what is real? What is unreal? What does it mean that the existence of real world is clear and self- evident? Does such common sensical rationality insure the truth? Is it possible that we ourselves structure our world according to our unique perspective? Is it possible that there are various perspectives, and that all of them are legitimate and equally valuable?
Marina’s questions follow the Heraclitian dichotomies in which there is no sense without nonsense. She contrasts the sharpness and clarity of the real world with the slow motion and ambiguity of the dance scene underwater; she compares the universal symbol of tradition such as an afternoon tea with nonsense of a tea party underwater. Way to truth is the way of apprehending the opposites: real and un-real, sense and non-sense. The proper knowledge depends on the understanding of the diversity, variety, conflicting and inversing realities. Truth is not in the parts, truth is Hegelian totality.
At the same time, Marina opens the question of a situated knower and the plurality of perspectives. What is the proper perspective, in front, behind, in the glass, through the glass? How can we recognize the movements in the water in the projection into water? How can we realize from where she looks at the Alices? How do we know, between many different identities, who is Alice? What is the proper perspective?
Marina’s venture is the cognitive venture of an artistic mind. And at the same time the artistic venture of an extremely vivid and curious intellect. Is Alice a symbol of uninhibited searching? Is a wonderland space of free thinking where nonsense is inseparable from sense? Is water a symbol of liminal because water is the looking glass where real meets unreal?
Snjezana Prijic-Samarzija
haven`t chosen Alice to represent, reproduce or re-interpret Lutwidge Dodgson`s original story. I am inspired with the writer`s intelligence and inventive approach.
I believe that any question, when you search enough deep, opens far more new questions then answers...
Alice as a metaphor for a `free fall` that leads into an exciting journey...
(Non)sense and (un)real
Alice and her adventure in wonderland have inspired so many philosophical dilemmas. Many of them are of the most difficult kind. However, Alice’s wonderland is before all the space of nonsense, unreal. It is a world that opposes to our sensical, logical and rational world, a world in which things are regular, clearly and distinguishably knowable, explainable, and definable. Our non-wonderland is conceived as full of meaning that can be universally recognized by the superior and divine power of reason. It is assumed that it is so harmonic - the best possible world - that we are forced to postulate a wise architect behind. Alice’s wonderland, on the contrary, is presented as a world knowable mostly by a childish fantasy incapable of rational and logical inference.
Marina’s understanding of Alice is not like many other in which the nonsensical wonderland is conceived and presented as superior to dull and tedious everyday life. She is far away from paternalistic lecturing about the nonsense of the allegedly sensical world. She does not want only to advise us, like so many other, about the need of a spiritual escape from the hypocrisy of our (non-wonder)land. Her Alice is not mere apologies of free nonsense over regular and fixed sense, unexpectedness of fantasy over clarity of reason. Her Alice goes further.
Marina is more concerned with perspectives and dichotomies. What is sense? Does sense oppose to nonsense? Should we say that nonsense is the absence of sense? Or that sense is the absence of the non-sense? Is sense possible without nonsense? What would be the meaning of sense if there was no non-sense? Or, what is real? What is unreal? What does it mean that the existence of real world is clear and self- evident? Does such common sensical rationality insure the truth? Is it possible that we ourselves structure our world according to our unique perspective? Is it possible that there are various perspectives, and that all of them are legitimate and equally valuable?
Marina’s questions follow the Heraclitian dichotomies in which there is no sense without nonsense. She contrasts the sharpness and clarity of the real world with the slow motion and ambiguity of the dance scene underwater; she compares the universal symbol of tradition such as an afternoon tea with nonsense of a tea party underwater. Way to truth is the way of apprehending the opposites: real and un-real, sense and non-sense. The proper knowledge depends on the understanding of the diversity, variety, conflicting and inversing realities. Truth is not in the parts, truth is Hegelian totality.
At the same time, Marina opens the question of a situated knower and the plurality of perspectives. What is the proper perspective, in front, behind, in the glass, through the glass? How can we recognize the movements in the water in the projection into water? How can we realize from where she looks at the Alices? How do we know, between many different identities, who is Alice? What is the proper perspective?
Marina’s venture is the cognitive venture of an artistic mind. And at the same time the artistic venture of an extremely vivid and curious intellect. Is Alice a symbol of uninhibited searching? Is a wonderland space of free thinking where nonsense is inseparable from sense? Is water a symbol of liminal because water is the looking glass where real meets unreal?
Snjezana Prijic-Samarzija