Towards the Within/
I Don't Know What I Saw

These images are an exploration of trauma that remained active through the passage of time. It is not the traumatic event itself that is being depicted, but a possibility of its retrieval and transformation through eye movement. To experience traumatic stress is to enter an inner space within the self, where past mixes with present and images with thoughts. Traumatic memory is like a photographic event itself: like a long exposure, but kept out of light.

 

The eye is understood here as both the point of first entry, and of later access and retrieval. Vision as the recorder, and later, the record which lasts within memory. What the eye could not grasp the mind cannot un-see.

 

Read as light, the traumatic event is turned into a flash, or at points a bleak beam. Sometimes sharp, sometimes soft and diffused. That light remains trapped within the eye.

 

In this disorder of time the past has an echo. Like a multiple exposure, but to the same view. Its captured but not developed. Its stuck in the process. It remains sticky and absorbent.

 

Like the photographic surface, the memory is sensitive to contact. It is better if it is not touched, or one can leave a mark that won’t come off. A stain that will not dry.

 

And for the witness, all of it came through the eye. For the traumatic memory to later get out, one's eye has to follow the light: left-right, left-right.

 

To witness an event of such nature is to see without knowing what is being seen. The event is like a flash of an image too fast to form a thought. Hence why we say: “I don’t know what I saw”