‘Umbralia: Cracking into the Threshold’

Michiko Oki, Silvia Terrón & Pablo Padilla Jargstorf

Artistic presentation

International Society for the Study of Surrealism Virtual Conference 2022
 

This film explores the idea of thresholds. The threshold has become an important philosophical concept for exploring transcendence beyond the perceptible world, attracting various figures from early twentieth-century avant-garde artists to contemporary practitioners of theosophy. The threshold is where the ascending/descending into the higher/lower scheme of the world takes place, revealing a liminal space where the visible and the invisible, the conscious and the unconscious, dream and reality, the personal and the social, the micro and the macro collide, exposing what gives credibility to the world in the form of various perceptual clichés, canons and norms.

Artists such as Hilma af Klint, who explored theosophical dimensions through the nature of primordial images, believed in the ‘higher form’ revealed in mystical experiences of space-time distortion. Faith, visions and ecstasy are the driving force of hope, desire and expectation towards the ‘higher form’, a journey towards an end realm, that in reality never comes.

In this work, Michiko Oki (art historian/writer), Silvia Terrón (writer/poet) and Pablo Padilla Jargstorf (visual-sound artist/architect) present thoughts on the threshold through audio-visual experimentation. Oki and Terrón vocalise their co-written texts over Padilla Jargstorf's visuals and soundscape of constant and eternal ascent. The work explores the threshold as a place where perceptual parameters are constantly shifting, where the boundaries between ascending and descending movements disappear in a state of waiting. In a psycho-acoustic/visual journey through constant rising, our psyche welcomes the transcendent events that occur at the edge of the perceptual limit.