Degrees, Angles, Ripped Pieces of Pink Pyjamas is a multichannel video installation by visual artist Ksenia Yourkova.
On a junction of theory and art practice, through the means of photography and moving image, this research, implemented in various artistic media, dives into the framework of contemporary affect theory and approaches the question of affect on personal, collective, and transitive levels. At every stage, the project is challenged to find artistic means of expression of the concept of affect, which is considered to be undetectable directly.
Following non-Cartesian tendencies in contemporary philosophy /merging the movements of matter with a processual incorporeality (Spinozism)/ and researching it in the interconnection with cultural and political studies, I’m experimenting with performative practices and detecting vague, diaphane disruptures of the visual reverberations to come up with a tangible notion of affect. I study affect in its autonomous bodily emanation, avoiding mixing it with emotions, which are defined as to be of the personal and subjective character. Being asocial, affect nevertheless includes social elements, but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of functioning, and combines them according to a different logic. (Massumi 2015).
Past events can be conserved in the body and brain and repeated; they can be reactivated but not completed. This brings the concept of affect very close to the mechanism of traumatic recollection. Trauma (via Jean Laplanche) is defined as a failed translation of an unremembered experience. Moreover, trauma (via Cathy Caruth) is more than just a simple failure of translation; it is also the result of the perplexing condition of a missing original. (Baer 2002). The process of acting out can index another significant side of trauma theory: a repetition without knowledge of the source of the catalyst substituted for the memory, where the action itself might not even resemble the missing original (Ricoeur 2004).
- Performer: Nadja Pärssinen
- Idea and script: Ksenia Yurkova
- Camera and editing: Ksenia Yurkova
- Composer: Karina Kazaryan
- Voice-over: Tikka Järveläinen
- Script editor: Clair Le Couteur
