REFLECTING THE GAZE

Contemporary society faces ever-increasing complexity from globalisation, TURBO-CAPITALISM, urbanisation AND NOW DEGLOBALISATION, etc. We find ourselves, as individuals,needing to slow down and re-engage with Nature IN AN EFFORT to redeem an element of ‘spirituality’. We need to preserve our mental health but not to do so by withdrawing from the world around us.

aN INDIVIDUAL is NATURALLY conflicted in THEIR participation in Society. This relationship with society and the problems that come with sublimating an element of oneself for the sake of the common good has been well described through many works of art from ancient times such as Virgil’s eclogues to poetry from the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Away from the artistic genre, the problem of an individual’s engagement with society is aptly described these days by works from Sociology such as Ulrich Beck in his book ‘The Metamorphosis of the World’ and analysed in depth through various contributions from the field of Psychoanalytic Psychology - for example, the works of Sigmund Freud. It is, however, the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that we use as an inspiration for The Medusa - notably, his concept of ‘the Gaze’. Lacan argued that a person’s identity was conditioned by what was reflected back - society’s view of how that individual belonged. An individual was faced with a pre-existing societal culture communicated in the Gaze.

Lacan discussed three registers of human reality - the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic. The Symbolic includes the world of linguistic communication, cultural conventions and the law. We argue the language of Architecture - through a semiotic convention - is included. The Imaginary realm describes how people identify themselves. The Real represents, in essence, the unattainable truth - as it cannot be symbolised.

Film lends itself to Lacanian analysis in that the Real might be glimpsed in the blank space between the frames. The Real may be contained in the Gaze but also contains the projections of society onto the individual. THE Medusa is taken not to mean not monstrous but suffering from the projection of others - In greek mythology, Medusa suffered at the hands of Athena; in our case we look to help redress the excesses of the modern age wrought on the indiviudal.

through the medium of film WE AIM TO reveal the Real, to assist a return to the bucolic - mediating an appropriate response between society and the individual.