"Echoes"

collage, found photographs, edited on cardboard

The secret of the face
The human face is a very special body part. Every face has the same components, but their similarity is so nuanced that hardly ever one is like the other. Moreover, as psychiatrist, behavioural biologist and neuroscientist Eric Kandel notes, compared to an enlarged fingerprint, we can memorise hundreds or even thousands of faces and recognise them in a fraction of a second.1 It is impossible for us to look at our own face directly, but we depend on mirrors, images or descriptions. Thus our impression of it is always an indirect one. We carry a face and this carrying is a "carrying in front of us".2 "I carry it in front of me like a confession I know nothing about, and on the contrary, it is the faces of others that teach me about mine "3 "One is more likely to slip into a face than to own one "4 We read faces, feel attracted to some, but others reject them. They can slip away under the influence of drugs or in a state of insanity, we are afraid of losing our own, or want to lose ourselves in other faces, as Roland Barthes describes the effect of the image of Greta Garbo, in which people get lost "like in a love potion". Her face seems like an organic, "absolute state "5 that radiates both attraction and inaccessibility. The face is, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, a "natural fetish".6 Before becoming a carrier of meaning, it is a white
 Area in which one inscribes meanings. The motionless face is at first a thing and nothing but a projection surface - a white wall7 - but by no means a two-dimensional one, once you start to cut "black holes "8 into it, thus creating a dimension of depth. The face is multidimensional, opaque and polyphonic. A type can "like a mask that shimmers through, gradually allowing a completely different, hidden face to appear".9 One facial expression is gradually blended into another. As in music, the present expression still echoes the past, while a future one already penetrates it. The face shows not only "the individual soul states, but the mysterious process of development itself".10 A human face does not simply exist like that of an animal, but is created.
(from: Karin Fisslthaler, I'll be Your Mirror. Medial physical constructions as self-reflexive techniques, Harpune Verlag 2019)

the entire publication: I'll be Your Mirror

1 Cf. Eric Kandel, Das Zeitalter der Erkenntnis. Die Erforschung des Unbewussten in Kunst, Geist und Gehirn von der Wiener Moderne bis heute, Munich 2012, p. 335.
2 Cf. Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, Tausend Plateaus: Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie, Berlin 2005.
3 Christa Blümlinger, Karl Sierek (ed.), Das Gesicht im Zeitalter des bewegten Bildes, Vienna 2002, p. 258.
4 Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p. 243.
5 Roland Barthes, Myths of the Everyday, Frankfurt/M. 1964, p. 73.
6 Cf. Christa Blümlinger/Karl Sierek (eds.), Das Gesicht im Zeitalter des bewegten Bildes, p. 258.
7 Cf. Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, Tausend Plateaus, p. 230.
8 Ibid.
9 Bela Balázs, The Visible Man or the Culture of Film, Frankurt/M. 2001, p. 42.
10 Ibid., p. 45.