The Lucid Room
Text by María García Yelo:
"Kemê or the fragility of an oak tree."
The fragility of an oak. The softness of a wire. The serenity of a fire. These and other feelings astonish you observing the synesthetic space that is The Lucid Room.
Kemê sees herself and the objects through a white mirror. A padded one. And collects into her pictures and videos the slow transformation of a living being, perishable, in an inert piece, like a beautiful game that is at the same time disturbing.
White, ocher and red are almost the only colours of this mysterious universe, inhabited by a multitude of characters and elements, all different and all intimate and subtly related.
Somewhere an irritant phone sounds or the expectant ticking of a clock; by listening to them we become aware that time passes, it is measured, but here life takes place very slowly.
The lucid room is in a gap and there, everything has reached an unusual balance: the mourner woman with an animal face, the artifice of the hair, the volubility of the postures, the organic and unexpected shapes, the bones, blood, tissues, fruits… You can see through the images, but what happens there almost seems that could also be touched, smelled or savoured. The delicate branch of a flowering almond tree, fossilised, turns at the sound of a song, dumb and infinite. And you do not need anything else.
The Lucid Room is a series that I use as a camera lucida of my dreams. Turning towards them is also to do it towards our very nature, a nature of veils that enclose others, with an implicit permutable character, where transience, transformation and change (so scary), are a fulcrum.
I worked systematically in the same a white room, making it act as a reflection of my mind and helped me to maintain the focus. Exploring the signs and symbols by its personal meaning rather than adjust them to a predetermined idea, the dynamism and fluidity between both are exposed.
The work comprises self-portraits made during performances and small objects/installations, playing with different levels of representation. It is in this act of re-creating when my subconscious speaks more lucidly about "reality" than the words my consciousness has learned.
