KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD — THROUGH THE KNOWLEDGE OF SELF …(to the knowledge of the absence of “self”)
γνῶθι σεαυτόν — The Ancient Greek “know thyself” is one of the Delphic maxims
知彼知己，百战不殆 — “know others and know thyself, and you will not be endangered by innumerable battles”. In this saying by Sun Zi (孙子), the idea of knowing oneself is paramount.
Photography was my refuge from the logosentric world for the last three decades. Collecting images of people, places, details, landscapes, photo-discovering everyday world was natural way of being.
Every shoot was like a “sending postcard”, connecting that moment to the future self… to the PRESENT self.
Now I have time and tools to reflect on the journey, to framework it, to use that body of work as an art material, and as a field of research. To prepare a ground for more art discoveries with the formed artistic paradigm. And approach it with the more responsibility.
Creativity and responsibility lie in “inventing” the meeting place. ...Responsibility in this case means striving find the optimal balance between creativity and rule compliance. (Derida)Self-ethnography practice and Context actualization to make visible and reflect on personal experience, feelings, discourses, on accumulation of a different worlds as a part, and as a whole. To concentrate on ways of producing meaningful, accessible, and evocative research grounded in personal experience. To reflect on self-actualization as an artist, and as a social element. To question and reexamine self ‘s “worldview” :biases, prejudice and conditionings.
Consequently, autoethnography is one of the approaches that acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don’t exist.
As a method, autoethnography combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography. I am doing Auto-Art- Ethnography, since in autobiography an author retroactively and selectively writes about past experiences, in my case, the autobiographical part is not in the narrative form, but in the visual. Any kind of art I produce is a historical representation of my past, everything created today reflects past artistic practices and limitations, usage of material, and aesthetic perception. Methodology of mind mapping useful not only to make visible the framework of the art process, but also to give a context of it to the outside observers:
At this point of research I am using methodology of Psychoanalysis and Ethnology, that is ‘…occupy a privileged position in our knowledge — not because they have established the foundations of their positivity better than any other human science, and at last accomplished the old attempt to be truly scientific; but rather because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form an undoubted and inexhaustible treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established.’(p. 407) Michel Foucault The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences. Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005.
here is more on that connection:
The research on the basic features of my works starts with the analysis of the shape and color:
