By Apostolis Artinos
There are moments that disturb the flows and logics of our life. Instances of rift that shake the foundations of our life and upset its horizon. And then we find ourselves in “trans-being”, as Badiou aptly puts it. The heterogeneity of these moments —whose duration certainly exceeds their momentary occurrence— exposes Being to an ecliptic horizon, to a negative affirmation of life. A ruptured Being whose rifts secrete this magma of the Real; an undiagnosed, messy Real that leaves us lost in confusion.
One such moment,* and all the moments after it, led Lizzie Calligas into the “small, oblong room” of a centre for psychological support. Exhausted and stunned, she surrenders to the insulation of the room, faced with a white wall and the emptiness of those days. And then Lizzie turns instinctively to what she has always done: she picks up her camera and records, almost unconsciously, the dim traces of those days, the curtain that formed folds in the light, its changes, a slow, tormenting transformation. She recorded what wasn’t there, and with it its impossible promise. Thus she discovers, hermetically, amidst the whiteness of those days, something minimal yet ripe with content.
And all this was a liminal experience in white —not in black; the black is night and the night is full of voices, while the white is the silence of the world, its withdrawal. An experience which is hard to objectify as what supports it is an impossible discourse—the discourse of the unsaid. What rises through these folds of silence, some faint whispers, are nothing but spectral sequences, mythical riddles, mystical experiences that quietly mould their relief. There is a scene triggered here, an impossible topology that traces out its agent—an agent open, available and riddled with holes, not at all reliable in its selfness. The agent is the trauma, the loss of continuity, a gap that the larger it gets the more it reveals and defames its agent.
In those days, Lizzie says she discovered the present time, the solitary truth of the present, the only certainty: the moment. A physical dimension of time, the physicalised experience of its concreteness—what attests to life at each time.
*On
the 20th of March, 2022 a fire caused by a short circuit burnt down
to the ground the house of Lizzie Calligas on Spetses, together with part of
her artistic work.
This text was written for the catalogue of the
exhibition Lizzie Calligas, The White Wall, curated by Thanos Stathopoulos, at
the Alexis Akrithakis Archive, Athens, May 2024.