Medien Wüste

''I once wrote that a man who was familiar with the deep see could never be like other men again. Such moments as this (in the midst of the desert) prove my statement. Because I realize that, as I walked along, my mind filled the desert landscape with water! In my imagination I flooded the space around me while walking through it. I lived in a sort of invented immersion in which I moved about in the heart of a fluid, luminious, beneficient, dense matter, which was the sea water, or rather the memory of sea water. This artifice sufficed to humanize for me a world that was dishearteningly dry, reconciling me for its rocks, its silence, its solitude, its sheet of sun gold hanging from the sky. Even my weariness was lessened by it. I dreamed that my bodily weight reposed to this imaginary water. (...) As I walked along, I bore within me gleaming reflections, and a translucent density, which were none other than memories of the deep sea.''
Phillipe Diolé's Text ist eine poetische Metapher über den Versuch in einer unwirtlichen Umgebung zu überleben. Er, ein Entdecker des Ozeans in den Fünfzigern, gleitet mental in das Element, das ihn am meisten mit Leben erfüllt – das Wasser; und schwimmt mithilfe dieses Tricks durch die Wüste. Als Video ist Wüste als Projektionsraum konzipiert, da der Zuseher auf diese Weise automatisch in das Wasser seiner Vorstellungskraft und in den textlichen Raum gezogen wird.

(Susanne Jirkuff)