Mars Gallery, 2007.
Elizabeth Presa
Video (6 minutes), mixed media.
Genesis tells us that birds played an important part of the story Noah and the ark. Yet they seem the most transitory of creatures as they move effortlessly between water, sky and earth. Two years ago, in the winter, a pair of black swans came to Hampton beach on Port Phillip Bay, then disappeared. Last winter in Paris I noticed a pair of white swans near where I passed each evening. One evening they were no longer there. Things surface and resurface, become visible then vanish, they make their dwellings, then erase their traces.
What is most beautiful is precisely that which is most transient.
Elizabeth Presa, Melbourne, 2007.
“Each one of us must accomplish Noah’s mission afresh. We must be the pure individual arc of all things, the refuge where they are not content to be what they were or imagined themselves to be, narrow perishable life traps, but where they become transfigured, free from form, and merge completely into the inwardness of their essence where they are somehow preserved from themselves, untouched, intact, at the pure core of indeterminacy. Yes, each of us is Noah. But our mission consists less in saving all creation from the flood than, on the contrary, in plunging it into the deepest waters where it vanishes permanently and radically. Indeed such is man’s vocation. If everything visible must become invisible, if this metamorphosis is our purpose, then this intervention is apparently quite superfluous – the metamorphosis will occur quite naturally on its own, for everything is transitory and what is transitory always sinks into profound existence. So what use are we in this lifesaving mission, we, the most transitory of all things, the first to disappear? What is useful is our readiness to disappear, our ability to perish, our fragility, our weariness, our aptitude for death.”
Maurice Blanchot, The Siren’s Song.
