The story of the hair: A reflection on incompleteness and crises of representation in knowledge

In this piece, relying on his study of the creative process in still-life photography, I will reflect on the significance and the difficulty of venturing beyond representation. Based on his observations of the photographic sessions of XEDER, I engage in an analysis of the constant struggles involved in the creative process to go beyond the symbolic/narrative and to instead relate to the vitality of things. I discuss the dynamics of a photographic session – how during a session, objects are brought in tension with each other and the human body, and how by dis-entanglement of objects from their day-to-day aura and associations – the artist aims to engage in a “vital realism” which would capture the emanations, cries, whispers and “voluptuous silence” of “feral objects” – going beyond the visual realism & representational flaccidness of identities, narratives and habitual associations. I do this through a theoretical and poetic reflection on the vitality of hair in XEDER’s photographic work. I end by reflecting on vitality as a shared idea(l) in artistic and academic life/creation and its implications for how we perceive and how we express.