SIMONA KOCH

Log of Interbeing

Multimedia installation: outdoor installation with sisal strings; soundscape (8:45 min / loop); video documentation (7:25 min), 2022

For every subject spins its relationships like threads of a spider to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a tight web that builts its existence.
Jakob von Uexküll, Streifzüge, 1934

The fact that living beings and processes are in highly complex connections with their environment and cannot be regarded as independent is scientifically investigated in the most diverse fields, for example in systems theory. In other scientific fields, forms of interconnectedness have been described with terms such as "enactivism" (Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela), "élan vital" (Henri Bergson), "Umwelt" (Jakob von Uexküll), "togetherness" (Alfred North Whitehead) or "sympoiesis" (M. Beth Dempster and Donna Haraway).
The term “interbeing” originates from the teachings of Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh. It describes the entanglement of all phenomena and their embeddness in a highly complex system of human and non-human relationships from a spiritual perspective.
 
For the installation "Log of Interbeing", I invited different people to enter a space I had defined in the forest of St. George's Mountain in Hungary and to immerse themselves in the feeling of being interwoven with the world around us. This space - which could be basically anywhere - was defined with loosely hung sisal strings. 

Visitors wrote down their thoughts and reflections. Later they were spoken by them and digitally recorded. From these interaction documents and snippets of thoughts, a soundscape was woven and brought back to the defined space in the forest. There visitors have the opportunity to dive into these past moments – the "Logs of Interbeing".

In this world, everything is in everything. The water that makes up the sea is not only the opposite of the fish-subject, but it is in it, it passes through it, it emerges from it. This interpenetration of world and subject gives space a complex geometry in constant transformation.
Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, 2018

With logs of:
Karim Attia (Cookie)
Anna Fabricius
Kukla Krisztián
Sebastian Pfütze
Bence von Puttkamer
Lilla von Puttkamer
Zsolna Ugron
Karina Vissonova

This project was developed as part of umwelten.art
Special thanks to Karina Vissonova, Kata Simon and Krisztián Kukla

Veszprém-Balaton 2023
Európa Kulturális Fövárosa