Traum

Video stills from the 3D video Traum

by Anne Kølbæk Iversen

Two people lie in close embrace on a beach. Both faces are hidden under the hair of the person on top, and it is difficult to make out where the one body ends and the other begins.

The two bodies constitute a sculptural form: a composition of legs, arms, hands, stomach, and chest. It is difficult to discern what kind of embrace it is, just like it is unclear what may have taken place or is about to take place, the before and after of this moment. Is this an intimate embrace between two lovers? The exhaustion after a climactic release? Or a more violent holding on to a wish to move even closer to one another, into each other?

The video work Traum takes as its point of departure the trauma as a wound or a cleavage of the subject stemming from the repetition of the hurtful or violent event that constitutes the kernel of the trauma. In the trauma lies a compulsion of repetition; the returning of memories and feelings tied to the traumatic incident – as a foreign body that keeps exerting its power over and acting within the subject. The trauma is also connected to the unsayable, understood on the one hand as what you cannot find the words for, because there is a blockage in the subject that prevents access to what has gathered around the trauma, and on the other as something that cannot and ought not be said because no one will listen to it.

Because of this blockage, what is repressed appears in dreams or as intense emotional or bodily reactions. Dream and trauma are connected in several ways: To those who have forgotten and repressed a trauma, the recollection may appear as a dream, as something that happened to someone else. Freud and Breuer in their studies of hysteria (1893-5) describe how there may be a symbolic connection between the trauma and its symptoms in the same way that repressed content can be symbolically expressed in dreams.

Their proposed method to deal with trauma is what they call the cathartic method or technique, which implies a detailed retelling of the repressed traumatic content as well as a reenactment of the emotional response. They underline the importance of recalling the trauma linguistically as well as affectively, thereby bringing both the memories and emotions to the surface.

In Aarkrog’s video there are recordings of water, the sea, which may at once carry the body and submerge and enclose it. Traum pivots around some of the dilemmas and ambivalences that connect to sexuality as a physical activity and an expression of individual as well as collective imaginations, fantasies, and desires. Part of the video is explicit recordings of a sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, filmed from below and in close-up. Because of the framing only the actors’ genitalia are seen, and you can only vaguely make out the contours of a thigh, an arm, or the upper body, but never their faces. They are in that way reduced to bodies and body parts, and a potential investment in emotions, fantasies, and imaginations depend on the viewer’s own projective imagination.

The more or less mechanical penetration of first the woman’s anus and then her vagina in the video, as well as the man’s ejaculation, are elements of a sexual script that attests to a sexual encounter. But what type of interaction this is, and what has been invested in and gained through this act is not clear in the video. Even if the video work borrows from a hardcore pornographic frame of reference, its aesthetics also differs from most porn by being filmed in black/white and in 3D, by not enhancing arousal or excitation through the sounds of gasping or groaning, by superimposing images of waves on to the explicit images, and by letting the video include the moment after the ejaculation inside the woman’s vagina where the man pulls himself out and removes himself so we see the erect phallos turn back into a penis with a drop of sperm falling towards the ground and the camera’s lens.

Seen from an image theoretical perspective the explicit sex scenes in Traum become an occasion to reflect further on the function of sexual images in the formation of sexuality. Etymologically pornography refers to the visual representation of prostitution but is today used primarily about material that aspires to be sexually stimulating or exciting. According to Paul B. Preciado the pornographic image is characterized by its ability to stimulate biochemical and muscular mechanisms that regulate the production of pleasure. Pornography is sexuality transformed into staged performance, into virtual, digital information, and the pornographic image is an embodied image that captures the represented body in an erotized representation while presenting itself as a body to the viewer. The pornographic image is therefore in a tension between intimacy and distance: It is at the same time a distant image of an intimate situation and an image with an – at least attempted – direct effect on the viewer lived out in a private setting.

We are used to considering the sexual act the culmination of a desire or pleasure, which drives and pulls us towards our partner. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan describes desire as a lack which the subject attempts to fulfill and satisfy, but which can never be exhausted. Desire is therefore productive in that it directs the subject towards the desired object which is constantly removed or transposed. According to Lacan the subject’s desire contains an unconscious wish directed towards the desire of the other, to be the object of the other’s desire. But this wish, that the other should fulfill one’s desire, can never be wholly met, as there will always be a mysterious remainder, some part of the subject’s own as well as the other’s desires which cannot be captured.

The rhythmic rolling of the waves propagates to the body – not least through the soundtrack which is bass heavy and dark. Using the 3D-effect the work draws out a space, which one can enter and where the images become forms one can make out and almost feel.  Without the 3D glasses the images flicker in red and blue. With its dreamlike sequences and thematic affiliations Traum provides an opportunity to move around in that imaginary space, to investigate and create connections between body, desire, and trauma.

Referencer:
Lauren Berlant, “Trauma and Ineloquence,” Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 5 (2001): 41-58.
Josef Breuer og Sigmund Freud, Studien zur Hysterie (1895).
Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie. Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York,
Feminist Press, 2013).
Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
Sharon M. Wasco, “Conceptualizing the Harm Done by Rape,” Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, vol. 4 (2003): 309-22.
Linda Williams, Porn Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
“Pornografi”, Den store Danske // ”Cum Shot” Wikipedia.