Distant Intimacy
Act 1 from “SEX LULLABY - The Ethereal to be a Daily Chore”
To be distantly intimate. To watch bodies through mirrors of distant intimacy. Filters like lenses. Distant attraction. Free space for the personal body and most intimate self.
This is my space.
Intimacy is born from the coexistence of the desire for contact and the impossibility of touching. The observer is far and helpless. Unarmed.
Distant Intimacy - Marie Déhé
Scene 1
A tangible distance
Gestures that I have learned unconsciously. Inherited from generation to generation.
The observation of life, the sensation of the body, and the feeling of being observed without any filter on my skin. Judgement embodies the failure to observe the wrong things and the right details from a non-value-adding point of view. Ideas are born from observations, as well as emotions are built through eye crossovers and sensorial accidents.
At times we are powerful, at times we feel overlooked; usually either we do not want to be perceived, or we are trapped by the obsession of desiring to be perceived solely by the idea of ourselves represented in our own damaged brain.
Human nature convicts and curses human creatures. We deeply want to be looked at, desired, loved, at least perceived: but at what cost? Mocking is the power play that keeps being recorded whenever our reflected mirror is distorted from another human point of view.
Hate, frustration, loss of power, again obsession. Identification, personalization of every single activity completed by our body during the day. The body we bring home before going to sleep, that body is the real anthem: the most concrete "us" from the other eyes. We see it as the beginning of our curse, but rarely as a means of transport. As not only what should be discovered but understood and appreciated in its own form.
We were born in the same body that walks us every day outside our lonely apartments. That same body evolved along with our mental growth, it lived with us through our best moments and our traumas. Our hated, loved, beautiful bodies are simply a discoverable image of us.
Bodies lived. They know. They kept scores of our past experiences that now live through them in our gestures and attitudes, through a fast tiny movement of our hands. This is what we are loved for. Universal real love language is observing. The body isn’t just our "cosmetic" form of existence; it is the representation of our deepest self, if the external being that is looking at us would be willing to notice it.
Bodies are guides, they feel, move and know things way before we do. They are objects, items with a positive connotation because they give the possibility of being observed and thus give information. The tragedy is linked with power. The power we give to the observer of knowing everything about us and the possibility of still not appreciating it, and the delusion whenever we run into a non-sensitive observer who, by not noticing, destroys our entire sense of identity.
Only in the sense that I’m noticing, points of inspiration, satisfaction, anxiety, slowly rearranging themselves.
Not noticing, for us idealists, means not being able to love. This may be extreme, but it represents the reality from our perception - the inconsistency of non-communication between sensitive and non-sensitive entities. Still believing that the lack of emotional intelligence is a clear obstacle standing in the way of fully comprehending another. Or maybe this is my own tragedy. Either way, my conclusion lies in the fact that the body must be celebrated.
Distant intimacy must be celebrated. Marie Déhé highlights the power bodies take on in her work 'Distant Intimacy' when imagined by oneself beyond their direct perception. The body is free from constant stares, from violence in our flesh and dreams.
How shimmering is the relation that our different but same bodies had with our younger selves, how close was the reflection of souls at those times and what about our future selves? This is all trapped inside the observer’s hypothetical criticism. Marie decided to photograph her female subjects from a distance, taking out from video calls the most powerful intimacy of her models, who were at different stages of their lives.
This embraces the freedom from the unknown observer, abolishing the fear within, not knowing how emotional may or may not be the eye of the observer itself. These bodies are standing alone, pure love showing solo in a tiny magazine.
An idea, a discussion led to photos. Photography now leads us to observation. Let’s be sensitive observers, with the ability to love every kind of intimacy.
“I haven’t been photographed in any comparable way before, but if anything, I think it made me more comfortable because I was physically by myself, and your presence was altered by the laptop".
Do you feel lonely? Do you feel safe? Do you feel different in your body?
I seem to feel my body more. It feels like a good home.
Can you see me?
Distant Intimacy - Marie Déhé
Scene 2
Dear little box…
I drink our conversation with interest
Distant intimacy, fatal attraction, sexual dependency: they coexist in our thoughts and physical dialogues. By realising the dependence, the attraction does not disappear as we are manifesting it. We manifest the fatality by being both distant and close. We should stop trying to catalogue our sensations.
Now it’s your turn to breathe with me and drink my uncomfortable but lulling words. There is no escalation. By being distantly intimate with each other we crave dependence.
My lullaby is to be seen through sex. We need sex not for physical conquest, but for the urgency of connection. Sex is the purest form of communication between beings in its silent structure of interlock of breaths. No matter the actual relation and knowledge of the other. We crave temporary escapes from our beloved loneliness, we desire chaos or simply wish to distance ourselves from our boring serenity. To give space to our desire for knowledge of another body. The desire to touch and feel.
Sex is the life we go to when ours becomes detached and cumbersome. Reality and dreams coexist in the suspended moment. A meeting with your deepest self through and together with the other’s. The social contamination of this scenario makes it dirty despite the clear purity of the concept per sé.
We blindly meet through shapes and senses.
I see sex when I walk through strangers’ eyes, crossing out of my curiosity to glance at a beauty I may never see again. I see it when someone dances in front of me, alone, carelessly. In steady figures, out of the common frame. Or inside my common frame, in and out.
Sex with strangers is cursed by those who don’t see the power and the beauty of breathing in unison with someone’s skin, working as a shell to the other’s similar fears, dreams and a regular life, whether loved or hated. Finding relief from life through an external body, before going back to your own fears, dreams and regular life. Never knowing their needs or thoughts but feeling them by sharing a communication. Finding shelter in not knowing and still sharing a frame of reality, disconnected from regularity.
Casual sex, more than a casual meeting, transitions between the two. Non-emotional sex is still a communication full of us, our subconscious is the first shape participating in the meeting. We meet ourselves through the other before meeting their external body.
It comes from our body with its strong sense of being nothing more and nothing less than what we truly are and were, what we truly want to be in that precise moment we choose to merge. Free beings. Free communication with no place for misunderstanding, because bodies follow. How beautiful when bodies do not follow but lead. Discovery, desire and pleasure together. Pleasure to me & pleasure to you. Everything and nothing, non-rational movements of joy.
Fear is what really makes us judgemental, because the idea of such an intense energy in a connection between two strangers may be scary. People must prefer being conservative to losing control, losing their power to fluid energies.
Am I free now?
Am I me?
Tenderly,
Your other self
- The other self
Distant Intimacy - Marie Déhé