Jot Fau
“Changing Room”
Magic is the art of changing consciousness according to will.
– Dion Fortune (1890-1946), cited by Starhawk in The Spiral Dance (1979)
Water is fluid and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: What is soft is strong.
– Lao-Tzu
Jot Fau’s Changing Room presents a series of black leather elements in a window display on street level. The hand sewn garments and carefully coated objects are hung along the walls of the confined space with precision, but without a clear intent, leaving the central floor empty. Like a stage, waiting for the main character to enter, this anticipative atmosphere is only helped by the ghostly presence of the onlooker’s own body, reflected in the window. The fact that the room is seemingly sealed off adds to the eerie atmosphere; only a mysterious apparition-perhaps accompanied by a cloud of smoke-would allow a body to inhabit the space.
The opaque and muffled objects in Changing Room speak of a certain poetic or magical functionality. Breast armour, cape, gloves, clogs and cap for bodily defence; carrier bag, hand tools, attached imagery and a miniature sheltering structure to assure the wanderer a safe journey. The character evoked appears to be simultaneously running from and searching for something, on a solitary and emancipatory quest.
But as the torch darkened by the tight leather, the tools in the collection have been rendered hopelessly unsuitable, casting light only on an otherworldly and imaginary land-scape. The repetitive practice of fitting and stitching pieces of leather together, in order to cover the support-almost as if adding a new layer of skin onto an exposed body-sug-gests a radically modest approach to the process of transformation.
In fact, the installation seems to play with the idea of the Changing Room as an image of human existence; life as a perpetual succession of transformative experiences, a constant shapeshifting, for which these charged items would be of utmost utility.
(…) to always begin anew, to make, to reconstruct, and to not spoil, to refuse to bureaucratize the mind, to live life as a process – live to become (…)
– Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart (2021)
