The Tyranny of Distance
Jasmin Blasco, The Kiss, 2018
HD video (18:03), stereos, 5 paper & ink
"Anna: Actually this is a good bridge to speak about Jasmin’s work, which also addresses the idea of immediate communication, but in this case he is thinking about a way to communicate without interception or detection.
So in the work of Jasmin Blasco, we talked a lot about encrypted messages to be sent across distance and how the communication path of a message distorts and exposes those messages to interception or corruption. Jasmin has proposed that a safer way to communicate is directly from body to body and from tongue to tongue. So he proposes a possibility to pass along messages through kissing.
Sébastien: So we’re talking about French kissing with the tongue, not the Hollywood stuff.
Anna: This work is called The Kiss. Having this idea of the people who are kissing passing along messages that only they can understand.
Maud: He has also developed a kind of language of ways of kissing, and so there’s also a lexicon that describes each gesture and what it means, so if you want you could practice, you can learn that language and be able to transmit your own secret messages. So then you kiss and lick and this means this, and all different symbols. So again in this work, we see a consideration of the promise of a direct, immediate, unmediated form of communication, which is at the same time impossible, or fantastical, and leads paradoxically to misunderstanding."
This text is an excerpt from the performance The Infiltration by Joshua Schwebel whose project was to infiltrate the curators’ position in the exhibition. Read more