AQUA MICANS

’Aqua Micans’ is a homage to the writer Raymond Roussel (1877 – 1933) and his novel ’Locus Solus’, in which a fluid is invented, containing so much oxygen that living creatures can breathe in it and the dead can be reanimated. In the novel the dancer Faustine, her hairless cat Khóng-dek lèn and the revived head of the revolutionary Danton, who died at the guillotine, come to life. A voice-over reads lines from the book, meanwhile the dancer elegantly moves through the water and the cat with no hair appears on screen, to disappear again afterwards. The decapitated head hangs from hoses on screen and it is even still talking, albeit unintelligibly. With collage-like video techniques the persons are put into a tank with yellow fluid, the sounds are hollow, like in a submarine. ’Aqua Micans’ was made for the exhibition ’An archeology of imaginary media’, held at De Balie (Amsterdam) in February 2004.