by Petra Ganglbauer
The surfaces have been exhausted. To where do we disappear? Where do we make ourselves noticeable again? Where does our gaze wander, time and again?
The photographer Elisabeth Wörndl has departed on her next expedition. We follow her and expand our own corporeality. Introspection: the territorial conquest of the other, dark side within us.
Computer technology proves to be an aide memoire. By making the (solid) body transparent, she helps us to remember what we have forgotten. What appears in the process is no homage to the deluge of data but rather a reanimation of a mythical introspection. Daphne has once again become transformed. The nymph who was transformed into a laurel tree was subjected by Wörndl, in an early group of works, to an ecstatic ritual of self-liberation. Now it is confronted with its own shadow. The mysterious inner dress. Wörndl proceeds in a most valiant way. We follow her. The steps into the inside of the body are like a self-willed passage. Sometimes diabolic. We encounter faces, creatures: the nameless. Silhouettes. Hatchings. Grimaces. Inscrutable signs of earthly mortality. The body becomes uncharted territory, a long forgotten terrain. Little that we had suddenly expected. The "Digital Selfportrait" resembles a memory of something that belongs to the very distant past. A memory of imagination. Phenomena emerge, come to light. The soul speaks from the depths. Vibration. Fear accompanies us. We discover, suddenly and unprepared, with wide open eyes, that what we saw could be ourselves.
It is difficult for us to become accustomed to witnessing an unexpected reality. This is also the certainty that what is covered by skin and resides deep within the body indicates the origin: I.