Lens Prism

The Lens Prism comprises a monologue, delivered by a man in an empty theater. Across his performance, he interweaves memory, historical fact and descriptions of art works. Each of the spaces and forms he describes fold in upon each other as does his relationship to them. He describes a scene from ‘La Jete,’ then the space Chris Marker filmed it in and its original purpose as one of the sites of the Universal Exhibition. Then he wonders if Raymond Rousell might have wandered its halls, whether his labyrinthine poem ‘New Impressions of Africa’ might have been influenced by the difficulty of grasping the exhibitions meandering passages and scope. Then again, he thinks perhaps this is more a description of London’s Great Exhibition where many visitors experienced a some synesthesia. In the final scene the character is asked to describe, a recently felt sensation but stumbles against its representation. He cannot describe an afflicting physical pain and conflates his inability to represent it with an inability to remember it. In so doing a polemic is set up between the personal appropriation of narratives as assistants in expressing ones self and the complexity of translating intimate subjective experience into a legible form.