+ Full video:

︎ Narration text: ^{this narration text was fictionalized and conceptualized by Ivetta based on a book, Kafka on the Shore by Murakimi Haruki.}

    Anterior Skin is a single-channel video installation inspired by the book entitled The Archaic Revival by Terence Mckenna. The book studies the contemporary relationship between botany and human, initially inspired by studies of Hildegard von Bingen. When it comes for the author to the discussion regarding important changes that will “provide a real-world agenda addressed to the escalating problems that the plant faces” (Mckenna 219), he asserts several revivals: re-awareness of hallucinogenic plants, feminize world culture, search for the significance of inwardness, the connectedness and so on. Agreeing on his agenda that requires the understanding anthropocentric impacts on the plant (Mckenna 220-223), Anterior Skin attempts to reveal the real face of “the connectedness in search of inwardness” in digital era. It also asks what is the real value of the distorted perception of hallucinogenic plants in us, who most likely only observe hallucinatory reactions through images, over/hear about impacts, search on the Internet, rather than experience fully. In this sense, Anterior Skin juxtaposes a placid scene of the “inner garden” on the first ground of a greenish apartment, where many plants are taken care of, yet kept inside, severed from the outer world permanently and another recording of successive images searching for ayahuasca on the virtual world of Instagram. Throughout, there are many searches existing–a)searching for ayahuasca, which most people only hears about mythically, b) for the reconnection with my younger brother, who has been ruptured and distant from my own life for a long time, and c) for the hallucinative mushroom that causes the mass memory loss of the students who appears in Kafka On the Shores by Murakami Haruki. These layers explodes the relationship between the visibility and invisibility of the concealed existence of hallucinogenic plants as well as ourselves being reconnected and/or ruptured on the virtual world.

+ Bibilography

McKenna, Terence K. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

“Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.” Goodreads, Goodreads, 3 Jan. 2006, www.goodreads.com/book/show/4929.Kafka_on_the_Shore.