Aïcha Sommer: Once finished project, reflect on how your outcome and personal development (May 4)
When thinking about fashion in the ways it has bettered my life I am reminded of the power of escapism, world creation, and fantasy. Fashion, alongside books, films, and music, enabled me to disregard reality. In the Realms of the Unreal: Insane Writings electrified me. “Written by those whom society has deemed mentally unbalanced” it is described as “a window on alternative ways of seeing, a beginner’s guide to what the ‘insane’ can offer those of us with more conventional outlooks”. The concept for my portraiture was prompted after reading the prose, poetry, and writings of these individuals who had been institutionalised. The incoherence of their work was interesting to read as I understood none of it, as if it were another language. I came to question and explore my own sanity through a series of portraits.
I began to explore my states of consciousness that were incoherent and experimented with lucid dreaming. This is when the dreamer is aware during their reverie and able to observe the decisions and story of the unconscious mind. I am able to swing between ‘reality’ to write down things I see and feel. Upon waking and facing the scribblings of the night before, I see detailed similarities between the ‘insane’ letters of many ‘insane writings’ and myself.
As part of the process, I allowed myself to experiment without pressure of executing a visual representation of my concept. As a reflection of my state of mind, its projection onto others, and what I conceived as the sanity of others, I wanted to create without hesitation or commitment to a certain aesthetic. This allowed me to produce a variety of work, none making sense with each other, only that they were produced as emotional and psychological responses to the external stimuli. I experimented with family members, strangers, collages, reflections, shadows, still lives, and self-portraiture. Similar to organizing one’s music in order of when it was as defining track in one’s life, looking back at the chronology of the portraits I am able to reflect on the nostalgia of each moment. The very first image was taken two weeks before the term break and was when coronavirus was a mere whisper. Personally, it was taken at a time of extreme emotions and, for me, it the image is a striking way to remember the moment. I chose to present it at the crit for our ‘best image’ because it is a memory from the moment right before our lives changed unimaginably. I look at all the images I produced and conclude that this one is the one I respond to most emotionally.
The series of images I now am in possession of feel incoherent and unorganised. I feel it necessary to conclude the project; to punctuate and make sense of the work I am in possession of. While I am considered ‘sane’, I certainly feel a camaraderie with the isolated and misunderstood individuals who were featured in the book. Perhaps their imagination was too grand for the rest of us.
Treacy, D 2020, Performance in Photography, lecture notes, Better Lives Unit FU001708, London College of Fashion, delivered 20 April 2020.
Oakes, G. (ed.) (1991) In the Realms of the Unreal: Insane Writings. New York City: Da Capo Press.