Darkness VISIBLE

'darkness VISIBLE' is the documentation of the artist Simone Couto throughout a three-year project developed in Iceland. The book is explores light, darkness, and what veers in between–the body veering as a rolling stone. It is also about landscape and our physical and emotional relationship to it. Every journey through time and space gives us the opportunity to tune in to the surroundings and ourselves. So it was with the artist's discovery of Iceland, its landscape, its materials, and, ultimately, with the volcano Eyjafjallaj�kull. Departing from a personal place, the journey soon became the discovery of Anicca (or Anitya), one of the essential Buddhist doctrines that assert that all of conditioned existence, without exception, is transient, evanescent, and inconstant. All physical and mental events come into being and dissolve. Human life embodies this flux in the aging process, the cycle of repeated birth and death. Nothing lasts and everything decays, which is applicable to all beings and their environs, and landscape as well.2. All of our experiences are registered in both a physical and mental memory. When our body moves within a certain terrain, our brain registers the surroundings and our muscles memorize any encountered resistance or harmony. The physical and mental practices (Aikido and Zen) that the artist learned in order to do the work were ultimately combined forces through the path of reciprocity between body and space.The discovery of these concepts and the possibility of finding living evidence in nature, especially in the magical volcanic landscape of Eyjafjallaj�kull, led to a series of deep and complex works which emphasize two important aspects: where we stand as humans between the natural world (landscape) and the fabricated world (city), and the potential of change that lies in everything and everywhere.Written by curator and Historian Sarah Crown