Xpiaani’: His understanding, his discernment, his consciousness, his enlightenment, his notion, his reason, his intelligence, his judgment.
We look, almost always, to recognize the other. We look, sometimes, in unison. We look to find the gaze, to hold it, to look at ourselves and recognize ourselves in a certain way in the eyes of the other; I look at the other, nodding to what I am, but also to what I am not. But what happens when we encounter the complex world of another whom we do not know how to recognize?
Through this project, I invite you into the world of Cosijopii, sharing my process of exploration and recognition of the everyday and magical moments in which I accompany and photograph my son with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). My images are not a collection of signs that lead to a diagnosis. On the contrary, I seek to bring you closer to an intimate, complex world that speaks to us of that being, which divides his world between colors, sounds, games, repetitions, and constructions that make up his xpiaani.
In this work, my gaze is dual: on one hand, it is gentle and accompanying; on the other, it confronts. It is a kind of prism that refracts, reflects, and decomposes colors on a wall—a child’s game that allows us to guess where colors come from, why light passes through them, and how “color-moments” are created, inexplicable to the tender eyes of a child. We are surprised to recognize ourselves in those small daily moments, which transport us back to our own childhood, or a childhood we have lost, which these images return to us gently while we scribble on the walls, reproducing experiences and memories of the body.
Though perhaps we have already been touched by that first memory where I hold my son in a river, as he slowly discovers his movements in this new water, in this new world.
And when I decide to confront through the lens, we find each other in those eyes that discover you looking at my son wrapped in a kind of cocoon, distant and protected from that prying gaze. But I also look into your eyes with my son in my arms, both of us naked in an embrace that holds, that holds me, and that finds us both. While I invite you to listen: “In my mind, I have engraved beautiful songs of a child, like a bolt of lightning, with wind, falling with force onto the damp earth.” That lightning falls, the sound doubles and replicates in the corners, it transforms into a cricket, into a train, into an echo that accompanies our journey through our own childhood-memory.
Below, I present fragments of the visual record of this project.
