Marnix van Uum

Everyone experiences sensations of ecstasy and waves of anxiety. During these intense moments, stories can be built by hyper focusing on the emotional back and forth - being present yet distant. Suddenly, a memory that isn’t yours surfaces while you try to concentrate on your breathing. It’s colouring your present existence. To the beat of arrhythmic breathing, physical impulses, like tingling fingertips, are transmitted by your body, marking the edges of the stage on which the story is developing.
 My work concerns the possibility of emotional responses to personal as well as collective memories to serve as building-blocks for ever-changing, timeless narratives. I feel that with the use of emotions as foundational elements in storytelling, a more fluid, less stable form of narratives can be found and a deeper sense of truth can be felt. I’m interested in the coexistence of these personal truths through the presentation of a multitude of options of interpretation. I mainly use drawing and video in my practice. In my videos, I often use improvised body movements in front of a green screen to instigate new narratives. My instant reactions to what I record help construct the world in which the story will unfold. Both drawing and video implement time as a tool: emotional reactions to memories can be stretched or sped up to highlight their intuitive and fluid state. While both media explore the elasticity and non-linearity of emotions, drawing allows for a direct registration of the body’s knowledge. Finally, I hope to encourage an imagination that honours the complexity of human experience, fostering a deeper connection to our shared emotional landscape. I wish to invite viewers into a universe where every emotion is considered a source of strength.