Gesture of Shadows

Gesture of Shadows from utakoshindo on Vimeo.

Gesture of Shadows
• Year: 2016
• Duration: 3min. 40sec.

“Last summer in this room where I write this text, A ray of light entered through the window, straight across the room, reaching the other side. The colour of pink on the wall was the deepest and strongest that I had ever seen. I was not intending this when I held my hand out, nor that the gesture would create the deeply translucent shades of gray in the pink. The colour and the image on the wall presented an extreme beauty, which even caused pain in my heart. Strangely, the shadow looked like it belonged to someone else. The strangeness and the weightlessness made me forget about everything, as though I was falling in love with someone, or possessed by something that I can never fully know, like spirits or gods. The sense of longing was so strong that all I could do was let my hand drift and try to touch something that was, perhaps, untranslatable. The shadows eventually began to fade as the sun set deeper. I prayed for the shadows to stay present, but I soon accepted that they would eventually have to vanish. The time was reaching hakumei 薄明, literally meaning ‘pale light’, indicating space- time that is similar to dusk and dawn. According to the philosopher Kiyoshi Miki, it belongs neither to day or night, and it is an ideal moment for one to contemplate one’s own aloneness. This particular instance shed light on my true aloneness that drifts ‘in- between’ places and languages, and is only to be witnessed afterwards, as a gesture of shadows. " Utako Shindo (November 2016)