The poet walks in the image

Sophie-Isabelle Dufour

In the video installation The Certainty of Shadow, the poet Adonis appears: "I live
with the light", he says in Arabic. The work is composed of three moving images
horizontally placed, as in a triptych. "Even if you came back, Odysseus", the poet recites as
he walks in the central image, an interval, between departure and return…

Movement
"I am different from Odysseus with regard to the return. Odysseus values his
return because he wanted to see his beloved Penelope again […]. I like to be in perpetual
movement".1 For Adonis, movement signifies "awareness".2 It's not surprising to see
Adonis walking in the moving images of Kali Jones and Maurizio Ruggiano. There is a
fertile collaboration between the legendary Arab poet and the two artists; Adonis recites
his poems, images take shape. A parallelism occurs: poetry is image and the images are
poetic. The work's mechanism is set in place "To write poetry, says Adonis, one must walk
outside of, or within oneself, see, listen to music, breathe, make love and do many other
things…"3 For Jones and Ruggiano, to create video is to construct visual and acoustic
sensations related to "space, time, the internal, the external, knowledge of the self through
the other, death". The Certainty of Shadow, adopts all these points of views. The video is
dominated by Adonis' presence, his unequalled face and voice: "The Arabic language is
sound, nature and human vivacity, it is intimately and organically connected to the ear, to
music and song."4

One need not know Arabic to appreciate the poet's words; it's enough to let oneself be
transported by their musicality, which mingles with breaths and whispers. At the centre of
the triptych, we periodically see a grey stone wall, shot close up. The video then shows the

1
Interview with Kali Jones and Maurizio Ruggiano, Paris, October 2010.
For Adonis, «c’est le mouvement qui est le retour et seulement le mouvement», Adonis, Le regard
d’Orphée. Conversations avec Houria Abdelouhaed, Paris, Fayard, coll. «Témoignages pour
l’Histoire», 2009, p. 106.
2
Ibid., p. 81.
3
Ibid., p. 129.
4
Ibid., p. 268.
interior of a gigantic cave: the Ear of Dionysius, thus named by Caravaggio in 1608. This
cave, an ancient rock quarry in Syracuse shaped like an auricular pavilion has a
remarkable ability to amplify sounds. It is said that here the ancient tyrant Dionysius
secretly listened to the conversations of prisoners at work.

In the triptych, stills and intermittent images intercut. The shadows of visitors walking in
the immense cave create strange visual effects. Rather than representing a secondary
reality, these shadows distinguish themselves from their reference by stimulating the
reflection of the viewer.

Image
How could one not recall here the allegory of Plato's cave, the Western founding
myth of the theory of knowledge? If the platonic tradition considers the projected shadow
as being "the furthest stage from truth" a simulacrum of reality,5 Jones' and Ruggiano's
video presents the shadow as an anti platonic image and producer of thought. The filmed
shadow does not appear as a degenerate semblance but rather acts as a protagonist,
intriguing the viewer, leading him or her out of the cave to see the world and its images.

To be in motion, to travel; it is the video image which brought Adonis to the Grande Cretto
at Gibellina, a monumental work of Land Art created by Alberto Burri. This immense
labyrinth, composed of blocks of white cement, follows the layout of the streets of the
former city of Gibellina. Let us recall some facts: in the night between the 14th and the 15th
of January 1968, an earthquake shakes the entire Belice valley (an area comprising the
provinces of Palermo, Agrigento and Trapani) destroying the cities of Gibellina,
Poggioreale, Salaparuta and Montevago. An abandoned city, Gibellina, has become the
site of a memorial: the Grande Cretto, entirely dedicated to the victims.

What takes place in the three images of the installation? Feet, naked and shod appear; in
the centre, Adonis walks, examines, explores the white labyrinth, reciting poems related to
the feeling of loss: "I worship this gentle stone, I’ve seen my face in it, my own lost
poems.". On the left, we have the profile of a naked man, walking; on the right, a naked
woman, also seen in profile, heads toward him. Will they meet? The images on the left and
right abruptly disappear, a breath resounds; at the centre a wall of white cement, shot
close up, metamorphoses into a woman's stomach. Then all the three images display pools
of water reflecting the sky, trees, silhouettes. A shape forms on the pupil of an eye filmed

5
Victor I. Stoichita, Brève histoire de l’ombre, Genève, Droz, 2000, p. 25.
upside-down, framed by skin on either side. Metamorphoses, shadows, reflecting
surfaces, and reflections show little mimetic fidelity; they are not the experience of pure
repetition, but that of poetry made image. According to Adonis, "poetry is the place where
all arts meet"6; in The Certainty of Shadow, poetry comes to meet the image. The video
installation attempts to transform, to imagine poetry in images.

In full sunlight, the shadow accompanies the traveler in the Grande Cretto; as in life, the
labyrinth is full of dead ends, chance and necessity. The naked man and his shadow walk
slowly on the road, which lies ahead of them. Suddenly we see an apocalyptic vision: a
landscape on fire. Does it announce purification or destruction? A human shadow appears
in the middle image; as if the video had brought back a phantom. Unease emerges: the
video image is imago. The Latin word is more complex than the word “image”. The imago
does not merely signify a copy, a portrait, a statue, a wax effigy, but also the shade: of a
dead person, a spectre, a specular image. The imago echoes back to the dark part of vision.
At the centre of the triptych, Adonis pursues his path: "Mankind, is your blood the only
light you have?”.

Love
On the road, occasionally a poet meets a woman. How does one transform a love
poem into an image? "I lived inside a woman’s face / She makes me die,"; the poet's words
are powerful, and so are the images. At the centre of the triptych, an eclipse is followed by
an autoerotic scene; a young naked woman caresses her sex. Although she may not be
chaste, the image is not obscene; the video adopts the point of view of the poet for whom
"eroticism is a culture, a way of thinking and imagining". 7

This conception of things is not new; during the Renaissance, Titian painted his famous,
The Venus of Urbin (1538), representing a naked woman, lying on a bed while
masturbating. The Beauty looking at us, "knows what she is doing", and Titian transforms
her into an "exceptional painting" staging "the eroticism of painting itself": the viewer,
comments Daniel Arasse, "is constantly shifting between the desire to embrace this image,
and the need to maintain a distance in order to see it".8

If Titian's Venus explicitly caresses herself, the young woman in Jones' and Ruggiano's
video only partially offers herself to our gaze; the stills, often blurred, succeed one another

6
Ibid., p. 321.
7
Ibid., p. 243.
8
Daniel Arasse, On n’y voit rien. Descriptions. Paris, Denoël, coll. «folio essais», 2000, p. 172.
intermittently at indeterminate intervals. At the centre of the triptych, the poet's mouth
appears periodically in close up. Thus a rapport is established between the mouth and the
female body. His love for women “is central to the poet's life",9 according to Adonis; "love
is essential for the act of writing".10 What does the movement of the images reveal? Most
likely something to do with the stationary and the moving: "In the love he feels for a
women, a man senses he is on a journey of self discovery".11 Love is a journey of initiation;
the encounter with oneself occurs through the other, however, love also renders “death
more extreme".12 In The Certainty of Shadow the images of the female body are associated
with those of an eclipse; love and twilight are inextricably connected.

Melancholy
Adonis walks in the image smoking a cigar; the naked man and his shadow slowly
ambulate within the labyrinth of Gibellina. Wandering the labyrinth inspires melancholy.
At the centre of the triptych, the poet's shadow materializes on the ground, then the
shadows of the cave appear in all three images. Sudden views of the sky, trees, and birds
propel the gaze upwards.

The poet recites:

“A palm tree’s fronds are breaking off,

tears etched on its golden leaves.
A palm tree: grief has made it into an interpreter.
Is this a notebook
in Arabic
taught by grief,
fenced in by invisible boundaries?
That is where it begins.
And all the rest is wind. ”

The poet is at the centre; on either side we see only desolate landscapes: destroyed houses,
cemeteries, ruins… All is but fire, smoke, dust, ash and volcanic stone: "the stone shows us
the difficulties or the obstacles that await us in our movement".13 We hear noises: the

9
Adonis, Le regard d’Orphée, cit., p. 260.
10
Ibid., p. 261.
11
Ibid., p. 223.
12
Ibid., p. 244.
13
Interview with Kali Jones and Maurizio Ruggiano, cit.
roaring of air mixes with the crackle of fire.

The naked woman and man; walk towards us, each in their own image, continuing their
journey in the Grande Cretto. Will they meet? At the centre, an uncertain, blurred shadow
roams: that of the poet or Death itself? "All my years are but a passing fragrance, each
second, years, and of years”.

In the central image of the triptych, Adonis walks, smokes; the side images display an
incredible Arabic calligraphy. Word and image meet in a poem, which does not
necessarily have an answer to the human drama: “Poetry illuminates, enlightens, merely
signals, the rest is up to the reader". 14

(Translation by Kali Jones)

14
Ibid.
Sophie-Isabelle Dufour

Lecturer at l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris

Publications
L´image vidéo, d'Ovide à Bill Viola, Archibooks, Paris, 2008

Critical Writings:
Critique n° 759-760 : À quoi pense l'art contemporain ?
Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 2010

L’archivio del senso

'Quaderni della Biennale' n. 1
a cura di Tiziana Migliore
et al. Edizioni, Milano

Sulla 53º Biennale di Venezia.

Quaderni sull'opera d'arte contemporanea 2
et al. Edizioni, Milano

Quando è scultura
a cura di Cristina Baldacci e Clarissa Ricci
prefazione di Angela Vettese
et al. Edizioni, Milano