on orchids to dusk by Pol Clarissou
the impulse to follow the footsteps of the corpse that you just found, follow them backwards to some origin and finding a disappearing route instead.
this place is littered with the dead. suffocated and voided of life by an absence of oxygen, by the local flora, forced into a position facing death.
a beautiful and deadly sensation, one that insists on the permanence of a mortal death.
I just watched The Night Eats the World, and felt this then on the other side of the scale, in a film about a man who fears that sensation, and lives on his hiding from acknowledging death to survive the aftermath of an unnamed, unseen event and eventually comes to terms with that fear. moves on.
here the aesthetic joyousness stereotypically associated with low poly, pastel palletes is used to create the web of comfort around the blazing realisation of your death.
finding the first body changes everything, if you find one, it reveals that this isn’t a solitary thing, and that this place doesn’t shy, it doesn’t hide corpses. from then the obsession is less with what this place is, and more with the potential of finding the next body. little realising that there’s more death around you than you think.
a slow countdown of the oxygen left. the impulse to sit. the impulse to take off your helmet. to admit how tired you are to no-one listening but the world. a bursting into life. this is an open place of morbid secrecy.
GlitchOut 