On Exiting Orbit and Entering Cosmic Consciousness

Witness reflection: Jana Putrle Srdić, writer

Dorotea Dolinšek: ∽21.600

21.600 is a twenty-four-hour-long performance. A durational act, it is also in many ways a point of departure, both for the performer and her audience. I experienced it as an active, all-encompassing, irreversible meditation. The act of breathing, which will ultimately leave an extensive material trace in the performance, is the central axis of this meditation, as it is circled by the performer and the observer, who has herself become a participant. They draw nearer and further away, always remaining affixed to this breath. The body and its gaze, looking inward, come into focus through this rhythm of inhale, exhale, repeat. In an astronaut’s orbiting of a planet, where her dependence on oxygen and thus bond to the atmosphere is that much clearer, the essential survival mechanism that is breathing requires a special kind of attention. Back on earth, the presence of oxygen is the consequence of complex prehistoric relations between the landscape and its being, the exchange of elements amongst themselves.   

The breathing of the performer, and with her, of the participant, encounters physical resistance in the first hours of the performance. At this point, a breathing device, especially designed for the purpose, enters the picture. Similarly to an oxygen tank underwater or a space suit in the ether, it allows air into the lungs, while simultaneously triggering an ejection of ink that colors the paper in front of the performer, rendering her breathing visible. The artist evenly sequences her exhalations along the paper, and the monotonous repetition of the exhale— inhale materializes in long rows. What is usually an autonomous and organic occurrence is transfigured through her performance into a supreme feat of effort.  

These very first hours of the performance reveal the limits of the body and technology. The performer’s forced posture, repetitive gestures, and attention to the device, which could malfunction at any moment, enact the physical boundaries within which she must endure twenty-four hours. These boundaries are particularly visible as the astronaut’s body floats closer to the space station, attached to oxygen tubing, confined to its space suit. Such are the physical determinants of cosmonauts, but also of all of us, as we are laid bare by the performance. 

The audience feels the performer’s motionless posture, as in meditation, as well as the pain of the body, its exhaustion by the fifth, twelfth, nineteenth hour, the fatigue setting in by the twenty-first hour. This is a fundamental, parallel reality, a departure outside of the moment. The performer with her direct intensity, the participant with her decision to remain present and thus be a part of the performer’s endurance, her need to survive; each with their own potency begin to traverse time and enter into the timelessness that is characteristic of meditation, of outer space.   

In a satellite’s criss-crossing of the earth’s orbit, astronauts experience up to sixteen sunsets in twenty-four hours and just as many sunrises, sixteen days and nights. In orbit, and even more so at great distances from the earth, the twenty-four-hour cycles of the interchange between light and dark that stabilize our circadian rhythms begin to collapse. Our proximity to the moon, which causes the tides, and to the sun’s warmth, which gives us the passing of the seasons, enacts the oscillation of planetary conditions. But these occur only on specific coordinates, specific planetary points. The rotation of celestial bodies gives our life on earth — our sleep, rest, dreams, energy, movement — its rhythms, and it does the same for global changes such as weather patterns. But these conditions begin to lose all meaning in outer space. 

The rotation of celestial bodies in our solar system also provide orientation to the precision instrument that is called the body — with no position on earth, we begin to lose our position towards reality. In space, this earthly reality is shown as only one of many possibilities. It has been recorded, for instance, that astronauts experience, alongside their withdrawal from earth, the relative insignificance of national borders and political divisions, of the anthropocentric focus as such. Where is the border of the human being in the process of exhaling and inhaling, which is the interchange of fundamental molecules and the transformation of elements? Where is this border in our cohabitation with the microorganisms that enable our survival, in our reliance on planetary rhythms? How much longer can the ‘human being’ remain separate from such interdependency — for instance, when it is bound to its ‘space station’

After only a couple hours of the piece, the performer and participant already inhabit a completely different world. It is a bubble of their own breathing, their own rhythm, eventually propelling them into timelessness. As in meditation, they have entered a state of cosmic consciousness, one that is always present, always inhabited. It is only that such pure consciousness, with its own silence, is usually hard to notice against the background of human noises, rhythms, exchanges. 

Both performer and participant clearly feel their world in the bubble of the performance as an emptiness that expands within them. They are simultaneously effacing themselves and embodying the simple exchange of breath that is the breathing of every being in the wider ecosystem. They are simultaneously at the center of these exchanges and effaced. They are slowly moving away, and once the performance concludes, they will once again attach themselves to our satellite, step out amongst people, and return to earth. Perhaps they will do so with a greater understanding of fragility and strength, disorientation and belonging.