Vibeke Mascini

Blind men provides an intimate glimpse into a sterile necropsy room in which a beached whale is presented for pathological examination. The limits of human perception are intently demonstrated by depicting a tender and fragmented image of the enigmatic whale body.

“Blind Men is a video and sound composition that provides an intimate glimpse into a sterile necropsy room—an inquest room for scientific research—in which a beached whale is presented for pathological examination. Filmed close to the skin, the blurred camera image shows small fragments of the whale’s body. The only way in which the viewer can see a total picture is by imaginatively puzzling the fragments together. With this, Blind Men evokes the parable from the story ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’, in which the limits of human perception are demonstrated and the imagination is actively addressed. Blind Men plays with a high degree of abstraction that makes it challenging to distinguish body and environment from each other. In this way, Mascini wants to address the porosity and connection between bodies and environments and establish the profound, reciprocal relationship between the two. For Mascini, this has been a central factor in approaching the subject, experiencing the whale’s body as an alienating archive in which traces of human society are stored, accumulated over the centuries. Apart from the history of processing whale bodies into various products and applications used in human society, there is also a long history of humans entering whale bodies. The story of Jonah and the Whale is perhaps among the most famous examples, but recent scientific studies have also found traces of human industries accumulating in the tissue of whales, making whales some of the most polluted animals in the world. This kind of anthropogenic traces of contamination are central to the current pathological research that takes place at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Utrecht University, where Blind Men is recorded. The body as a toxic archive, in which an apparently external world has a major internal influence. A world in which a single element can expose a whole chain of (eco)systems and industries, as evidence of a deep and sometimes disturbing entanglement between existences.”