Welcome to The Invisible
The Invisible
Issue No.2
This issue is devoted to all that is, in one way or another, difficult to see. As embedded as we are in the physical, material world, we are only too aware that, in the words of the Little Prince, “what is essential is invisible to the eye.” The things that we seek — love, happiness, hope, success, freedom, meaning — and the things that we flee — pain, fear, powerlessness, death, sadness, loneliness — as humans, are none of them visible, can none of them be weighed or measured. Neither can they be dismissed. These large, strange, and unwieldy topics are precisely those with which this issue invites you to contend.
The above photograph as well as the cover art for this issue are both from the work of our featured artist, Carolina Caycedo. Above is a moment captured during her project Apparitions where the viewer asked to consider bodies of color in traditional public spaces. The cover art is from her project A Gente Rio, an installation wherein satellite imagery is one of many pieces designed to artfully confront the unprecedented environmental disasters in Brazil and Columbia due to unsafe damming and mining practices. Read more about her work in our interview with her here.
As always, with each issue of CHARGE we hope to be able to ask you to slow down. To look more deeply, to engage more fully and with more awareness, and to be open to what that might do in you.
We’d love for you to think about this issue as though it were a gallery. Walk through the rooms. Allow yourself to spend time, to engage with what you find. Allow yourself to be surprised. To be open to the interaction that might wish to occur.
In this issue you will find artists, authors, poets and essayists engaging in one way or another with the invisible. You’ll find stories about the invisible connections between lovers, poems that deal with the impact of an invisible but impending threat, essays about how much of ourselves we make visible to others, and the invisible force of saudade that imbues us with longing and impels us into our future. You’ll find a discussion about Pablo Neruda’s engagement with The Invisible, and audio recordings that attempt to document that which is beyond language. Artists struggle with the idea of how to portray marginalized people groups and environmental issues that can be rendered functionally invisible to our modern, western world, and with the spaces of process that are ever-changing and constantly, even as they are grasped, leaving again. The invisible, as always, is everywhere, and in this issue we invite you to see it, to engage with it willfully, and to inquire as to what it might have for you, now, in this moment.
Pull up the playlist, pick a room, and start exploring. You’ll notice at the bottom of most pages there is a section titled “Inquiry,” and that most pages are open for comments. We are delighted to encourage you to consider the lines of inquiry that each piece offers, and, if so moved, to share your thoughts, ideas, questions, and possibilities with us and with each other. Let’s disrupt the ways in which we usually interact - with the world and with one another. Let’s open ourselves to the possibilities and transformations that might occur.
Welcome to your encounter. The Invisible awaits.
Above art, Apparitions Still, and Cover art: A Gente Rio, 2016. Installation at Incerteza Viva, 32 Bienal de São Paulo. Photo: Pedro Ivo Trasferetti / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Photos are the property of Carolina Caycedo and have been provided courtesy of the artist.