The Body of Reality – The Skin of Experience
Essay by Kjetil Røed, 2025
The Body of Reality – The Skin of Experience
What is trust? It is easy, in everyday life, to think that trust simply means believing what someone says and the attitudes they express — and, over time, trusting them as a person. But trust runs much deeper than that, and it is not only a feeling. It is an orientation towards oneself and the world, connected to the smallest fibres of what exists within and around us. We might say that trust makes it possible to open oneself to another person, to dare to be naked, not to pretend — and that trust in oneself means that one can carry that exposure with steadiness.
Yet trust’s anchoring in authority can also be understood as resonance, to borrow Hartmut Rosa’s term: the sense that the world speaks, carries meaning, appears coherent. This space of resonance means that one has a place in the world, he claims, and that one can meet what addresses one — nakedly and with force — what one resonates with. The opposite condition — that the world does not speak, but is instead mute and dead — produces alienation. One has no room to step forward into, neither naked nor authoritative, because there is nothing one can address that matters.
So what speaks to us? What can give trust in ourselves and in the world? The smallest things can address us, if we allow them to: the sound of wind in the trees, a stranger’s accidental smile on the bus, a partner bringing breakfast in bed. This is nourishment. It allows life to hold together, and it can unfold in such a way that we become whole human beings. Here lie the seeds of small worlds — within us, around us. Bonds of trust become networks of relation: to phenomena, to existences, that gather loose threads.
At the same time, trust is not something one simply has. It is something that accumulates over time, like sediment collecting along riverbanks — to use a natural metaphor — or, if one thinks of slower processes still, like grains of sand pressed together until they become solid, until they become stone. Such trust-building trajectories belong to the ongoing question of whether the world speaks to us, and whether we are able to answer.
Ina Otzko has made several sculptures titled Trust, and they circle around precisely these trust-building, world-making processes. In one of them we see blocks of salt crystals — Himalayan salt, that rosily shimmering kind — roughly the size of bricks. As I look at them, I think of two processes. First: that they have been cut out, as they are here, into manageable rectangles that can be used for cooking or other activities. Such actions could be called the cultural part of sedimentation: here will is involved, human action — body and hand — and it is with this will that one slices pieces of reality in order to use them in one’s activities. This is the cultural distillate of nature’s cycles.
The salt blocks frame — retell — the time it takes for salt to gather in banks, in quantities, a process that is itself an expression of, and part of, natural cycles. Nature’s time meets human time in Otzko’s work, and in this encounter different cycles are generated; cycles that are lifted up and that meet — in the gallery — a third time: the viewer’s. This time is filtered through the word — the title — and through the room — the exhibition — and it tunes us to yet another accumulation: thought itself.
To show a cross-section of these processes as art is nevertheless not an abstraction, because sedimentation and will are mirrored in the thing that is shown. The work gives us the possibility of making our own circular trajectories, partly entangled with those that came before. Perhaps we could say that trust mirrors — or carries a residue of — both sedimentation’s slow labour and the will’s cut into reality. Looking at art is rarely dictated by the straight line of result-oriented thinking. It is dictated, rather, by the way fragments of thought and images of feeling rise up in us and gather in the work’s form, weight, and history.
To think in art, with art, is to answer. And what one learns from the artwork is how it can form a new shape out of the work itself, adapted to one’s own life, one’s own history, one’s own processes of sedimentation and crystallisation. In such a gathering, clarity can arise — and with it the possibility of combining the parts of oneself that habit has locked in place in new ways. Clarity, then, appears as an opening, a freedom-leaning lift in how one thinks, rather than the narrowing lines of a conclusion.
I look at the salt, and at the piece of cloth lying on top: it is stained with blood. It may signal exertion or danger, but above all it speaks of processes that have affected the body to the point that it has been punctured. But what have we understood?
One often carries the assumption that one understands something — say, a work of art — if one looks long enough, or gathers enough information. Then one can arrive at a conclusion, or — as some call it — deliver a judgement of taste. I have done this myself many times as a critic: used the word and believed — meant — that I was judging. But is it really true that one has understood? I am no longer so sure.
Is understanding something one has, like a kind of intellectual property? Or is it rather something one lives out — and in that way belongs to? A form of life? A variation of the cycles mentioned earlier? In recent years I have come to think that what one says and believes as conclusions — as completed processes, as yes and no, good and bad, either/or — are, really (most often), provisional states. The binary is surface, simplification. The temporal belongs to life; it goes deeper — perhaps deep enough to bleed — and tells us that everything unfolds in time, that what addresses us is in motion because we are in motion, if we answer; that stillness is impossible anywhere, so long as the world exists.
So long as we exist, one might almost say, since this concerns experience and thought — and we have none of that if we do not see matters from our perspective, as living: as human, as body, able to think, to undress, to be wounded; to come into clarity or be thrown into confusion.
The Catholic philosopher and mystic Simone Weil often writes that the only knowledge we can hope for is of this kind. By making ourselves receptive to the world, we may grasp it — not by placing it beneath us, but by letting it enter us. Attention — attentio — is therefore more important than thought, she claims, because only by standing naked and without demand before the world will it show itself. Thought, she writes, must above all be waiting — empty — not hunting for anything, but ready to receive the object that is to come in its naked truth.
There is an almost Buddhist insight in Weil’s formulations, one that runs against modernity’s preferred methods: to be someone is to be unyielding, and above all to be filled with oneself, one tends to think. To know something is to sit on a heap of knowledge, it is assumed. To conclude complicated matters is progress, power, strength, position. But the mystery of strength, as Weil calls it, is that it is only when one lets go of oneself — when one is emptied of such things — that one receives oneself. As a kind of gift. A love of oneself that is also a love of the world.
This also concerns the balance mentioned earlier between humility and authority — or perhaps one should say: the vulnerability that is disclosed in us when we place ourselves at the disposal of how reality actually is. Iris Murdoch, who was deeply inspired by Weil, writes that this is a matter of love, because the will towards truth and the desire to discover something or someone outside oneself spring from a basic, radical care for all that exists. “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” she writes.
Such methods therefore prescribe a nakedness and a sincerity that are demanding. They require presence and the ability to be a subject without imposing one’s perspective or forcing solutions. Yet the difficult task can nonetheless manifest with charm and lightness — it can appear simple and assured, even if the path to such a state is long.
Sometimes this has to do with how one carries one’s body, or how one inhabits a room — something Otzko has explored in a series of other works. In Interiors, we meet the artist herself in different apartments and rooms that are not her own. She is vulnerable, partly or fully undressed, and fills these spaces with her uncovered body. These simple arrangements show how the body can rewrite simplified divisions between foreign and familiar places through its bare, undisguised presence.
Otzko’s method is not entirely unlike how Francesca Woodman once inhabited abandoned places and houses in her photographs. Where Woodman made decayed and deserted houses into places of life and movement, Otzko enters these rooms — these homes — with an unforced and gently curious presence that unsettles ideas of property and introduces the sense that any place one finds oneself might, in principle, be a commons — a kind of home. If only temporarily.
The body is history-triggering, and through its gestures and movements it can exceed binary systems, ingrained myths, and patterns of thought. That one can, with the body as medium, tell other stories about places and times that have been absorbed into established systems and narratives is something Otzko shows in several performances. In A Mouthful, she dissolves the separation between stones as passive objects outside us and her own body, by exploring different configurations with her body as an arena. She moves them about as if they were drawn into a system of language, and lets them circulate through the mouth. In an outburst of agency she drops them onto plates so they shatter, as if releasing a force of nature against the bourgeois ritual of the dining room. Where such performances take one is not easy to say, but Otzko shifts patterns of imagination; she activates the body in relation to an environment in a way that nudges how we view the world and ourselves.
In Capital, she sits — seemingly “well-behaved” — between containers assembled around her outdoors near Longyearbyen on Svalbard, before rising to bang and strike the containers — carriers of global trade routes and capitalism. Finally she sits down again at the desk and speaks the words: Poverty, Distress, Debt, Ignorance, Depletion, Deprivation, Starvation, Emptiness. None of these words can be assimilated into the story of commerce; they remain as a hole in the narrative that capital performs. Again an element of aggression punches through one of the stories shaping our reality.
Otzko also casts new light on religious ideas and myths, as we see in MUTATIO. In this work we see the artist holding another adult with what one might call radical tenderness. The radical lies both in the unstrained yet resolute manner in which the motif is conveyed, and in how Otzko dismantles religious iconography through the this-worldly proximity of the human body. She strips the historical Pietà motif of its explicit religious substance and shows the human core of the arrangement.
One might say that the works make tangible and sensible only the skin of a process of insight — because what we see, feel, and show to others is precisely what we can touch and be touched by, and this provides the ground for insight and thinking. What can be thought is, one might say, never itself visible — only surface, vulnerable surfaces. Yet it is everything beneath the top layer, behind the skin, that is most interesting; and the glow of the surface is strongly connected to the inciting dissonances we do not see directly.
Again: it is not answers or conclusions that concern Otzko. Rather, she gathers threads that enable the viewer to experience something that is true and important in itself.
These tensions are most clearly articulated in the neon works, which are intriguing commentaries on the force of what neon signs usually express. In public space neon tends to convey advertising, or perhaps important guidance for orientation in a building — like the familiar green EXIT sign. It is striking how Otzko’s works convey something diametrically opposed to a product or a direction. Consider IAMNOWHERE, for example, which inscribes both a subject and a placelessness into neon’s otherwise assertive rhetoric. The statement dissolves itself, yet at the same time it seems to gather us, precisely because — given the medium’s insistence and its appearance of direct address — it forces us to think. Forces us to find a form that might reconcile what pulls apart cognitively and emotionally. Does it work? I do not know — but that is not the point.
In another work we see a similar movement in the utterance: (Be)longing. Here too something unravels from within the statement, making one consider the different parts of the word: belonging is not the opposite of longing, the last element of the word. Or is it rather that every longing creates — or can create — belonging? Or that any belonging, constantly, potentially, can be undone because one longs for something else? In this way, by saying something other than what the sentence seems to say, what is said is turned towards the unsaid, and one is made to think.
This can also be illustrated through something as seemingly simple as focus, or the lack of focus. In the history of photography one finds the impulse to see who someone really is in the often strong will to capture a person in portrait form — and it is not without reason that people in photography’s early days feared losing their soul through portraiture. But perhaps it is when someone is least themselves that they come into view most clearly? Perhaps it is when one does not see — will-driven and truth-seeking — that one sees?
In Who Are We Today?, a series of photographs of a young girl — portraits — we see both impulses. In each image she wears different hats, as if one particular hat might fit her and thus create a whole that reveals who she is. Yet the final “formation” of how she appears is one of defocusing: the face becomes indistinct, and in that way the quality of sharpness is handed over to the viewer. If one ends by saying that one does not see, one does not truly see the images either — because it is not the unfocused quality of the image, nor the face’s indistinctness, that the image is “of”. The “revealing” portrait ends up in the same category as the solution or the answer — or the work as something completed and finished-seen. An outer — in this case photographic — defocusing can, in other words, lead to an inner refocusing.
We find a similar method, though formulated through a different imagery, in Treasures of Heaven, where long exposures of the sea’s movements produce a kind of clarifying obscurity. Here one sees how what is out of focus is not truly a loss of the object’s clarity, but rather a time-image — an image of the sea’s movements unfolding across a longer duration than a snapshot could contain. At the same time, the transitions between the water’s different states carry an associative horizon in which the waters below are lifted towards clouds and sky. One recognises in these transitions formations that resemble those seen when looking upward — perhaps even more so when looking down from an aeroplane high above.
That the portrait is only the ground for how one imagines the portrayed person again touches the connection between surface and depth, or process and life. Otzko has, in several other works and series, shown such an interest in surfaces that take depth into themselves — not because depth is exhausted through the displayed surface, but because the attention granted to the surface through the work invites — or calls for — a corresponding attention and time from us.
In art, it is not the direct line to what one thinks is essence that becomes the most important for attention. Often it is the detour, the detail, the sidetrack that becomes the most fruitful path, I think, as I look at Otzko’s photographs from the depths of the Solfatara volcano near Naples. The volcano sleeps, but it smokes, and one knows that beneath the surface there is glowing molten mass. The gaze that emerges through the seventy-eight images of the series — the artist’s gaze — searches its way towards these transient border zones of reality. Otzko leads us around the place, and with a careful hand guides us down along the fence that runs to the bottom of the volcano (which is, of course, not active). Steam rising from the crater floor testifies to activity in the depths, but in the photographs it becomes a visual skin for the volcano’s body.
Otzko’s volcano photographs are shown together with the sculpture Trust — another variant of this word, this form — a tetrahedral figure that might resemble a measuring instrument from early modernity. Together, sculpture and photographs carry the title Leviathan, referring to a gigantic sea monster mentioned in the Bible, and also the title of a poem by George Oppen, which Otzko herself cites in her text for the project: “Truth also is the pursuit of it: Like happiness, and it will not stand.” Truth is not something one uncovers or finds — a permanent thing or state — and to know the volcano through its edges and fragments brings one closer to the process Oppen writes about. Perhaps also, in an extended sense, nature itself — or natural forces — which will always exceed human attempts to control or understand them.
Such imperfect instruments used to map natural forces will, in the long run, disappear into lava flows or be overgrown by vegetation when humans are gone. Before that happens, we need oases like the ones Otzko creates. Yet these visual places are not idylls; they approach zones of orientation and cognition. It is in the sidelong glance, and with an attention that does not restlessly seek the essence of things, that one can locate the fracture line where reality is disclosed — not as a thing, not as something there that one can see — but in the cognitive and emotional cracks that contemplation opens within us.
One can think oneself into — or imagine — a larger picture. One can think oneself into and out of the more-than-human. That is why art and literature exist. We know, in any case, that we are always part of long processes we cannot fully survey, and in that sense perhaps understanding — if one keeps to the human perspective — is only the experienced surface of trajectories that embrace a far larger reality.
If one imagines what is larger than us — the universe, nature, the collective — then even in death, even in the inorganic, nothing stands still, because it does not end with each of us. Whatever is — however large or small — is entangled in processes that do not end until life on this planet is extinguished, which is likely billions of years away. For what is life, really, other than a consciousness of such processes, such metamorphoses, and the ability to answer the growth and transformation in the depths of what exists? What is life other than the awareness of how this network of veins branches out and can cause our life trajectories to change?
As in many of Otzko’s works, the relation to nature lies at the centre of the volcano images. Yet there are no grand claims here, no clear attitudes being articulated, but rather oases for attention and afterthought. In the absence of explicit statements, receptivity comes into view rather than assault. There is no essence, one might say, because there is no “this is what things really are” — as both Buddhists and quantum physicists know well — and it is therefore the moving assemblage of fragments, of sidelong glances and poetic glimpses of the world around us, that says more about how the world is composed than the gaze that wants to conclude.
But how does this take place? And what kind of view of who we are can such notions of thought and insight lead to? This is an interesting question, because it is not only a matter of using imagination to create an inner image clearer than the outer one.
Otzko inscribes herself into a line of performance artists who have worked with both viewpoint and presence as methods for arriving at clarity in oneself and in the world. It is natural to think of Ana Mendieta here: an artist who wove body and landscape together through ritualised actions, and who refused to position herself outside what she reflected on. Where Mendieta, with great pathos, made her own body into ecological cycles and forms in nature that corresponded to her body’s shape, Otzko rather forms places in our shared nature-consciousness, with her gaze and body as a stand-in.
Otzko also works with the body as medium and scene without moving into the more extreme versions of endurance, trial, or spectacle. Where, for example, Marina Abramović explored the outer limits of bodily presence, Otzko cultivates situations marked by relational resonance, where receptivity, ecological attention, and the echo between body, environment, and time are central. The practice thus appears as an independent position in dialogue with art history, shifting performance’s focus towards the relational and the ecological.
This concerns how we all must work on ourselves in order to see anything clearly at all. Michel Foucault’s concept of truth is interesting here, because he argued that what is true is not something one simply has access to; it requires work on oneself. This increasingly preoccupied him in the last years of his life, and even as he was dying of AIDS he worked relentlessly on what he — with the thinkers of antiquity — called epimeleia heautou (care of the self). One cannot spontaneously see and understand the world, nor spontaneously grasp oneself, he thought. One must work through how one relates to understanding and to seeing clearly at all. Who one is, and how one works through how one is, is directly connected to knowledge and truth.
Foucault argued that modernity has largely misunderstood truth and insight. Scientific models, objective archives, procedures of collection — and today one might add the enormous quantity of information available online — are not something that can be accumulated in an external place and then “poured” into one’s head. One does not become wise by reading up on a topic, he claims, and calls this the Cartesian misunderstanding, after René Descartes. In the seventeenth century Descartes sat and waited for ideas to appear clearly before his reason; this is how he arrived at the famous sentence “I think, therefore I am,” in his Meditations on First Philosophy.
Foucault drew inspiration from ancient practices of care of the self, where “meditations” did not mean waiting passively for clear thoughts, or reading heavy volumes on what one wished to understand, but rather putting oneself into what was required to live a good life. Thinkers he used frequently — and who are still widely read — include Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. For them there was no sharp separation between knowledge and life, since any knowledge is also a question of what a life is at all, and how one should live for oneself and with others. Morality was not an academic discipline, but closer to what one today might call self-help.
What else should philosophy or knowledge be, one might ask, since there is an obvious connection — at least to me — between what one knows and how one lives. To think and live morally, one had to know, for example, that there were certain virtues — traits of character — one must cultivate in order to live well. Moderation, for instance, mattered, because an unrestrained way of living manifested a failure to understand oneself: one thoughtlessly destroyed the basis of one’s own life, which in turn would make one unreceptive to further insight.
I have sympathy for this mirroring of the one who knows — or wishes to know — because it should be obvious that we do not stand equally as receivers of knowledge. Many, for example, may not have the patience required to experience the full character of a place with all its different qualities, because one is always rushing onward to something else: another place, another person, another conversation. Perhaps one day one understands that one must be patient in order to experience places as something other than oneself — as Murdoch wrote — or be receptive to what it actually is — its reality — as Weil was concerned with. But to get there, one must work on oneself. One must examine how one is now in relation to an ideal, or to an insight into where one wishes to go, or who one must become.
Foucault’s emphasis, in any case, lies on the practices that produce clarity in us — where those ideals, the person one wishes to be, can become visible at all. An important part of those practices — and all the ancient thinkers say something similar — is to keep a kind of diary: to log one’s life. At the end of the day one should go through what happened and ask: “What went well?” and “What went less well?” By writing and thinking in this way, a comparative quality emerges in the answers: one discovers what works rather than what did not, and in that way one finds oneself on the track of the work required in order to cultivate more of the good.
When I look at Otzko’s works, I think of such practices of care of the self, because they show situations that — one might assume — bear witness to the results of such work: how she is humbly in dialogue with nature; how she inhabits a room with an assured lightness that suspends possessiveness; how she dismantles religious motifs by bringing forward the radical care at their core — the core of life, of resonance, of address and response.
Perhaps one could say that tenderness and care circulate through Otzko’s practice, and that she shows us how there is no opposition between thought and feeling — indeed that they are part of the same cycle. If we are not moved by something, we will not think it through. It is when something speaks to us that it becomes thinkable, that it hooks into desire and will — like the salt stones stacked in Trust.
In Together Elsewhere — a performance by Ina Otzko — also known through a photograph — the artist leans against a wooden stick in a vast natural landscape. The stick is placed at the region of the throat, and with slightly more pressure it would be harmful to stand like that. Perhaps one could say that in doing this anyway, Otzko locates the balance between being present in the moment, in the landscape, with her own perspective, and the landscape’s own reality. The moment of insight lies, one might say, not in thinking one’s way to what this landscape is — drawing a map of it — but in entering into dialogue with the surroundings as a vulnerable being oneself.
Knowledge of the place, Otzko tells us, does not lie in rising above geography or standing safely outside it with theories and instruments, but in entering the region one wishes to know as part of it — and, in that presence, exposing oneself. Not only through an uncovered throat, or a fragile, sensitive skin, but as a vulnerability that is called forth in the trust she shows nature — through the wooden stick — by leaning into it, towards it.
What is articulated here is reciprocity, not domination. Thus, through the critical moment as turning point, both nature and human beings are articulated as vulnerable bodies. It is in this double truth that what we see takes form — not as something we can see in itself, as something “in” the image, but as something we can gain insight into by thinking over what we see, by taking seriously the friction between exposed and vulnerable bodies.
In another series of photographs — Mnemosyne — we also see a woman in dialogue with nature. Here there is no explicit declaration of trust, but rather a kind of dance with the elements. In her airy dress she creates movement both within and beyond her body, before finally surrendering to matter: sinking into earth and water. One does not have to stand still to work with natural forces. There is always a struggle to be oneself, to be someone — but sooner or later we become no one. Earth, air, water. In this way we are part of the history of phenomena.
Perhaps one could call this a material cycle of remembrance, in which the active human body — our body — becomes the hub for a while. For as the series’ name more than suggests — Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory in ancient Greece — what takes place is something like nature’s own work of memory: individuals who dance, love, laugh and cry before entering the great story that remembers itself through the shape of mountains, the curves of earthworks, and rivers’ slow erosion of the small stones along their banks. We are part of life environments that point forward and backward, that themselves remember and dream.