Collaborations

Alien Mirrors

With Irina Vladi

Creatrix Magazine

Photography: Irina Vladi

A critical essay on the photography of Irina Vladi — her mirror self-portraits read through Butler, Bergson, Derrida, Blanchot, Deleuze, and Sartre. The mirror as threshold: between self and other, the actual and the virtual, the gaze that looks inward and outward simultaneously.

Vladi describes herself as a “time traveller” and “alien in disguise” — her self-portraits with mirrors lock the viewer into a Medusa-like gaze, the eyes two-way mirrors looking inward and outward at once. The dream dissipates into consciousness and memory; the optic unconscious closes its eye to always blind us to the possibilities it once presented.

In Bergsonian terms, every moment of life presents two aspects simultaneously — actual and virtual, perception and recollection. Vladi’s photographs hold both in suspension: she is actor, producer, and director of her own fantastic creations.

“The surface of the mirror is the wall of hallucination.”