Single Frame Journal #6

Mimeparis - Breathe.mp4

Mimeparis is a France-based artist creating collages and video-collages using hand-cut paper, HD scans from old second-hand books, and curated online visuals. Their work blends analog texture with digital layering, forming a personal archive of reconstructed figural art and poetic distortions.

I love works with open endings — the kind that give us room to find ourselves in them, to choose. Pinhead, perforated, fatigued, chemically and technologically aided. At some point, we were breathing like lunatics, taking it all for granted. What a strange way to exist. Now even gold leaf, melted aristocratically in the heat of hyperventilation, doesn’t satisfy me anymore — I need blue ink, like that pop-star, royalty-coded blood.

The soul asks for ink so it can rewrite what it still hasn’t made peace with; another crutch walking ahead of the wheelchair perfectly matched to the avatar. But beneath the performance, just remember: it’s still flesh and bone. And I have writing to do, dear friends. I’ve traveled so far with that fake expired passport.

I’ve seen myself reflected in the melting glaciers and in the "mirrors" of dead corals; soft silk sheets have been sweated through, ol' new selfies have been made — but my iPhone’s screen just cracked, and now I have to wait until I’m home again to see myself whole.

If you’ve tailored it, wear it. This suit that could have been a second skin — full of meaning, pathos, and affect — is in fact stitched from small gratuitous things and fabricated memories. Just as appetite comes while eating, reconciliation comes while loving. And forgiving.

What an ill-curated past — one that now craves the truthful tone of unpolished instinct, after the spring equinox, after the end of this late-post-deconstructivist winter with its faint nuclear smell.

After all this — the gentleness behind the paradox of belonging to myself while also letting go of myself.

Maybe this calms that need for an external enemy.

Maybe I can stop searching for the evil in you.

Maybe I can finally put down this heavy lead Allan-Poe-style mask, so I can feed the hope that gold and blue will turn into orange, then maybe, red again.

Breathe — a mouthful of fresh, tube-fed oxygen; a reflection on the uncontrolled hyper-digitalization of the self; a journal page that’s perhaps a bit too personal.

Mimeparis, thank you — selfishly.