How does an image emerge? What are the conditions for this? How can an image function outside the system of narration?

The term vigilambulist means a sleepwalker in the waking state. It was firstly used by psychiatrist Paul Sollier in his studies of hysteria. The clinical picture of hysteria, as it was formed in the 19th century, describes its physical manifestations: contractures and paralysis, hyperesthesia and anesthesia, the phenomena of hurry or, conversely, delay, autoscopy – the appearance of an illusion of looking at oneself as if from the outside. Autoscopy often becomes the motive for the developing of an artistic image – for Goethe, Maupassant, Dostoevsky.

Vigilambulism is a condition of unconsciousness regarding one’s surroundings, with automatism, resembling somnambulism but occurring in the waking state (Medical Dictionary for the Health Professions and Nursing). The philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his writing on the painting of Francis Bacon uses this type of wakefulness to conceptualize two methods of working with an image that differs from the classical method of narration. He writes about the function of the surreal dream, contraposing it with the specific vigilance – not a dream, but the blackness and insomnia, so the dreams themselves bounce off it, falling apart. If surrealism works with an image through fantasy and imagination, an arbitrariness of dreaming, the second method appeals to the hysterical reality of the body – the state of the impossibility, anemia, stupor, found in the vigilance, in the heart of everyday life.

The everyday life is wounded by the rupture between human and world. And the unbearable is not a catastrophe or a thrilling effect, but a permanent state of a daily routine. The experience of this rupture is becoming the specific “clairvoyance” – the vulnerability by something unbearable in this world.