Eva Beazar

A Request For The Unattainable is a photographic series created for the magazine Coconuts, exploring the theme of ‘Paradox Of Madness’. In collaboration with the ‘To Mad to Be True’ congress at the Gisslian Museum, Ghent.”

There is a constant yearning to explore what we think we know. A reflection on the nature of madness: a boundary that is no boundary, an echo that keeps resonating in the depths of our thoughts. Madness is an imagination that can never be fully understood, a whisper that refuses to be caught. It feels, it moves, it lives—elusive, irrational, and yet so familiar.

Madness challenges us. It breaks the apparent logic of the everyday and forces us to look beyond the known. It is a mirror, merciless and true, offering us a glimpse of our own incomprehensible self. It reveals what remains hidden in the light of reason: a reality that always seems just out of reach.

The boundary between fiction and reality is fragile, brittle, a shadow. We want to grasp it, to understand it, to explain it. But it is precisely this urge—this hunger for control—that is the paradox of madness. To experience it, we must accept not knowing. As soon as we try to name it, it vanishes; the chaos becomes recognizable, and with that, it is lost. Yet, we must recognize it to understand it. Logic clashes with the absurd, the rational with the raw.

Madness is the unnameable. It slips through language, refusing to be caught in the nets of words. We may try to give it a name, but what we grasp are only fragments. What remains is a reflection, an echo that conceals its origin. Yet, there are other paths. Sound and image offer an entry, albeit a broken one. Through atmospheres, we can touch something, experience a fragment, catch a glimpse. But fully understanding it? That, no. The essence always remains out of reach, a shadow at the periphery of our consciousness.

In my project White Noise of a Room, I tried to make the invisible audible and the intangible visible. The ambient sounds of a conference—voices, footsteps, the rustle of movements—were transformed into images. These streams of images gave shape to what was once only noise: a chaotic, invisible presence that now unfolded in fragments and patterns. The process was a transformation. What first sounded like disorder was converted into a visual flow, a dance of elements. But even these images could only evoke an atmosphere. What we truly experience remains fragmentary, never complete. Just as the noise of the conference overwhelmed us without us being able to capture every detail, the essence of madness remains, always partly concealed.

Perhaps that is its strength. The elusive reminds us that not everything in the world can be captured. Sometimes, experiencing is enough. Sometimes, the edges of understanding are richer than the center. Madness is not a concept, but a presence—felt, heard, seen in the corners of our experience. A whisper you cannot catch, but that continues to resonate within you, like white noise in a silent room.

Media:

Photographic images, moviestil, collage. Size A4, printed on 10 pages.

Publication:

magazine Coconuts, 2025