Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Khôra first emerged as a philosophical idea in the writings of Plato and was used to describe a space or interval that was ‘outside’ normal experience. He described it as a kind of ‘non-being’ or ‘formless interval’, a space that existed in between realms that were logical and knowable. I use the idea of Khôra as a way to investigate emergent images of the unconscious as they emerge in conversations with experienced psychotherapists and psychoanalysts in an arts-based research project. This research explores Khôra as a generative way to think about the interactions of the unconscious and digital spaces which have resulted from a year of tele-therapy, creating new places of in-between, ones that can never be definitively posited, but that can be explored through refraction, projection, condensation, and displacement.