Serra Bilgincan
1+1=1
2025
stainless steel, birch plywood, silicone rubber sheet, pigmented water, plastic hose, water pump
210x44x53 cm
“You’ve been looking in the wrong direction ,” they said.
“You seek belonging outside of yourself. You seek it in finding, not in drifting. In arriving, not in becoming. Can you envision belonging without separation? Do not confine your selfness. Expand your selfness."
How? they asked.
“You must return to the beginning. To the waters of the womb. To the moment you first dropped into the womb as a single cell. To the journey you took aboard Noah’s Ark. To the first prokaryotic cell in the water, that primordial mitochondrial miracle, to the primal waters, the cosmic ocean."
How can I remember? they asked.
"You must watch a dried apricot pit and see in its grooves the echo of your own cells. You must imagine the cord cut from your navel tied to the root of a tree. You must wet yourself with spoiled milk, train your decaying body for death. Only then will you remember that you are not a separate being. You’ll watch dust drift where sunlight hits, and wonder how many worlds viruses must have seen as they traveled from organism to organism. You’ll imagine the ancestor of every cell, draw shapeless forms in your mind. And then—whether you want to or not—you will see the world as a single cell. You will no longer be able to separate inside from outside.”
ahoy! 1
2025
uv print on glass
22x30cm
ahoy! 2
2025
uv print on glass
22x30cm
"...Silence. Darkness. The unknown. This is such moment that concentrates all its energy and erupts with a deafening force, scattering into stardust. In a weightless void, where even warmth falls outside of definition, millions of scorched dust particles try to extinguish their flames after the explosion. It burns so intensely that cooling takes billions of years. In one of them—or in countless unknowns—a single cell moves quietly within cooling water, unseen by any eye. It has no witness, yet its knowledge is certain and ancient. This first motion expands like an explosion born from the pressure of its own nothingness. Water nourishes it; it, in turn, draws life from water. What a magnificent sea! Cells, fluids, a universe expanding through communication. It divides, multiplies, reproduces. It becomes itself by separating from its counterpart. It resembles its ancestor but is not the same; it comes from it but does not belong to it. It belongs to water. As the water moves, the cell grows—or as the cell grows, the water ripples. Our first connection with the world begins here: in the body. In a scene from the movie Red Desert (1964), child asks his mother: “Mom, what’s one plus one?” The mother says, “Two.” The child drops two droplets of water on a microscope slide. They merge; no longer two, but one. The mother is mistaken. “Our genomes are catalogs of instructions, filed to cope with every unexpected scenario from all sources in nature.” Water is the most primordial cradle of this knowledge. The first state of existence in the womb, the life vibrating within a single cell, the evolutionary motion that began in the primordial oceans, or a shared origin formed by cosmic energy. 1+1=1 doesn’t question the singularity of origin, but rather brings us closer to the idea that things exist through interaction, fusion, and communication. Movement is the sign of energies, of birth, of encounters between molecules and cells. The questioning of belonging resonates not only in the luminous waters of the past but also in the dark waters of the present—and in the perception of the body..."
T. Melis Golar