Seffrin Stefan

 

Stefan Seffrin | Arte Laguna PrizeStefan Seffrin
Bad Dürkheim, Germany 1964


Der Psychonaut

Art selection: Photography

Dimensions: 120 x 80 cm

Year: 2021

Technique: Digital photography

More info >

Description

The Psychonaut “Home” – neurobiologically solidified in the brain of every person who enters and walks in this world. The longer someone stays in a place, which holds emotionally positively occupied experiences for him/her, the stronger engrams (gr.: gramma – inscription) a physiological trace in the mind. The totality of all engrams, there are billions and billions, we call memory. „Home is where I am well“ (Patria est, ubicumque est bene) noted Cicero intuitively correct millennia before all nuclear spin and magnetic resonance tomographies. The Psychonaut is also concerned with what is actually going on in the conscious and subconscious mind, i.e. with the exploration of one‘s own inner home. Ernst Jünger gave it lasting form in a book about drugs, intoxication and meditation entitled Annäherungen. The Psychonaut‘s spiritual quest takes him into both the inner and outer spaces of the world. Always in search of a place that his psyche can emotionally affirm and make its home. Stefan Seffrin‘s Psychonaut knows through long and lasting engramming: such places are not easy to find. A long and arduous journey awaits the seeker. Seffrin‘s Psychonaut wanders the confessionals, hunter‘s seats, volcanic peaks and winter landscapes of the outer world in search of soulmates who also carry the longing and urgency of his journey in their inner world. Often it is outdrops, fringe members of society, whom the Psychonaut encounters. This is no accident. The psyche, as the term “Psychonaut” points out to us, is connected to nautics, the science of running a ship. Psyche places, through all storms, sitting in the lookout, the highest point, its gaze towards Utopia. There is not eternal time for the search, hardly anyone feels this more deeply than the Psychonaut. The brain ages with us. When the engrams begin to dissolve, the feeling of home also gradually disappears. The places where we had a good time fade away. This is one more reason for the Psychonaut to wander incessantly, always carrying the feelings of home with him as food for the journey. A ZEN master from 7th century Japan would probably have accompanied Stefan Seffrins Psychonaut inwardly approvingly a few miles along the way. The ZEN master wrote: „In the sea of living, in the sea of dying, tired in both, my soul seeks the mountain where all the tide ebbs“.

Share