In The Wind
An experiment in unfiltered expression and digital play.
In The Wind
If you’ve been alongside me over the past 2.5 years, you’ll know I’ve shape-shifted more than once as an entrepreneur and content creator- moving through chapters of vintage curation, personal styling, branding, and identity work. Each pivot wasn’t a departure but a deeper excavation, an instinctual descent into the passion that’s always lived beneath the surface, driven by the desire to uncover the work I’m truly meant to do.
Now, I find myself at another turning point.
In the Wind is an eight-part social media video installation, my first exploration in this form. It is raw, experimental, and deeply personal.
This body of work marks a return to myself, not as a strategist or curator or stylist, but as an artist and expressionist. Through this medium of short form video, I’m learning to listen more closely to the textures of my inner world and give form to the vivid imaginings that live in my mind.
To create- not for validation, virality, or to build a book of clients- but to feel something real and offer authentic expressions from the heart. To be honest. To be seen mid-process- messy, tender, and unsure as I navigate uncharted territory in this new role as a digital performance artist.
I crave the freedom to express publicly, imperfectly, and often. To let my ideas breathe before they even harden into certainty. To allow myself to change and unfold at the rapid pace that feels so natural to me.
In the Wind is physical evidence of permission granted to let myself to throw spaghetti at the wall, again, to see what might stick.
It began as a sensory reaction to “Ze e Parana,” a song whose essence brought me immediate somatic release. Its sound is ephemeral, swirling, ever-shifting, and utterly familiar. I tend to interpret my own energy body in much the same way, and I decided to follow that feeling into form.
This work explores energy in motion- how, as it transforms, it reshapes awareness. It’s a study of the interplay between inner and outer worlds, and how their dialogue reveals the fluidity of identity, expression, and perception. Each fragment becomes a lens for presence in flux- never-fixed, always becoming.
The opening video presents a quiet ritual, smoking weed on my stoop. It is a deliberate pause, a conscious act of surrendering the outside world’s demands to access a meditative state. This moment becomes an initiation into presence, inviting a deep inward gaze and an unguarded exploration of the imagination.
The flickering lights represent synesthetic perception. Thoughts becoming color, emotion becoming shape. And from there, we slip into the void of mind.
“Sorry for Party Rocking” might seem like a jarring contrast to the soft, reflective nature of the first video, but that tension is entirely intentional moving into part two.
This song underscores the first dance sequence, a thermalized hallucination of my inner world grappling with the absurdity of my own chaotic digital presence. It is at once satire and sincerity, a collision of humor and vulnerability.
I dance in a distorted, kaleidoscopic space where freedom and confusion coexist in harmony. There’s an intoxicating thrill in expressing without boundaries, a reckless joy in relinquishing control. Yet that very freedom can feel like a complete free-fall, destabilizing to both the nervous system and the architecture of previously held truths.
After the initial collapse into inner sensation, In The Wind turns outward.
I take a walk.
But it’s not just a walk. It’s a shift in dimension. I’m still high, still buzzing with internal electricity, and as I step further out, the world reverberates louder and louder.
There’s a surreal softness to everything. I blur. My aura flickers. The veil between perception and physicality has thinned, and I’m not walking through the world so much as flowing with it.
I exist both within and as the liminal state itself. Everything is slightly out of focus, but full of meaning. It’s not about what’s “real” anymore. It’s about what’s felt. Thermal pulsations reveal the unseen energetic fields inherent in all that exists.
And then I see Mr. Lion.
A cement sculpture embedded in the side of a limestone cliff. A stoic, urban relic I pass regularly, but today, under the influence of slowed perception and expanded awareness, he radiates. Lit from within.
Not just a fixture, but a figure. The frame zooms in. He beams with aliveness. He’s awake.
Mr. Lion becomes a symbol in this series. A reminder that even non-living objects hold charge. Everything we overlook: walls, statues, lampposts, sidewalks, participate in and observe the moment, each through their own limited form of consciousness.
When we’re high, or deeply present, or slightly dissociated, we start to understand. We start to feel what we usually rush past.
This moment nods to the sacredness of overlooked things. An acknowledgment that there’s no such thing as “dead space.” The world doesn’t split neatly between the alive and the inanimate.
This awareness inspires a pause.
Part four is built on a loop, not from lack of footage, but as an exploration of what repetition could reveal. It’s the same few clips played over and over again, internalized by different shifts of visual treatment.
Each pass feels brand new, not because the action changes, but because light & pattern reframe the same gestures into different meanings. Interpretation and perspective are the sculptors of our distinct realities; a single action can embody infinite significance.
This scene is particularly resonant for me. To repeat is to rehearse identity, to allow something to sink deeper through exposure. These repetitions are not for the viewer’s benefit, but for mine.
I'm re-encoding the image of myself, not as one fixed self, but as a waveform collapsing and reforming, expressing differently each time.
The choreography here alternates between two poles: snapping (dance, release, motion) and posing (pause, assertion, rest).
This is the meeting point of duality and oneness. Movement and stillness, surrender and will; they aren’t opposites but different expressions of the same energy unfolding through unique tempos.
Creation lives within movement, pause, and the space where these states merge and transform into each other.
Then I fall back in.
A return to the void, but this time it feels less psychedelic and more psychological. A drained landscape. If the first dance in the abyss embodied the playful inner child, this one summons the abandoned child. Lonelier, more cautious, still curious.
“What am I doing here?”.
“Am I free, or just unmoored?”.
My body keeps moving, but not in celebration. It wanders, tentative, observant, unsure of what it’s searching for.
This is the self suspended in limbo, caught between expression and doubt, between play and the part of you that watches and judges the play. It’s the terrain of shadow work, slow and disorienting. A soft descent into unclarity.
As I revisit this in-between state, I start to question what drives my need to create at all.
Is it purely an act of self-exploration? A yearning to be seen, to be understood? Or perhaps a way to measure my existence through the reflection of others’ responses to my most vulnerable self. There’s an undeniable longing to grasp who I am, not only through how I identify and what I create, but through how it is received.
Why?
Limbo offers no clear answers. It’s not charged with meaning. It simply is. Blank, expansive, unformed. The void doesn’t define, what we bring into it does.
As I continue my contemplation the high wears off and so does the spectacle. There’s only one place to go, back to earth.
My walk continues in part six, but unlike the earlier stylized stroll through thermal layers and animated textures, this one is bare. There are no visual effects. No digital manipulation. Just me and the whistle of “Ze e Parana”.
It’s that whistle, haunting, delicate, almost avian, that shifts our perspective yet again.
The sound floats through the scene like a spirit guide. I search for her presence. Does she dwell in the sky? The trees? The sun itself?
After all the performance, after all the editing and meaning-making and looping, the ease of this moment feels radical. It's not performative. It’s not “content.” It’s just presence.
This walk isn’t about being seen. It’s about seeing.
Noticing how sunlight fractures through the branches. How my body softens when I’m no longer shaping it for a lens.
And how, paradoxically, I feel possibly more understood here. Outside of my mind, outside of the questioning. Simply in the body, in appreciation of the greater whole I belong to.
Eventually the spiral leads me home, back to where it began. But everything is different now.
Not because of what’s changed physically, but because of what’s been metabolized. Emotion, memory, movement. The stoop is no longer just a backdrop for a high. It’s a resting place. A nest.
I sit, motionless, for nearly a minute. Perhaps the rigid stillness is performative in its own right. Yet, there is no persona. No projection.
The visuals are still unedited, save for a single, passing thermal glitch, a reminder that life force is still present, even and especially when the body-mind is quiet.
I’m not reaching for understanding. Not chasing sensation. I’m simply basking. Letting it settle. Letting it be.
The final scene returns to the first, but this time it plays in reverse.
The smoke doesn’t leave my lips. It returns to me. It’s not an exhale, but an inhalation of everything I’ve experienced. The movement backward becomes a metaphor for integration.
And layered beneath this reversal, applause.
The audience claps not to celebrate mastery, but surrender. Not to validate the performance, but to acknowledge what was witnessed. Myself. The unseen. Energy and emotion through so many expressions: joyous, absurd, chaotic, ominous, still.
The inhale completes the loop. I am not the same person I was at the start. But I’m not another either. I’m just more here, present to the fullness of what has always lived beneath.
The Creative Process
I began this installation as a total experiment.
There was a loose concept, something about illustrating myself floating through the wind, inspired by a song that made me feel untethered. But there was no script. No storyboard. No fixed outcome.
I dressed intuitively the morning of, drawn to fabrics that could translate the sensation of moving through air in varying densities. An organza skirt and a silk pashmina seemed to fit the cause.
I shot for about an hour, camera rolling, body moving, thoughts drifting. I didn’t know where it was going, and I didn’t want to. That was part of the point.
My sole commitment was this: to create something new each day for one week from the raw footage, allowing the mood, instincts, and curiosities of that given moment to guide the edit. Few clips, infinite possibilities. Fleeting moments, endlessly refracted meanings.
The narrative you’ve just read was only understood after the work had moved through & been published. It revealed itself in hindsight, not foresight.
This process was by no means graceful.
I got hasty and over-excited. I broke my own boundaries. I over-edited on days I knew and felt rest would’ve been wiser. Skipped meals. Skipped other responsibilities. Got caught in the thrill of it.
That’s my pattern when I feel lit up by something, I want to taste the whole process at once. Idea, execution, and satisfaction in a single breath. A creative orgasm, start to finish.
But that’s not how flow works. Flow asks for space. For rest. For listening. And there were moments I didn’t listen.
Doubt crept in, especially after I opened the project up for public interpretation without explanation. When the posts “underperformed”, low likes, comments, shares- suddenly the work felt flimsy. Like maybe I got it wrong. Even though I reminded myself repeatedly that this was never about validation, but simply the joy of creating and sharing, the uncertainty lingered.
I considered deleting pieces I no longer “liked”. I questioned my intention. My taste. Myself.
And yet this, too, is the art. Not just the final work, but the full terrain of making: the overdoing, the missteps, the ego flare-ups, the intuitive sparks followed by intuitive betrayals.
It was a social experiment, too. Again, I posted all eight parts without explanation. No captions. No context.
The point was to let myself live and express. To release something not meant to be immediately digestible, even to myself, simply because I felt like it.
This was an impulsive, exploratory creation. Some days I honored myself and others I didn’t. And still, I kept playing because I just love creating so much.
Sometimes play isn’t light and carefree. Sometimes it’s messy. Unstructured. A tug-of-war between the spirit and the ego. A full uncovering of self in all our flaws and all our glory.
So, this is the explanation. But really, it was never meant to be explained.
Just felt.
I had fun! More to come. I would love to hear your thoughts below.
Thank you for reading & watching.
X,
Bari
Truly creative 🙌