Sofie Van Loo, extract [exh.cat.] Gorge(l). Beklemming en verademing in kunst/ Oppression and Relief in Art,  ed. Sofie Van Loo, with introduction of Paul Vandenbroeck and text of Bracha L. Ettinger, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, 2006, p. 57-59.

Whose phantom is it? Whose crypt is it?
In process of co/in-habit(u)ating, the artist brings into being the art I call “transcryptum” ... the lifting of the world’s hidden memory from its outside with-in-side.
Bracha L. Ettinger

            With her audiovisual (performance) installation SOFah!, Alda Snopek (b. 1971) subtly evokes an analogue suggestion of falling, rising and hovering in-between. The visitor climbs a staircase to reach a dark platform with a hole in its centre through which the floor beneath is visible. Down there we vaguely perceive the outline of a body lying stretched out, lightened by the beam of a projector. Slowly a scanner moves over the body, covering it with a new, virtual skin. The scanner does not pierce the body, does not look inside, but simply covers it. The (real) body is illuminated by this projected video image. Alda Snopek filmed her own body, processed, manipulated and edited the images and during the performance she projected the “film” on her own body. Using the “old” media of video and performance, Snopek creates an art that has features which were thought to belong exclusively to the new, experimental media. The work reminds us of former techniques that evoked three-dimensional images. Holograms e.g. are the precursors of the 3D animations that are now common in the new media.
            But the outlines of the bodies do not entirely coincide: they vibrate over and around each other. A second image—a second echo—is projected over the first video layer. The three bodies—one and the same person—wrap themselves around each other. It is obvious they need to be separated. They become two individual entities, yet they do not loosen their hold. Like the joker in the pack, the bodies seem to slide into each other. The bodies feel each others' arms, slide over each other, engage in a legless dance. The “upper” body opens the abdomen of the body “underneath”, nestles inside it and vanishes. It is as if the body becomes pregnant of another self through a caesarean section—a reference to the artist's previous performance-installation Vers (2004) and David Cronenberg's film Videodrome, in which the
            Hands touch, grope, grasp (objects), withdraw, gesture, hurt, destroy, comfort, heal, busy hands create. Hands engaged in (manual) labour or occupied with some action, suggest a state of concentration. The hand can betray how human beings are absorbed in their actions, but hands are also capable of reflection without resorting to our traditional rational way of thinking. As Julia Kristeva put it: Nulle distance entre la pensée et la main: leur unité instantanée saisit et retrace, dans les corps visibles, l'intériorité la plus concentrée.
            Taking something in the hand also marks the “now”. In a conversation with Bracha L. Ettinger, Emmanuel Levinas said: En Français nous avons cette expression merveilleuse: maintenant-le présent. Main-tenant. Le présent, c’est ce qui correspond à la main—c’est ce qu’on peut travailler, prendre, com-prendre, com-prendre. “Howé” (en hébreu: présent) c’est la main-tenant: ma shenichnas layad (en hébreu: ce qui entre dans la main). Dans la structure de l’intentionnalité, connaître ou voir, comme prendre à la main, ramènent le passé et l’avenir au présent, l’Autre au même. Ceci est différent de l’idée du passé comme dû à la relation avec Autrui. C’est ce que je vous ai dit tout à l’heure: devant le visage de l’Autre? Je suis déjà obligé; avant de l’avoir vu, et même si son visage est caché.
            In this context Bracha L. Ettinger refers to the link between the line, “the brain of the hand” and creative freedom: The line is also “a means of transport”. A superimposition that flattens, consciousness in expansion. Brain of the hand. And all that which does not come through the eyes, still perceived, from the interior or the exterior... Touch in another way-wisdom on the hand’s brain that lives in the space of painting. The hand is another thought. Hearing or not hearing thought which the hand meets. The freedom of the hand and the thought of the hand; the freedom of the line and the grains; the thought of the lines and the grains. The hand-line is a thought of painting. The hand-grain too.
            In the art discourse it is fashionable to point out how the “new” media (photography, film, computer, etc.) have influenced the art of painting, but has painting itself has influenced the new media art? That is particularly true with regard to the construction and deconstruction of layers.
            The scanner in Alda Snopek's installations removes the layers of skin that were still left and reveals a complex tangle of nerves and the bones inside the hand. A second scanner then disentangles this complex jumble and transforms it into an intricate maze of shapes. The body turns into a landscape. Snopek shows us the layeredness inside our body through an organic web that highlights ever more complex structures and patterns. An image of the “subtle body” featuring the spiritual energy lines and patterns instead of the nerve paths and arteries is common in Eastern cultures (fig. 6a-b). Snopek confronts us with the spiritual dimensions of the inner body. The spiritual body turns into a landscape, a web that lends meaning and sense.