From The Ground Up, 2020
Light box, inkjet print on paper, sound 12'39''
175 x 132 cm
The image presented in From The Ground Up results from the direct intervention on a film negative and is installed in a light box with sound. The surface of this negative was completely scratched. This work is the culmination of the research that guides the series Renascimento por transformação (Reborn through transformation, 2018-20), where what matters most is not the original referents, but the subjective potential that can emerge from the new image that results from a gesture of loss. As Bruno Marchand wrote about these last works, they «rise to the paradoxical condition of inscriptions of erasure». If in one hand they haste «time’s tragic violence», in the other they work like a «biographeme (…) where their greatest virtue arises from the fact that they bring that forced erosion to a halt at the precise moment in which it becomes productive.» (Marchand, 2018) The sound that echoes in From The Ground Up, with 12’39’’, plays an inverted requiem. At the end of this sound you can hear the phrase “This is eternity”. What are the redemptive possibilities of the image when it proposes itself in the subtle gap that resists between an almost end and an almost beginning?
* Views from the solo exhibition From The Ground Up | November 14 to December 30, 2020 | CCA - Centro de Artes de Águeda, Portugal