Lacuna, 2008
Custom ActionScript software, 6 video channels, table + 2 chairs, suspended screen, projector, headphones, computer mouse and plastic sculpture
Dimensions variable
“[…] the act by which life goes forward to the creation of a new form, and the act by which this form is shaped, are two different and often antagonistic movements. The first is continuous with the second, but cannot continue in it without being drawn aside from its direction, as would happen to a man leaping, if, in order to clear the obstacle, he had to turn his eyes from it and look at himself all the while.”
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1911.
Starting with a series of experiments in print and stop-frame animation, my research interests developed through a concept I described in my undergraduate dissertation as ‘Organicity’: an ‘inter-body’ responsible for materializing the encounter of two subjects. As a main tool in all my recent experiments, this inter-body hosts key strategies to express my concerns regarding the geographical place of identity, the evolution of Man, as well as the bridges between the brain and thought and how we can represent these connections visually.
The overcoming of biological conditions makes the human responsible for his own evolution, detaching himself from the rest of nature in the most peculiar way. Lacuna questions this redefining relationship as it requires a divorce from psychological attachments to our body image, which originates at the ‘mirror stage’ according to Lacan. In the project I use a reflective screen / mirror to act as a rupture in space in which a narrative on creation and destruction unfolds, in the same way that Duchamp uses the Infra-Thin concept on space in The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Regarding the narrative, my original ideas came from a storyboard for a short film I wrote 6 years before also called Lacuna. I considered it to be my first attempt in sketching out an autobiography. My original plan for this current Lacuna was to focus on a mixture of this original storyboard and the myth of the Portuguese King Sebastian who mysteriously disappeared in the battle of Ksar el Kebir.
In collaboration with Isabelle Carvalho.
