It’s enough that a bird takes flight

/SINOPSYS

IT’S ENOUGH THAT A BIRD TAKES FLIGHT is a work by Rui Dias Monteiro (photography) and Vítor Ferreira (text). It was developed in the context of the multidisciplinary project “Trace, Margin, Flash”, involving a collective of artists and essayists from the fields of the performing arts, visual arts and academic writing. The collective takes a bold and heuristically interdisciplinary approach to engage with the work of the author Rui Nunes (b. 1945), in all of its heterogeneities, focal points and preoccupations.

— look at how everything moves. It’s enough that a bird takes flight for the world to be put in motion. These are the very simple things that I see. The only things I can think.

Rui Nunes, Portrait Album

Montemor-o-Novo, 2020. Trace, margin, flash. For the world to be put in motion: I recite, at last, the missing part of the prayer. This photograph also belongs to me. I told you that you would find it. There were pictures waiting for you on that path that we took, separately and together, on different days, at different speeds, with different weather conditions. At last, I pay you what I owe: a Cristal beer and a bottle of water, in a café in Paião.

The title of this book, suggested by Rui Dias Monteiro, takes a phrase from the excerpt transcribed above, yet leaves it unfinished. Instead, it asks whoever looks at these photographs to take part in an imaginative exercise. The exercise of looking should be, above all, one of doubt. It’s enough that a bird takes flight: for what? It falls to each one of us to look, that is, to create our own fiction.

(The light is different here. It cuts out the thorns with its warmth.)

After the photograph. The two birds have already taken flight. The sun has almost gone down. We finish, therefore, with the final fragment of Portrait Album, with these last words that are so exact in their haltingness:

nobody knows any more how this interminable speech got started, people kept emerging from it only to extinguish themselves in it again, some then re-emerged to pick up where they had left off or to prolong the unknowing

the world is a varied forest: says the narrator. He senses how close he is to the end of his own adventure, and fears the opacity of a house that’s been fully built.

(here is my departure)

Ecce homo.

[Essay by Vítor Ferreira, excerpt]