Terceira Pessoa

MOUTH

/SINOPSYS

MOUTH is a work by Valter Vinagre (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.

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Running through the photographic images taken by Valter Vinagre we find a certain sense of death, which is, above all, the death of visibility itself. They take as their starting point the writings of Rui Nunes, without being strictly illustrations. Like the writings, they emerge from an ‘imperfect’ perception of the world. We are prevented from seeing fully or clearly, stopping us from any attempt at speculation, or consumption of a reality that remains unrepresented, unrepresentable. In black and white, these photos are dramatic, almost baroque in their violent contrasts of light and darkness. Now slightly out of focus or invaded by reflections, stains and areas of shadow; now so close up that they flatten out into the abstract. An anonymous and dull humanity, some animals, traces of hostile or funereal vegetation: these are the only signs of life in these ruined, spectral landscapes. Natural settings (if not ‘denatured’ settings; cf. Pinharanda, 2013) and provincial scenes become desolate and fragile Arcadias. Dilapidated urban blocks and the world of suburbia, faintly sordid. This is a kind of backstage reality, a harsh wasteland of ruins and rubble, pieces of a whole that has been lost and, it seems, can never be rebuilt. One might say that these images are destined to corrupt the signifying nature of photography itself, to obstruct the often predatory quality of the machine-like eye and its hallucinatory capacity to ‘see more’, to see all.

[Essay by Eunice Ribeiro, excerpt]