In the imprecise eye of the wind

IN THE IMPRECISE EYE OF THE WIND

/SINOPSYS

IN THE IMPRECISE EYE OF THE WIND is a work by Susana Paiva (image) and Diogo Martins (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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Susana is not interested in images that show her a mere imitation of reality: if what appears on the film is what she can see with the naked eye, she will make sure to deface what’s visible, to turn day into night, in pursuit of other layers that will disorientate both her and the image itself. […] There is a desire to cover up what can be seen in the image and instead invite the viewer to imagine, thus establishing new and secret connections between things (what Baudelaire called the divine faculty of imagination). This is where Susana Paiva’s images enter into dialogue with the becoming-revolutionary of the “non-time of he who sleeps”, according to Jonathan Crary: that courageous leap into the abyss that is our denial of tomorrow, “an interval into which may come, close to the edge of consciousness, flashes of a life not lived, of a life postponed”. Signals from a world that continues even as we sleep. Brief indications of a coming freedom, of auspicious primary intentions, of an open-ended politics of the possible. That is, of the imagination as politics, as poetry, as a way of life. The unforeseen embedded in the stuff of the seen.

[…] These images represent the fork in the road where language has to choose to either speak, fallibly, the world, or to speak its own fallibility, the speech which is error – the blindness of language, as Derrida put it –, the world which is never quite itself, for lack of words with which it can be named, delimited, de-imagined.

[Essay All is peace in the imprecise eye of the wind by Diogo Martins, excerpt]