Basta que um pássaro voe | Rastro, Margem, Clarão
Enough that a bird should fly | Trace, Margin, Flash
2020
Publishing
BASTA QUE UM PÁSSARO VOE is a work by Rui Dias Monteiro (photography) and Vítor Ferreira (text), developed as part of the multidisciplinary project Rastro, Margem, Clarão, in which a collective of performing artists, visual artists and essayists set out to think through the writing of Rui Nunes (b. 1947) in all its heterogeneity, its thematic knots and its disquiet, taking a bold and heuristically transdisciplinary approach.
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— see how everything moves. It is enough that a bird should fly for the world to be set in motion. These are the very simple things I see. The only ones I can think.
Rui Nunes, Álbum de Retratos
Montemor-o-Novo, 2020. Rastro, Margem, Clarão. For the world to be set in motion: I pray, at last, the prayer that was missing. This photograph is mine too. I told you you would find it. There were images waiting for you along that road, which, alone and together, we travelled on different days, at different speeds, in different weather conditions. I pay, at last, what I owe you: a Cristal beer, a bottle of water, in a café in Paião.
The title of this book, suggested by RDM, appropriates the excerpt transcribed above but does not complete it. Instead, it demands of whoever looks at the photographs an exercise of the imagination. The exercise of seeing must be, above all, a doubt. Enough that a bird should fly: for what? It falls to each of us to see, that is, to invent a fiction.
(The light is different here. It picks out the thorns with its warmth)
After the photograph. The two birds have already taken flight. The sun is almost setting. Let us close, then, with the last fragment of Álbum de Retratos, with these final words, so exact in their stammering:
no one knows any more who began this speech that has gone on so long, people kept being born of it and, one after another, faded out in it, some would be reborn to complete interrupted descriptions or to prolong unknowings
the world is a various forest: says the narrator. He feels his own adventure almost at an end and fears the opacity of a house built once and for all
(behold my abandonment)
Ecce homo.
[Excerpt from the essay by Vítor Ferreira]
