BOCA is a work by Valter Vinagre (photography) and Eunice Ribeiro (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.
Running through Valter Vinagre’s photographic images is a certain sense of extinction, which is, first and foremost, the extinction of visibility itself. Like the writing of Rui Nunes that provokes them – though they are not, properly speaking, its illustration – Vinagre’s images are born of an ‘imperfect’ perception that prevents the world from being seen whole and clearly, disallowing any attempt at spectatorism, at the consumption of a real that remains partly unrepresented, unrepresentable.
These are dramatic photographs in black and white, almost baroque in the violent contrasts of their chiaroscuro, at times slightly out of focus or invaded by reflections, stains and patches of shadow, at others so close to their subject that they graze the abstract or the formless. An anonymous, lustreless humanity, a few animals, traces of a hostile or funereal vegetation – such is all the life that peoples these ruinous, spectral landscapes, the images capturing now natural spaces (if not ‘denatured’ ones; cf. Pinharanda, 2013) and provincial settings turned into desolate, precarious Arcadias, now decaying cityscapes or faintly sordid worlds on the urban fringe: a kind of backstage reality, a wasteland heavy with remains, wreckage, fragments of a lost totality that nothing, it seems, allows us to recover. Images, one might say, given over to corrupting the very indexical nature of photography, to obstructing the predatory tendencies of the machinic eye, its hallucinatory capacity to ‘see more’, to see everything.
[Excerpt from the essay by Eunice Ribeiro]
