no. 23 Editorial
Moodboard

ISSN · 2183-5527

Visual Essay + Author in residence

7 Portraits

7 Portraits

João Fonte Santa

VHS, 29' By João Fonte Santa, assisted by António Caramelo The video Sete Retratos was created for the exhibition Mundo de Aventuras, curated by José Alberto Ferreira, and features 7 video portraits, …

7 Portraits

B, Y, R

Visual Essay

B, Y, R

Henrique Biatto

Água Viva

Visual Essay

Água Viva

Lander Patrick, Gonçalo Marques, José Soares

Through the longest path

Visual Essay

Through the longest path

Margarida Rodrigues (MAR)

Working with mountains is easy

Article

Working with mountains is easy

Isadora Alves

Process Of Unframability

Sound Essay

Process Of Unframability

Frantz Loriot

Drowned, in the shame of light

Visual Essay

Drowned, in the shame of light

Isabela Abate & João Castro

Workbook on the adaptation of the play The Man Outside (1947)

Visual Essay

Workbook on the adaptation of the play The Man Outside (1947)

Pedro Paiva

Sightings

Visual Essay

Sightings

Francisco Novais

HALF A STEP FROM HOME

Visual Essay

HALF A STEP FROM HOME

António Olaio

Misfits

Visual Essay

Misfits

Fabrizio Matos

Out Of Here

Sound Essay

Out Of Here

Quatroconnection (Carla Santana)

Weiße Rose

Visual Essay + Author in residence

Weiße Rose

João Fonte Santa

it was just drained, drained

Sound Essay

it was just drained, drained

André Hencleeday

Lavagem

Visual Essay

Lavagem

João Jacinto

XXX

Visual Essay + Author in residence

XXX

João Fonte Santa

The hand with no specialty

Visual Essay

The hand with no specialty

Carolina Lino

Wrong Wrong n.23

Misfits

Visual Essay + Author in residence 26.04.2019

Freezing Utopia

Enrico Gaido

This video was made in 2010 with the intent to ‘complete a cycle’, a cycle that indeed has, conceptually, never been closed. The first experiments on this type of work date back to 2006 when, in collaboration with an architect specialized in blasting operations, we caused a microcharge to explode inside a mass of gelatin. The result was the ‘freezing’ of the explosion, like when a single frame is isolated from a video sequence to capture the most expressive moment, but in a sculptural form. From 2006 to 2013 several ‘frozen explosions’ were carried out, always as an isolated performative act lasting a fraction of a second: the explosion and the result, the impossibility to see the ‘during’, too fast for the human eye, and the result somehow was already the strongest expression, frozen in the matter, of the explosive act. It was in 2010 that I decided I wanted to further fragment this ‘during’ by using the film process as a tool, but instead thus of closing a cycle, new ones were opened. The resulting video put in greater evidence the dynamics of the relationship between forces that push and others that resist to an ‘agreement’, a point of equilibrium in which they neutralize themselves and in which a sort of quiet returns. If the frozen explosion in the gelatin, both as a performance act and a sculptural object, while being a representation of an ephemeral stillness, has nevertheless preserved intact its expressive force, (it is, obviously, a physical quietness, a stable equilibrium, but also the expression of a destructive potential retained over time), the dynamics of the relationship between action and resistance as a motor generating meanings has strongly conditioned and oriented the development of my subsequent projects.
As argued by Lawrence Weiner in a commentary to his work Cratering Piece of 1960: «You can’t have an explosion without resistance. An explosion is only an explosion if there’s something pushing against it».
Over the years, the frozen explosions never found a title that really satisfied, up to 2013 when I last performed it live for the opening of the exhibition Exploding Utopia in Laure Genillard Gallery in London. «There was a loud bang followed by lots of applause» it was written. Actually, to me it was more like an impulsive, kind of liberating reaction, to the non-disillusionment of the audience’s expectation. What better title, therefore, than Freezing Utopia?

Apolo Rising

João Fonte Santa