How heavy is a cloud? is a video installation presenting the results of my research in Poland in search of a history without traces, erased by the Holocaust of World War II. The project brings together the works Questions to stones [Series 3] (stamps), Disturbingly familiar (audio and postcards), How heavy is a cloud? (video and photography), which occupied Galpão VB in 2016.
Curator: Ana Pato.
The works:
Questions to stones
The series Questions to stones maps my perplexities in various contexts. This Series 3 begins with the questions I asked about my own history, seeking a narrative for the journey of my family, whose roots I visited on a trip to Poland.
Presented at Galpão VB in the exhibition How heavy is a cloud? as a set of stamps, the work refers to the branding of prisoners’ bodies in Nazi extermination camps. It offers the audience the possibility of deconstructing the experience of violence and pain indelibly imprinted on the memory of the twentieth century.
Disturbingly familiar
Disturbingly Familiar is a visual and textual diary of my trip to Poland, from which my grandparents came after World War I. The work consists of a sound installation and sixteen postcards that together narrate the journey through images, personal accounts, and quotations from authors such as Hal Foster, Andreas Huyssen, and Vilém Flusser.
Remnants of a narrated memory, it gathers fragments that, through juxtaposition and free association, reveal tacit relationships among varied topics. The concealment of memory by the design industry and the twentieth century’s inability to produce ruins are among them. Disturbingly Familiar casts the viewer amid rubble and reflections on the opacity of fog. It also records a tension between the administration of memory and policies of forgetting, situations of belonging and cultural exclusion.
This installation was reworked as an artist’s book.
How heavy is a cloud?
How heavy is a cloud? comprises a video and a photograph of equal dimensions, the latter taken from a still from that same video. The work, which gives the exhibition its title, records the artist’s journey from Kraków to Auschwitz on a day of thick fog.
The journey is recorded so as to blur its starting and ending points. Combined with the spatial proximity of still and moving images, this creates a zone of indistinction between the two elements.
How heavy is a cloud? reflects on the impalpability of pain, vertigo, and the impasse of tourism that cannibalizes history. The work engages with a narrative without traces through imprecise images that continually erase themselves. These images venture into reticent, unrecorded landscapes that are nonetheless pure memory.
A photo posted by Videobrasil (@videobrasil) on Jun 21, 2016 at 2:28pm PDT
Works commissioned by Culture.pl as part of the program presenting Polish culture in Brazil in 2016.
Opening: June 25, 2016, noon–6 p.m.
Visiting hours: June 28–August 20 (Tuesday–Friday, noon–6 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.).
Galpão VB – Av. Imperatriz Leopoldina, 1150, Vila Leopoldina. Tel: 11 3645 0516