Between Absence and Presence examines the practice of erasure as a device of transformation, capable of assigning new meanings to a given object. This investigation was part of my master thesis in Multimedia Art, in the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, and resulted in two collective exhibitions: Cenestesia, curated by the College of Arts of Coimbra; and Oitonove presented in LX Factory in Lisbon.
The practice of erasure is particularly interesting since it acts as a space of mediation between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, memory and oblivion, excess and loss, exposure and concealment, creation and destruction. To understand this phenomenon it is, therefore, necessary to reduce it to its most elemental form, as a stage of conflict between two opposing forces: the marking of erasure (the element that suppresses) and the trace of what is under erasure (the suppressed element). It is this permanent state of instability, tension, and fluctuation that creates the potential transformation of meaning.
These ideas culminated in a final installation, Guião para 00:04:45 Horas. For this artistic intervention, I recorded several minutes of television ads that I would later translate as written texts or “scripts”. The scripts would then be printed in a typewriter, but always in the same lines, until the complete illegibility and saturation of the page. This intervention was presented as a 2’57” video loop, accompanying the three original scripts. The project also includes a special printed edition of the thesis, with 156 pages in 136 x 228 mm, printed in Munken Lynx 100g/m² paper and finished with a clothbound cover, with the help of M2 Artes Gráficas. Between Absence and Presence is available in Portuguese and can be found here.
I hope you enjoyed.
