Face to Face, by Carla Zaccagnini
for the exhibition catalogue

Contents of the love dimension, which punctuate the limits of the understandable and utterable, tend to put in check the validity of any artistic representation. I think, again, on Fernando Pessoa and his poem in which he feels tired of symbols and wants the concrete happiness of the seamstress who he sees standing on the corner, waiting for the unlikely return of the boyfriend who left her. There are no symbols that can compare to the joy which only she might feel in case, tired of the waiting and the surprise, she saw him coming back. However, something of that joy, which may never be fulfilled, riddles or builds itself on Pessoa’s poem.

When Nicolela gives to the visitors your list of questions and invites them to answer in front of a camera in a reserved room, yet within an exhibition space, she is not demanding little. And there are many moments of suspension and silence sewing the answers. The video shows precisely those images. One after another, the faces of those interviewed looking thoughtful, without words, in moments of doubt and dilated hesitation summed in the edition. The images show what is not able to listen, what is not possible to say.

The sound - which sometimes comes from one sound speaker, sometimes from the other - overrides the answers. Every attempt to define love, whether yes or no, whether it sets free or imprisons, whether someone loves, whether another no longer loves anymore. It’s curious how the responses echo, are repeated and reverberated; wee see the sum of particularities settling the universal. Or perhaps what you learn as a universal value shapes our views and attitudes, even in the more private fields.

I still wonder: if Fernando Pessoa delivered the poem to the seamstress so, in case she wanted, she could send it to her boyfriend? What if he left the poem fly from the window so that she could also find it and recognized herself surprised? It would be a joy as well, to see her own life that way, from outside, important to a stranger like the cycle of the day and night? Would it be?

translated from original in Portuguese

Face to Face, by Carla Zaccagnini
for the exhibition catalogue

Contents of the love dimension, which punctuate the limits of the understandable and utterable, tend to put in check the validity of any artistic representation. I think, again, on Fernando Pessoa and his poem in which he feels tired of symbols and wants the concrete happiness of the seamstress who he sees standing on the corner, waiting for the unlikely return of the boyfriend who left her. There are no symbols that can compare to the joy which only she might feel in case, tired of the waiting and the surprise, she saw him coming back. However, something of that joy, which may never be fulfilled, riddles or builds itself on Pessoa’s poem.

When Nicolela gives to the visitors your list of questions and invites them to answer in front of a camera in a reserved room, yet within an exhibition space, she is not demanding little. And there are many moments of suspension and silence sewing the answers. The video shows precisely those images. One after another, the faces of those interviewed looking thoughtful, without words, in moments of doubt and dilated hesitation summed in the edition. The images show what is not able to listen, what is not possible to say.

The sound - which sometimes comes from one sound speaker, sometimes from the other - overrides the answers. Every attempt to define love, whether yes or no, whether it sets free or imprisons, whether someone loves, whether another no longer loves anymore. It’s curious how the responses echo, are repeated and reverberated; wee see the sum of particularities settling the universal. Or perhaps what you learn as a universal value shapes our views and attitudes, even in the more private fields.

I still wonder: if Fernando Pessoa delivered the poem to the seamstress so, in case she wanted, she could send it to her boyfriend? What if he left the poem fly from the window so that she could also find it and recognized herself surprised? It would be a joy as well, to see her own life that way, from outside, important to a stranger like the cycle of the day and night? Would it be?

translated from original in Portuguese