Tom's cube

auto-portrait inside the cube

My friend Tom made an installation (Temple, Architecture building). It's a huge cube where one can go inside. The interior is made of mirrors which creates infinite reflexions. At first the scare, the confront with my own image. Multiple images of the self showing the human complexity. The blinking of the lights creates an intervale, a day and night. The music in the head-phones is mixed with spoken words. "Virtual reality" "Desert" "Emotion"... The sound creates new emotional dimentions, sugested by the words. Slowly, I relax. The imagination floats throught different places, ideas, connections, experiences. Changeable memories. You can not escape from your-self. I made photos. A witness against the vanishing.

reflexes on the city

After 3 wonderful art exhibitions we flaneured around downtown following the tracks of the reflexes on the buildings and other urban surfaces. We took photos. Capturing the movement is difficult and the lightless makes the images blurred. How to capture the mobile silhouettes reflected in multiple images everywhere ? Glass, metal, water, asphalt. Also ice. In the ice rink by the river is already night. The rink is empty, just a machine watering the ice. The water creates fresh reflexions. There's people waiting with the skates on. It's cold and we go inside. A huge video-wall shows the rink. Searching for reflexions we look at the glass of the window. An accumulation of the real rink and the screen mix together. People are having fun. We go out-side again to take pictures. For the movement I chose the video camera. Try to catch the glide, the laugh, the hands, the body slicing, relaxing from the stress of another day.

philadelphia

mobile

MOBILE

mobile movable portable transportable itenerant

1. easy to move / able to move freely or easily “she’s mobile again after her accident”. 2. operating from a vehicle / operating from or set up in a vehicle that travels from place to place. 3. changing expressions quickly and easily “a mobile face”. 4. prepared for change / able or willing to change job, move home or alter other arrangements. 5. hanging decoration / sculpture or decoration whose parts are balanced to move in response to air currents. 6. mobile telephone / a cellular telephone. 7. outside employee / somebody who works for a company outside its offices, especially using computer link
(in Encarta Dictionary)

for me less is more

Performance: "empty your bags".
tell the narrative of your personal objects was the request.

For me less is more. I like to have just a few things with me, I don't like to feel heavy, full. I need space. I have a red apple in my bag. It's my way to try to keep the balance in this mobile world, where the rhythm's are highly superior than nature can take. I have my keys. The key of my house in Philadelphia and the key of my office at Temple. When I arrived, 2 months ago, the only key I had was the one of my suitcase. I wish I could have made photos of all the keys I had in my life, all the places where I lived, sometimes for a few days, weeks, months or years. I don't have a home in my country. Homeless in the world, a citizen of the world. I like to travel, try to understand, live in different places, searching for my place. I have my mobile phone in my bag too. A new one, that I bought when I arrived and was trying to find a house for two weeks. I needed a number to people to contact me. I arrived in the week of the strike, so I walked all the city with my map. My goals were the houses I was going to see, probably to live in. I started to understand the geography of the city, so different from Lisbon, with her 7 hills and her small streets. Now I don't need a map anymore and my mobile phone has more use as a clock, 'cause I don't know so many people here yet and the ones I do communicate with me mostly through email. Usually I like to walk in a new city, without a map, just be there, on the streets, looking at people, how they look, how they walk, how they wait for the bus, how they talk or sing on the streets. So I have my note books. Today, in my bag I carry 2 note books. One very little called "Pocket Memo" that I use even when I don't have a bag. I can carry it on my pocket and take notes of this kind of details, how someone opens the mobile phone using it as a mirror. And I have a black note book already almost filled with notes since I arrived. There I note all kinds of things. Ideas for my films, images, a certain kind of light, the things I have to buy in the supermarket, the money I can spent, the meetings I have, the web sites I find interesting, anything. My note book is the map of my days.