Vila Nova de Gaia, 2020

Vídeo-Performance Installation | Time: Loop

Performer: Sónia Carvalho; Vídeo: Marisa Bernardes; Sound Design:
Hugo Paquete; Actress: Maria Inez Espírito Santo; Produccion: EMERGE.

The video-performance proposes a dialogue between two distinct moments of action and temporality; and a video shows a female body painted in pink and framed by a detailed plan of the pubic area, where it is activated by the decontextualization of the rubbing gesture - similar to that of domestic or sexual tasks, such as cleaning activities and hygiene that a house and a body requires - and a formal game between the floor brushes, and the female genital organ enters a dialogue of ambivalence. From the rubbing action to the erotic movement, a sense of communion results with the experience of the sacred feminine manifested in everyday rituals. The sound that results from the gesture of rubbing the steel wool brushes causes a state of tension or even strangeness that is interesting here to provoke and explore before the seductive image. Thus embracing the phenomenon of “disturbing strangeness” (Das unheimliche - Freud) as a state of discomfort where something familiar becomes unknown, generating a sense of its own where the boundaries between the “domestic-public and private”, the “social and the sexual ”and the“ symbolic-sacred ”and allows a reflection on the condition of women as a place of strength and effort in a multidimensional field, in a still patriarchal society. Therefore, this action is accompanied by the video of the unfolding of the circle, the unfolding of an ancestral time by the hands of an elderly woman, who in the repetitive gesture induces a state of hypnosis and allows a historical and corporeal relationship of the passage of symbolic time where a place cannot be developed, thus allowing a meditation, abstraction from the task that develops as a loop, hypnotic cycle as a whole.

These videos were developed as part of the creative process of carrying out the project “Struggle Like A (WO) Man # 1”, as a result of a workshop directed to the local community, marked a journey through the city by six participants and the artist, and was presented within the scope of the Festival Novas Invasões. And they result in bodily reflections felt during the creative processes