THE MIRROR AND THE AFTERNOON

2011

Video installation (three-channel with audio)

Variable dimensions / Loop 08’42”

Series of six photographs

Ink Jet on Canson Rag Paper 302 g

2 ( 150 x 100 cm)

2 ( 100 x 66 cm)

2 ( 66 x 45 cm)

The video “The Mirror and The Afternoon” is part of a series of works gathered under the title “Small Stories of Modesty and Doubt” - a collection of notes and images collected from video, photography, drawing and song. The work seeks to point at Doubt and modesty as supreme virtues of subjectivity, and at the same time register the intense social transformations produced by economic changes in contemporary urban life.

Technically, “The mirror and the afternoon” is a video installation consisting of three synchronised video projections on three different planes (three screens), with variable dimensions, arranged differently from the traditional form of the altar tryptikon of video projections. To optimize the visualization of their most recent investigations on the synchronicity and multiplicity of things, Dias & Riedweg sought to develop their own presentation device in which images filmed at the same time and from the same location, but at different angles and speeds, can materialize the existence of a more complex reality, in superimposed planes rather than juxtaposed planes.

In “The mirror and the afternoon”, a former resident of the recently transformed Complexo do Alemão, one of the largest and most complex favelas in Latin America, carries a mirror through the alleys, ghettos and squares revealing old problems and new urban planning. The images reflected in the mirror complement in detail this new unusual landscape through the afternoon until nightfall. A piano composition created by Walter Riedweg for this piece was superimposed on the small sounds recorded in the filmed locations.