THE CITY OUTSIDE ITSELF

2011

Video installation (three-channel with soundtrack)

Variable dimensions / Loop 08’18”

This work appears as the first work in a series of photographs, videos, texts, musical compositions and drawings gathered under the title “Small stories of modesty and doubt”. The video installation “The city outside itself” consists of three video projections, of variable dimensions, arranged differently from the traditional tryptikon shape in the form of an altar. To optimize the visualization of their most recent investigations on the synchronicity and multiplicity of things, Dias & Riedweg sought to develop a 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 instead of the traditional juxtaposed planes, in the eyes of the viewer of the work. A piano composition created by the artists to accompany the angles captured by the three cameras is superimposed on the small sounds recorded in the filmed locations.

In dialogue with the chosen form, “The city outside Itself” presents the proposed theme, the city as a medium, portraying apparently disconnected aspects, but in reality integrated. In fact, the city here is seen from the inside out, from within itself, but from within its most stigmatized and unknown part, the favela, the part commonly known as the outside. The city portrayed is Rio de Janeiro, where the artists live and live. The well-known landscapes of Lagoa, Sambódromo, Central do Brasil and Corcovado reappear here, but seen in the background, behind shacks, kites that crisscross the sky and through the windows of lost pubs where they play pool and drink cachaça as the city darkens, oblivious to its daily frenzy. The plans overlap...the city, its cemetery, its many buildings and cars, the nightlights and the windows coming on are overlaid by kites flying in the darkening and fading sky, and again these are overlaid by the beer bottles of the at the window of the favela bar. Night falls everywhere. The city appears as a means and witnesses to it.