Medium Type

Photo Performance

Genre

Performance

Year

2019

Frans van Lent stood motionless and silent in a field in the Jardim Botânico (N 38° 43′ 4.8” W 9° 8′ 52.9”) in Lisbon, facing North, eyes closed.

At the same time Daniel Pinheiro stood motionless and silent in a field in the Jardim Botânico (N 41° 9′ 6.9″ W 8° 38′ 36″) in Porto, facing South, his eyes closed.

Frans
― Ready to go! We will meet somewhere half way 😉
― (…)
― Hi again Daniel, I don’t think I can say I met you. The experience was very sculptural.

Daniel
― Ready to go too! Should we set timers or wait for noon?
― Will close my eyes at twelve.
― (…)
― For me there is something about synchronicity that is not properly about meeting in between but actually some sort of assurance that you were also there. That we both were at the same time, stopping time and making visible the intersections that happen all the time.

Some thoughts (Frans): At the start I tried to imagine you, but I could only see you in the position you have on our photo. The best way to describe my situation is in layers. The first layer was my body. The instability that I mentioned and also the breeze of wind on my neck, head and back.The second layer was the roaming around of birds, they must have been quite near, fearless. The third layer was the whistling of birds and the sounds of human feet on the paths around me. The feet stopped often and I imagined the people watching me, I felt a bit exposed. Now and then I heard their muted voices, could not hear what they were saying. The fourth layer was the sound of car horns and engines, not constantly but occasionally. The background of everything was a drone sound of traffic in long distance. Every now and then I heard a plane and I tried to travel with it, to travel to this place halfway. I failed in that. What I now really could imagine was the symmetry of our bodies, if I imagined the facing towards each other. The best description of what I was feeling was an ultimate experience of performing, a sculptural activity in circles around me, I was in the eye of the movements. And this circle of rings had it’s mirrored parallel around you in Porto.

Some thoughts (Daniel): Maybe because at that hour the botanical garden in Porto was populated with children playing hide and seek, maybe because the house that is in the garden belonged to the family of Portuguese poet and writer Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, very much known for her children’s books, I couldn’t stop myself of thinking on the episode of the fox and the Little Prince quoted above. As I stood motionless with my eyes closed “facing” Frans, I could feel all my surroundings, and hear all the sounds and while time passed I felt as being part of the landscape, pausing time as everything else around me moved as if I wasn’t there – which led me to think that my presence there in fact changed and altered the state of everything. This affection expanded and the confirmation, minutes before, that Frans was also positioned made me think (again) about trust and (re)assurance that this was a connected action and that we both were, even if not exactly meeting somewhere between, activating a parallel moment – where through stillness we were connecting all that was outside of ourselves. An unnoticed (?) sculptural rite that, although previously agreed upon by both of us, renders visible the possibility of “synchronicity” coined and described by Carl Jung as “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events”… This possibility of synchronicity is interesting if in public spaces we observe behavioural patterns starting to emerge. In so doing, Frans and I placed ourselves within a landscape, transforming it and let it behave around us and it was by this overall behaviour the things beyond ourselves that I felt us connected as part of the same thing. As time became unknown to me, questions about Frans started to populate my thoughts – as «Are we actually facing each-other?»; «Is Frans surrounded by all this humming people as well?»; «What is he feeling, is he feeling the breeze? And the sun?» and suddenly I was brought back to my own physical surroundings precisely by the questions I was thinking about Frans.

Since 2008, Daniel has been mainly working in the field of Video-Art using the internet as the main platform of “distribution”, ever since then, with an interest on approaching both “means of expression” in a single object has been intensifying and been part of his artistic practice. His works have been using video as the main tool towards the development of visual narratives and the internet as a mean to communicate them and, overall, a space that allows for the creation and dissemination of those same narratives reaching an unknown audience, that collaboratively experience the art object.

Having been, since 2010, involved in projects that often revolve around these tools as a way to communicate larger concepts, such as Telematic Art, their proximity and relation has been unveiling and the symbiosis between them is an on-going work of transformation, a process that he aims to include in his work as a reflection of the world we live in. So far, his interest dives deeper in a more accurate study of how the abstract nature of this Transmedia movement allows to alter and modify notions of space, presence, privacy and, amongst others, be part of a new revolution of where both spectator and performer stand.

His projects do not follow a reasonable continuity, although they all belong to the same body of work. Each one, even different and unique, is a result of all the concepts and questions that arise from the above urgencies. Each one is the translation of a quest for different resources used towards a specific determined ending, a result that is part of that same abstract nature, inherent to every artistic practice.