Exhibition view at "Halbe Halbe", Dauerwelle. © Luiz Zanotello, 2023

Every abyss is a poem yet unfinished (2022)

mixed-media installation (custom infrared heating light, electronics, video, text)

Based on a personal story of loss, the installation explores corazonar (the warming up of reason), mourning, and time beyond the abyssal line of thought that linearizes past, present, and future. A growing archive of audio-visual recordings depicting the mundane passage of day into night is displaced asynchronously on the floor and juxtaposed with recordings of water flowing in contradictory directions. Reflected on its surfaces, a warming light of varying intensities shines, displaying in the present the memory of a spoken poem translated into light. Reflecting the contradictory staging of time, a series of unfinished poems and auto-ethnographic essays are placed on the floor next to it.

The installation is activated by a performance during the opening that explores the afterglow as a trope of liminal time. The performance is an attempt to evoke corazonar within the artist's practice by blurring the boundaries between personally felt and culturally experienced concepts of affect, memory, and time. Various poems with auto-ethnographic intentions are read in real time and transduced to the variable intensity of a bright warming light through a custom-made microphone. At the end of the readings, the light shines in repetition of the recorded sound intensities, performing the recording of a text after the words have disappeared and the affect lingers throughout the rest of the exhibition. The installation functions as a research site and may incorporate new materials and media constellations in future exhibitions.

Activation performance during the opening of "Halbe Halbe", Dauerwelle. © Luiz Zanotello, 2023

Exhibition view at "Halbe Halbe", Dauerwelle. © Luiz Zanotello, 2023

Exhibition view at "Halbe Halbe", Dauerwelle. © Luiz Zanotello, 2022

Acknowledgements: Funded with the support of the Deutscher Künstlerbund and the Binational Artistic PhD-Program at the HfK Bremen.