As part of an ongoing peer workshop, we were invited to along to the Camden Arts Centre to see the work of Joao Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. A magical, immersive film installation for their first major show in London. The kaleidoscopic world created by 27 16mm films and two camera obscura installations takes viewers on an imaginative journey into science, philosophy and religion.
Each film examines a particular subject – a treatise on material, animal or human behaviour that probes at the nature of truth and perception. Shot with a high-speed camera but projected in slow motion, the films reveal ordinarily imperceptible detail with ghostly effect. Starting from journeys, stories, anecdotes or cinematic allegories and with few contextual cues to enable the enigmatic scenarios to be located in a specific time or place, the veracity of each film is ambiguous.
Whirring mechanics of projectors create a soundscape that draws attention to the absence of sound in the films themselves. Concerned with ‘analogue’ approaches and technologies, any editing is done ‘in camera’ and several films contain multiple exposures within the same frame. The two camera obscura installations directly investigate and display the behaviour of vision and light, and the aperture motif which is reiterated in other works, connects representations of the eye to the camera.
