The challenge of working Book III of De Rerum Natura by Lucrece (first century B.C.) from a site-specific form to the space of Porto’s Planetarium, lead to the construction of a wooden structure in its indoors area.
In his Book III, Titus Lucrece approaches the themes of death and the nature of the soul, presenting 24 arguments to sustain his vision of a world in which body and soul are finite, and of a universe without gods, made of particles and atoms.
In A few Arguments, 24 to be more precise the public sees the object and its interior through a video projection that creates an atmosphere prone to reflect on the relation between particles in an internally cohesive world, from top to bottom: from the stars to underground particles. The archetypal structure is reminiscent of basic utility constructions: the telescope, the bird observatory, the water tank… The sculptural monumentality of the piece – 5,20 metres – is nevertheless rooted in an apparent constructive simplicity, materialized in plain wood. But the physical experience of the oeuvre changes as we penetrate it, as it surprises us in the human dimension of its interior. Between the guard post and the outer observation camera, the inside piece is a human dimension camera, a module for a body. When the visitor’s body enters the structure it becomes the centre of the piece which, in a way, completes itself. A body attracted to the earth but with its gaze upwards – a tense and self-conscious body. Above the onlooker the video acts as an animation through a compassed succession of photographs. A hand – measure of all things –, projected on a black abyssal background, rehearses different gestures, 24 to be more precise, in a fictionalized language to probe the world, convening sign language, the 24 characters of the alphabet, the 24 frames which constitute the second of the video and the 24 arguments of Lucrece, in 12 seconds of continuous looping. But the hand there also oppresses, and hits us shaking our own living body. The video piece within the sculpture, one that we cannot guess from the outside, is surprising as well for its projection mechanism’s invisibility. The piece as a whole, with its wooden structure, the sound film, the plethora of things one guesses located in its interior for the visualization (video projector, video reproducer, sound columns, screen…) is simultaneously an artistic object and the mechanism to visualize the artistic object. A complex object, thus, that is an attempt to create a language (artistic, visual), an alphabet of 24 gestures for philosophical questions. A possibility of problematizing, with the artistic object as well, the task of representation.

To read the exhibition presentation text by the curator Eduarda Neves click here.