Pendular, from the series Projeto amplitude

"In my research for Pendular, I underscore a concern with waiting, with not rushing after seeing the first image, with allowing duration to cause it to stabilize. In order to write down what we hear around us, we must allow time for things to reverberate again. I have always worked by proposing actions for the body, whereby the performance spreads out through photographic images or videos. Working with different contexts and cities, I noticed that there is something made of sound in the relationships I create, and that a pause can also conjure images. Therefore, I am striving to dilate the wait more and more, and to take my time in the process. By superimposing diverse temporalities, I’ve taken to composing the images of lived experience, underscoring the conversation with the other. The other, here, is the distant that draws closer, then recedes into distance again; it’s this silent music that flows. 

The image of the lone body in Pendular evokes a relationship that unfolds in the 'between'. Upon this image, which comprises a set of details collected over time, is where the other lands as a quote. The insistence on duration makes it possible to vary the modes of interlocution with the multiple figure of various sonorous encounters that lined the process: the composition that accompanies Pendular is different for each staging, and evinces this multiplicity. Thus, a dimension of sharing and collaboration is rebuilt in the piece. The piece is a passage that recognizes the presence of others sonically; it exists and it demands a relationship. It organizes itself as artwork, always part and always whole, an imagetic-sound situation that emerges as a consequence of a trajectory where image and sound are reciprocally investigated, so that each can fit in the other by being at different tempos and different phases. 

Even when working with images, I look for a position that doesn’t rule out sensation or the invisible. The images I propose are aware of their ability to be an experience rather than recreate an experience. Thus, the process of creating Pendular involved a permanence in displacement: to inhabit the minute events of each place, collecting and erasing images until you find the one that remains, the one that stays. After all, producing an image means accepting the inevitable questions posed by mundane, commonplace images, fabricated as truths by common sense, and at the same time investigating, in micro-negotiations, possible forms of infiltration and escape. 

The piece somehow suggests resistance, as it seems to run counter to current economic and labor logic, finding its territory of reference in subjective and intimate relationships. I built a silent confrontation of the 'path' that is imposed upon us and sought to amplify what is buried. I appropriate myself of unique social events, without creating a hierarchy, and this is how I compose the image. I believe this image must be taken in in a dimension that is beyond visual, but is corporeal and reflexive as well, even if it doesn’t express a theme or topic that is identifiable in an explanatory way. 

In the piece, I chose to occupy the image, exposing others solely through the sound of their presence: I reckon this is how I participate in and create a conversation between two ways of being a body; body-image and body-sound. What I do with the body is not something the other cannot do; this position is what makes my body an image and not a self in particular. For me, a simple gaze means sharing, and I think one is allowed to take a narrative, a frame, and put it in one’s pocket. I enjoy the idea that an image can be taken away; that whoever gains access to it will always take something away with them." 

Waléria Américo in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (July 2015)