MURMÚRIO DE PENUMBRAS
Soraia Oliveira
3′ 30” video
Artist book
Chaos and sorrow, I received them when they were crawling. They remain the visible face of the world, the one we choose to turn towards us, when we are full of mental and emotional noise, when we only know how to access the abysm in a world saturated with restlessness. Among figurants and shadows that live in what we call real space, I decided to disturb human somnambulism.
MURMÚRIO DE PENUMBRAS (murmur of gloom) was performed when sadness started to enter my ordinary life, and I didn’t comprehend it. In the first self-portrait, I suffered a massive disappointment for having betrayed me. But in the last one I did in Bolzano, it was when, for the first time, I felt only sadness, and nothing more. I had to gain intimacy with this sadness that absorbed me in the most unexpected period of time.
This project is based on self-portraits made in Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland. It displays an expression of what I never felt before: pure sadness. And the way I accept it was by reading poetry again. The images are combined with poems of Charles Bukowski, Samuel Beckett, João Granado, Sophia de Mello Breyner, and Fernando Pessoa.
