ร bidos-Luz: Notes on a flash production
Coordination
Mรกrio Caeiro Philip Cabau
The Book Title
Corisco e Resplendor: Notas sobre uma produção relâmpago – Óbidos Luz [Óbidos-Luz: Notes on a flash production] Coordination
Mário Caeiro and Philip Cabau Edition
Palavrão – Associação Cultural Editorial Production and layout
Rosa Quitério Cover image
Work by Joachim Slugocki and Katarzyna Malejka. Photography by Edgar Libório, courtesy Câmara Municipal de Óbidos Photographies
Edgar Libório (courtesy Câmara Municipal de Óbidos), Felipe Ribeiro Reference
plv colecção insecto n.º 3 Print: Guide, Artes Gráficas, Lda. Legal deposit: 392254/15
isbn: 978-989-97559-9-4
1.st edition
Caldas da Rainha, April 2015
www.palavrao.net info@palavrao.net
‘Óbidos Luz’ – Óbidos Shines – consisted in a series of Light happenings inside the city walls of the Historical Village of Óbidos, all along Christmas time. A monumental video-mapping projection. Several artworks in the public space. Site-specific installations distributed across the urban fabric. As well as pedagogical activities about and around architectural lighting and the craft of light.
The General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed 2015 as the International Year of Light; a recognition of the importance of the technologies associated with light in promoting sustainable development and the search for solutions to global challenges.
IN ÓBIDOS, LIGHT IS A PASSION Mário Caeiro
Light is a passion which conquered me in 2002. At the time, I realized that cities, in terms of lighting, are far from offering a satisfactory experience to their inhabitants. Rarely are lighting projects included within artistic visions. Light art, as a branch of Contemporary art, occupies a small space within the collective imagination. Portugal is no exception. A country recently industrialized and generously gifted with an excessive Sun we take for granted. At a certain point in my career, I discovered how a certain light-minimalism, coming from Land and Conceptual Art, can be adapted to new visions, attitudes and technologies, namely moved by an urbanistic drive. Today’s most affirmative examples of such ‘art of light’ are contributing to a Light Culture that can effectively change the cityscape. This is what we witnessed in Óbidos, during the Christmas of 2013. Following experiences in Lisbon (2004-2006, International Biennale on the theme of Light), Poland (2009-2015, [Bella] Skyway Festival) and other cities, this book tells the story of an event – an urban happening – witch briefly integrated the village of Óbidos in an international dynamic. With the collaboration of the Architect Philip Cabau, I have developed a curatorial experiment witch was grounded in a systemic and territory-based understanding of artistic action. In this case,
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we developed this project within the framework of a Cultural Plan we named ‘Água Viva’ [Living Water]. What was particularly exciting in this Project was the fact that we – at Palavrão – developed the whole project from scratch in a very short time frame. My role was to be particularly attentive to the artistic sense and quality of the interventions. The care for the place-making dimension of the artworks had to be explicit and transmit both an institutional and (micro-)political meaning, in what I like to see as a soft model of urban communication. A curator works with possibilities and options. He/she imagines a narrative, in which the key-characters are the artworks turning the whole environment into a living system. In this sense, the program we realized in Óbidos was particularly rich and focused. Hetpakt, whom I presented previously in Lisbon (2006) and Torun, Poland (2011, 2012 e 2014), did their usual ‘trick’: Using a few tents illuminated from within, they designed as a surprising set of inter-subjective experiences. The interactivity met a most sensitive approach of dialogism. This is always an important aspect of a Festival: to offer the public deep emotions to be shared in real time. Katarzyna Malejka and Joachim Slugocki brought something completely different. A sort of Op-arte povera. I have presented them before, as solo or as a duo in Torun in 2010, 2011 and 2013. In Óbidos, their minimalistic intervention was an experience of rarefied color and geometry. The result was of extreme elegance, if not a radical artistic statement purifying the gaze of the spectator.
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Limelight created a video-mapping projection. We felt that the most important icons of Óbidos should be dressed in moving light and images, so that the celebration could hold a truly spectacular moment. Limelight mixed delicate patterns with balanced and calmly paced visual stories. The stories were inspired in a very important religious myth from the region: Santa Luzia. An important characteristic of this work is that it managed to create a virtual landscape in a crucial point of the visitor’s route. Additionally, they worked as a dynamic grapho-visual emanation, a narrative loop which decorated the façade with a beauty that the spectators will not easily forget. Finally, Visual Stimuli, a team of designers and architects – Pedro Ek Lopes, Rute Delgado and Alexandre Neto – were responsible for a specifically pedagogical and participatory part of the program. Their contribution was the realization of a workshop with local people and the design of the ephemeral architectural lighting of several of the most important local spaces and buildings. This said, I think a flash-event like this must avoid becoming merely ‘fashion’ and strive to engage itself in a conceptual operational model that will appear as a set of exemplary actions. With the help of artistic craft, I always try to offer the public, the partners and the sponsors, as well as the Municipality, a motivating vision. In this sense, Óbidos-Luz contained the seeds for future reflections at the local and regional level and of course, other experiences to be realized in other places.
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Fragments from
ON THE CASTING OF SHADOWS A LIGHTING LAB OF NIGHTLY DRAWINGS Philip Cabau
from perceptions
in this text we’ll try to focus on some of the issues that are directly or indirectly related with the design of Light, mainly those that deal with the problematics of light as an entity that contains shadows. This is a relationship that rests at the very core of the questioning and the practicing of the concept of Light in the urban space. One that was common to the set of artworks, installations and actions that defined the event Óbidos-Luz – for unlike the customary presentation of art in public space, all of these works were designed to be experienced by night-time. There’s an explicit goal in this approach: that is to explore the connections between line and daylight representations and, likewise, between blot and nigh-time perceptions. Our aim is to explore the way drawn images actually reveal distinct understandings and perceptions of the spatial reality in which we move in – and our visual sensations and concrete experiences in the urban space. Dualities of lines against blots are intrinsic notions for the concept of drawing – as a verb as well as a noun – and they stand at the very core of the perceptions of light and shadow that’s guided the Óbidos-Luz projects and interventions.
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When we say that the day is opposed to night, we are not only referring to light gradations, for it is not just a question of decrease in visibility conditions. It is the perception of the device itself that changes radically. It is, actually, a different experience of light (and shadows) altogether. That, consequently, point to different representations of the visible reality. Even in this digital paradigm we live in, sustained upon prosthetic devices for the enhancing of perception, night is still night and day, day. However, in this age of globalization – an enduring connexion of lights all over the planet – the opposition between day and night still remains a rational category. One that allows you to understand the way events in public sphere actually work.
from to make a line and awe
Even the most overcast day seems luminous compared to the night that preceded it. Our daytime perception is built upon a wide network of visual paths that establish a complex network of spatial references. In it lines play an important role because they identify the limits of forms and determine the relation among things – and our own interactions with them. The line is always blatant, ostensive even: it shows a path, such as a finger gesturing a track in a map. Lines are movements that contour, link, intercept and organize. In order to be registered or perceived, these lines need certain neutrality – and they require certain conditions of visibility. It is in this sense that we can say that drawing inscriptions are born from
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a movement on surface, thus becoming a natural tool of visual communication, presentation and representation. A procedure involving choices and rescuing surfaces from their impartiality. We can thus to say that the homogeneous daylight is, along the edges of the forms city, the natural environment of the line. Night, being naturally different from day – not only because there’s less visual information, but also less distractions – provides (and depends on) different conditions from the daylight altogether. In its core lies no longer, as it happens with lines in daylight, a three-dimensional network of topologically structured surfaces by relative positions, ready for description and that can be counted. The perception that defines darkness provides a singularity within a saturated space – that often seems unable to support more information. We can therefore say that the basic unit of nightly perception is no longer the line, but the blot – as a visual entity adjusted to near darkness. There is a close relationship between blot and shadow in that its form does not manifest itself by its contours, but through their (often diffuse) margins. This presupposes the viewer’s immersion in the very perception process and the acceptance of a magnitude that entangles the body of the observer/ experiencer.
from a network of lights
There is a common ground among all these projects gathered along the urban spaces of the town of Óbidos: an attention to light. One way or another each and all of them call for the
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meanings of Light – incorporating light and shadow in the one and same event.
from the experience of shadows
For over a thousand years the possession of light was handed from the magic to the artisan. However, early in the nineteenth century, at first with the gas lighting and then with electricity, it was for the engineer to determine what light it is and what it can do. And a century later century the architects and urban planners definitely took account of the matter of light, either in private and public space. Recently things changed. Inexorably the user-stroller gave way to the consumer-spectator. Alongside many other territories, we attest to the establishment of a new paradigm in lighting where, increasingly, the criteria are more and more inherent to the territory of the designers. Perhaps every light show always refers to, in an obscure way, the experience of the primordial fire in the darkest night – as a source of light that’s inseparable from the idea of the Sun itself. To retrieve that mysterious dimension is possibly to retrieve the original impression that fire must have produced in us humans in the beginnings of mankind. To ensure the making of a benevolent space in a hostile night might be the goal of every event of light. In the meantime the gullible, nostalgic, or just tolerant public embarks on an adventure without risks where a deferred experience of transcendence can occur.
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Inseparable from shadows light plays, within art, a very different goal. Three of the works in Óbidos-Luz, the installation pieces of the artists Alessandro Lupi and Joachim Slugocki / Katarzyna Malejka display it well. The light, as is usually crafted in the fine arts, doesn’t belong to the space alone. It installs a divisive and radical line inside the continuum space of perception. Even those artworks in which we identify the intention to modulate the light, this operation is always servicing an intentionality rooted outside the conditions that depict the physical and architectural space that hosts it. What sustains it does not come directly from the requests of the space where it stands, but depends on the potential that this space entails and is confirmed in its own artistic proposal. In this sense light, for the artwork, is not so much about a solutions as it is about the delineation of a problem. The understanding of the way light is depicted displays a kind of fracture, creating two distinct and contrasting conceptions of what light is. These are set diametrically opposed to one another. On the one hand light would be a device that is simply a product – or rather the effect – of the technical device that produces it. On the other hand light is conceived as a significant event in itself, that device being an absolutely subordinate one – invisibility or, preferably, absence.
from notes on the drawing of shadows
In the connections between line and blot drawing may open, as mentioned, a useful laboratory for the understanding of light’s representations. Plenty of images in drawing’s history point directly to this issue; these images of light and shadow show us the complexity
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that portrays the relations between line and blot. Ambiguity and graphic incongruity often take account thereof, which never gets to set up a linear border but, on the contrary, open a fertile and dynamic space that can only be conceived in movement from light to shadow and vice versa. Light and shadow are excessive words. Not alone because the history of their meanings – social, religious, technological, cultural – is a dense one, but also because both words are overcharged with metaphor. Positive metaphors are always associated with light (sun, whiteness, brightness, transparency, clarity) and negative ones with darkness (doom, opacity, blackness). The weight of metaphors is such that we fail to consider the discrepancies between our physiological vision devices and we don’t even listen to the subtle differences amongst our own experiences and sensitivities of lights (and shadows). Yet, in practice, our awareness in experiencing the transition from light to darkness or from darkness to light is always anew.
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wish tree, hetpakt
Performative installation Driving their van, illusion in their luggage, they came to Óbidos. Six tents, six Light sets where the visitor is king. In the work of Belgian artists Het Pakt, a mix of artistic installation and street theatre, we get to know the inner moods of affection.
árvore, alessandro lupi
luzia, limelight
Installation
Video-mapping
Within the intimacy of a hidden and quiet place, form and space melt dynamically. With extremely simple resources, appealing to all generations, the art of the daylight meets the art of the night, in the realm of shadows. Magic and crafty Óbidos.
Never did Óbidos shine this way… The show by Hungarian artists Limelight on the façade of the emblematic Santiago Church is the first of its kind ever done in the village. The village’s patrone Saint Lucy – Santa Luzia – inspires the audiovisual narrative. To be seen at close range… and from afar!
joachim slugocki katarzyna malejka
Installation Slugocki and Malejka are two young artists from Poland. They aim to juxtapose geometrical order to the elements of space. Such contact gives birth to a new nature, both disturbing and serene. When the night falls, the colours become lively abstract and artificial, somewhere between painting and video.
arcos, alessandro lupi
Site-specific installation Light. Energy. Interactivity. Place. For the Italian artist Alessandro Lupi, reality does not exist in itself, but as craft of the senses. This art work, envisaged in Óbidos during his stay, requires the passers-by to be alive.
visual stimuli
Arquitectural lighting Óbidos shines. It glows. Becomes colour. As the night falls the Square is lit and Óbidos takes the first steps towards a new nocturnal experience. This is an ephemeral work by the Portuguese collective of designers and architects Visual Stimuli, experts in architectural lighting.