Video-photographic essay carried out in 2022, within the framework of the Movimento art residency, on Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal. The work explores myths of origin, investigating themes of creation, love and death through volcanic elements.
Text: Guilherme Vernize
Voice: Telma Pereira
Sound: Artur Pispalhas
After Departure is a work that delves into the mineral matter and its human-cosmic dimensions. A work about time, mountains, and affections. A journey guided by printmaking and nourished by photography, video, sound, and text.
I come from Minas Gerais, in Brazil, a state where the disappearance of mountains due to extractivism is a historical constant. The project After Departure originates from previous works related to mountains, stones and the colonial ground. The works explore ways of symbolising contrasts between dimensions and erasures. Between natural time and human time, between construction and disposal. Here, magnitudes oppose and merge. Human time joins cosmic time through the extent of its mythology, tales and wonderings. The counting of geological time accelerates with the collapses of the Anthropocene. In several of my works, this dual perspective is central to understanding historical relationships and the constitution of collective memories and fictions.
The journey of After Departure begins with my personal narrative, marked by the sensitive collapse of a long-standing love and artistic partnership, coinciding with the landslide of a large stone in the house shared with my partner in the mountains of Minas Gerais, our common research space. The fall was consolidated by the political collapse of my country that same year, the mark of yet another erosion. Fleeing through other mountain ranges, the paths open up to explore new fictions of body-geology.
Hole: in Minas Gerais, the stones are devoured. Blood-red ore is extracted, travelling along new routes, distinct from those once traversed by gold.
The Tapir Head was an Ox: in my new home, the rocks mimic the movement of the sea.
Eruption, About Affections, Roar and Breakers: forever, volcanoes explode, destroy and fertilise the earth. A perpetual cycle of non-linear history.
Vertigo and Lapse: the melting of glaciers, the fear of the end manifests itself as social vertigo.
A project that seeks to capture the movement of the mountains.
In both lands, new perspectives on love. Reconstruction can only be mediated by affection.