Solange Fabião

The piece consists of 14 HD videos (each video ca. 45 minutes) shot in the Amazon region. Filmed in the dry and wet seasons in the years of 2006 and 2007 the videos capture the dramatic changes that occur during sunrise and sunset. The single-direction videos focus on the invisible through sound and light, dis/appearance of the Rainforest. The project’s intention is to transport the viewer while creating a sensorial environment, which evokes awareness to an ideal Nature, our Sehnsucht.  AMAZÔNIA serves as a living landscape that creates an immersive effect upon the viewer, there is no sound beyond the ambient polyphony of the rainforest and no silence. By projecting on a black-painted surface, Fabião unites the medium of painting to that of video and, in doing so, reveals a new kind of depth to the projected image while also exploring the extremes of darkness and light.

The absence of humans, or any hint of their accoutrements on site leads the viewer back in time. One could consider 30,000 years ago pre-historic cave paintings at Chauvet a first exhibition –a time preserved in the dark. Projecting on Black looks for the purity of darkness and light, the subtle perception and conservation of passing time and euphoric nature in the AMAZON.

‘We must immerse ourselves in the “otherness,” inwardly uniting our feelings with the pain or pleasure expressed by the sound. To do this, we must disregard what the sound is for us–whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, agreeable or disagreeable. Our soul must be filled only with what is happening in the being from whom the sound comes.’

Rudolf Steiner

Wild space. The Amazon wilderness maintains its power to draw us to it. Eternally fresh, constantly refreshed, yet we sense and know that this particular wilderness is continually endangered by even those with the most benign intentions. Our knowledge that these places exist continues to lure us to them, tempting us to spoil its purity. We see these spaces and desire them -- not to own them or control them, but to experience that level of reality that seems an idealized state to urbanized residents of 21st-century cities. The deep Amazon seems as remote and unreachable as any quest for transcendence -- and at the same time, so simple and available: just there for the (picture) taking.

In her simple and elegant video landscapes, Fabião expresses her experience of these spaces in their most quotidian yet most profound transitional states -- dawn and dusk. To the work’s credit, the notion of real time is communicated as profoundly as the sense of the river’s physical beauty. The rich and complex sounds of the river emerge and fill the room before the dawn’s light opens our view, creating as profound a picture of the Amazonian space as Fabião’s straightforward camera work. We luxuriate in Fabião’s visual and sonic space, though eventually we begin to feel uneasy about our comfort. As the darkness descends, however, we are comforted by the inescapable reality of the unbreakable nature of this wild space. The re-emergence of the river’s symphony (no silence here) once again reigns as our visual experience fades into memory. It is a relief to sense that our observation of this primal wilderness has not (and can not) alter the environment any more than our gazing at the stars can change their course.

Recently, I was shown a photograph of Teatro Amazonas, the amazing 19th-century opera house that was built in the heart of the Brazil’s Rio Negro. (The same theater made famous in Herzog’s fictional Fitzgeraldo.) And I wondered then, as I wonder now, about the folly of bringing opera into a natural environment that generates its own extraordinary symphony night after day after night, and has done so for eons. I thought for a moment about the tradition of camera work in remote wilderness, from 19th-century photographic expeditions, to the 1970’s video work of the Chilean artist Juan Downey -- the folly and the lure. The lure of wild spaces.

Thankfully, Fabião’s videos don’t negate the need for man-made opera or art of any kind, as much as they reveal and celebrate the majesty of the wild space. Something found that was never lost.

David A. Ross
New York
Summer, 2008