To arrive at a new place and to set up a mirror in order to reflect oneself is an egocentric attitude, a sense of our own identity and a certain way of feeling protected, of feeling at home…
The mirror – as a metaphor of this encounter – displays my body in the foreign land, confirming that I am there.
What more than a mirror can impose on us our very own presence?
But, behind that mirror, the other’s space is represented: the point of arrival!… and even if it is hidden – we can feel it, or know it, through the sound, which reminds us of the culture and the existence of another…
The pair of head-phones which comes from the space behind the mirror – the colonized space – allows each “colonizer” to see himself or herself and to listen to a “warlike” sound (10’:04’’) which translates the tension of the moment of the encounter between the “colonizers” and the “colonized”.
Just as Narcissus who found his own reflection in a lake, fell in love with it and followed it. Here we too as colonizers feel safer with the presence of our own image in an unknown place.
Is our presence and the way in which we impose ourselves in a new territory enough to say that that place belongs to us? Or is our existence as ephemeral as Narcissus’s in the water of a lake?
A mirage that merely attempts to erase the roots of a place?
This ambiguity of seeing ourselves, and of hearing within us, the voice of another – translates the underlying idea of the theme of our work in this Ultrabarroco project.
I see me and I feel you, your world… your deep and profound roots coming into my soul… I am not only me anymore. I cannot be only me from the moment I touch your ground…
I can hear the sound of your finger writing on the sand… the silence of your movement echoes in my head. I hear the sound of your presence… that’s all I can hear for now.
I can hear You. Can you see Me? Can you see my reflection behind that mirror? Listening to the sound of your presence?
