SARA RODRIGUESI can't say more

Water is the central element of the installation that Sara Rodrigues (Porto, 1990) opens this Friday at Sismógrafo. Through the recordings of everyday actions, to trips recently made, the artist focuses her attention in the liquid element. This visual documentation, presented through the superimposition of images from a double video projection, is accompanied by a sound piece where not only field recordings are included, but also vocalizations by the author of songs where water emerges as a central motif.

The exhibition, the first solo by Sara Rodrigues, includes also a table which will be activated through various actions, like the simple gesture of drinking a glass of water, the daily register of the weather forecast – the construction of this narrative recalls the observation produced by Henry David Thoreau during his permanence in the hut constructed by himself next to Walden Pond, a lake situated in Concord, Massachusetts –, or the collection of song lyrics where the liquid element is present. With this material, the artist will construct the performance with which she will finalize the show, in September.

Between the authors summoned by Sara Rodrigues for the process of the exhibition Gaston Bachelard stands out, namely his essay Water and Dreams: An essay on the imagination of matter (1942), where we read: “The being devoted to water is a being in vertigo. He dies at each second, something of his substance constantly crumbles. The quotidian death is not the exuberant death of fire that perforates the sky with its arrows; the quotidian death is the death of water. The water always runs, always falls, ends always in its horizontal death. In numerous examples we shall see that for the material imagination the death of water is more prone to dream than the death of the earth: the suffering of water is infinite.”

Let us still refer to the exhibition’s title “I can't say more”, that has origin in the text First Faust of Fernando Pessoa:

Ah, all is symbol and analogy!
The wind that passes, the night that cools
They are other things than the night and the wind –
Shadows of life and of thought.

All that we see is something else.
The vast tide, the anxious tide,
It’s the echo of another tide that is
Where is real the world that is

All we have is forgetfulness.
The cold night, the wind passing
They are shadows of hands which their gestures are
The mother illusion of this illusion.

[free translation from portuguese by the artist]

Sara Rodrigues (Porto, 1990) lives and works in London. Having a degree in Fine Art from London Metropolitan University, she is currently studying Contemporary Composition and Sonic Art at Goldsmiths University. Her work is multi-disciplinary, encompassing audiovisual composition, performance and installation. Colective exhibitions include Arbeit Gallery, London, Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, Zagreb and Galeria Quadrado Azul, Porto/Lisbon, having also taken part, in 2014/15, in the residency ‘1ª Avenida’, in Porto. Sara Rodrigues founded, with curator Cristina Ramos, ‘The LivingRoom’ projects, a nomadic space dedicated to the presentation of multi-disciplinary arts. She is also a member of the New Music Ensemble at Goldsmiths, a collective with whom she regularly presents work.