MARIA SASSETTI (Lisbon, 1986)

The artwork presented by the artist Constança Clara, at the Edge Arts’ venue, faces us with the following challenge: how to perceive a black painted perforated cylinder placed in the middle of a business center, between an accounting office and a gym? For this, I propose to go back to one of the first visual instruments of mass entertainment, from the nineteenth century: the panorama.

A panorama is a circular structure with a closed dome and capacity to seat up to three hundred and fifty people. The audience, seated in the dark, watched translucent canvas painted with images created by the passage of external light on the canvas as well on the ceiling. Many times, in order to accentuate the 360 “experience”, it was combined with sound effects, such as music or drums, or olfactory experiences, by including fragrances or the smell of burned wood. The idea was that the audience would be in a total immersive experience. The most common displays were of war deeds or landscapes of distant and unknown lands, outlined by a strong didactical component.

These canvases were made with great detail and effort, in which its performers, with the help of a “camera obscura” (and later on, of photography), minutely captured the image of the place or scene. It was an instrument of visual illusion created at a time when the Industrial Revolution radically changed the landscape, by arising the need to show the great achievements of Humanity. At this pre-cinema period, reality is replaced by an image. The art installation made by Constança Clara, for the Edge Arts’ venue, brings us to all these fundamental questions, from the changes in our landscape to the history of the ultimate illusion or its own representation.

In this cylindrical space, where we enter and immediately find a different light tone, created by the perforated fabric, we realize that we are not seeing distant and exotic landscapes or epic battles, but a human skeleton lined with dry leaves and paraffin. Maybe it is a homo vegetabilis? The viewer will tell us.

In addition to this artwork, the artist also presents, and following her research on nature, a series of objects which could be “creators of life”. Fragments taken from nature, such as wood, shells, dried leaves or stones, in which the artist intervened in order to make a new object, with symbolic and magical meanings.

In a time in which we systematically read news about climate change and its consequences, it seems pertinent, by revisiting History of Art and its media, to recall that these changes are real and that any warning call can be positive.