My father, João, was blind. Last time we were together, he asked me to take him to the living room so he could hear the wind blowing more closely. Then he asked me how many steps it would take to get across the street, what was between on side and another, and if there were curves on the way because he would need to make up a route to described images and others that remained in his memory. He could not stand that the description was polluted by “noise”. His eyes were hands for balance inside his private worldview. He has gone through more than five decades selecting a world of images where he could live and share space between his body, the couch, the armchair he listened to music, and the corners of the house. He always needed silence to understand what was before his eyes. Otherwise, noises of day could turn into matter (almost tactile) in that symbolic world. His life became the idea of an image from somebody else’s voice. When Ricardo Barcellos told me about The Blue Universe is a Booth two worlds match: my tumultuous outside world (visible/carnal) and João’s, interior, built from the words of those who were by his side. Anyone who believes that my world can produce more images than his is wrong.

Barcellos came into the world of blind people trying to understand and “tolerate” the high volume of images that reach us every second like shadows.  From a photographic repertoire, he proposes risk situations, challenging imagery and having a mental model as sensor that may overtake the third dimension. Who can sees what? Mass information should to be unveil so we can overcome chaos, said composer Sérgio Sá, 63, congenitally blind, one interviewed for the project. That is the proposed filter: who will bear to see plenty and who needs information to build an immediate landscape? Paraconscious system takes something to a culture of vision. What is before our eyes: a cloud or a soap bubble?

The Blue Universe is a Booth deals with encoded images. One: a table broken in pieces where each corner will touch the finger of a non-built vision. Two: horizons in the imagination’s border: how is the blue? Do objects smell? Does color have a sound?  How can we touch the skyline? Three: moon at the same time projected and diluted: inside a smoke/cloud what will remain between what we can see and cosmic loneliness? Four: discovery of landscape at our fingertips. Imagination printed in 3D so relief wins digital photography: here touch will be the protagonist of thought/vision. Five: inside a cube, passers-by appear and disappear between real and imaginary: “Those who cannot see are able to notice body occupying a space. Those who can see notice body as if it was a moving image”, claims the artist searching for a path between what is volatile and what may be perpetual. Six: panic of bombarded images. Author’s eyes try to understand the pain of others. Those who recover sight after blindness and succumb to a conflict between two extremes, which can result in depression and death.

The Blue Universe is a Booth is an experiment involving words, matter, things and landscapes that try to balance in the limits of what is tangible and what is not anymore.  Something like touching an object described by distance or trying to live with the “reality” of images cast on our retina.

 

Diógenes Moura

Writer and Curator of Photography