UNFOLD: Vera Sofia Mota

19/05/2021

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The following performances are part of UNFOLD: Nan Hoover, on Wednesday, 19 May, 2021 from 16.00-21.00 CET.

Attend the Facebook event and get your tickets here.

For this year’s edition of UNFOLD: Nan Hoover, LIMA invited artist Vera Sofia Mota to re-interpret Nan Hoover’s work. On May 19, Mota will present two new pieces: Movement Dissolves: Composition with Red and Shadow and Walking – Method, both taking different works from Nan Hoover as reference and work material. The works are the continuation of preliminary research on the artist's work, re-interpretation, documentation and archival practices carried out in collaboration with Fransien van der Putt and LIMA between 2015 and 2020 - Untitled (Unfold, Nan Hoover). Here, the development of practices of approximation, editing and recomposition of the archive, formed the starting points. This naturally resulted in a process of mixing and embodying traces of it.

“Being confronted with such a huge archive of works by an artist with whom I feel a strong artistic connection, but I hadn’t had the opportunity to become so close to it until this invitation, I wondered from start how could my practice reshape and transform itself when diving in the process of working directly with another artist's work. LIMA provided me this opportunity to work so closely with the material, editing and reinterpreting so that the identity of the author was/is often enigmatic, even to me.” - Vera Sofia Mota

Walking – Method

In this work, Mota explores both Hoover's and her own working methods, and combines them in the form of an interactive performance-installation. The slow walk performed by Nan Hoover in her video Direction of White Walls (1978), is used as the choreographic score. Image-movement feedback, walking loops, repetition, multiplication and accidental variations occur; in a piece which invites the audience to collaborate with the performers and Hoover to develop an improvised, emergent group composition.

Movement Dissolves: Composition with Red and Shadow

The piece is influenced directly by three works from Nan Hoover - Light Composition (1977), Movement in Dark Part 2 (1978) and Intercept the Rays (1982). Movement Dissolves is a game of subtle interactions and reverberations between slow movements, variations in light, sound and a black and white landscape punctured with red. This environment is inhabited by shadows of a body in movement and a rigid architectural structure which multiplies and fragments the visual perception of the body. The piece creates an immersive and meditative landscape in which sound and music, body and shadow, light and dark, movement and dance delicately combine between concrete and abstract forms, becoming indecipherable.