Between Clarity and Fog, 2008_09 (new version, 2013), HD video, color, sound, 25’34”
José Carlos Teixeira’s multi-channel video-installation relies on the idea of hidden/internal border as main operative concept. Between Clarity and Fog addresses issues of identity, and departs from a subjective investment on a larger history and geography, intending to look for the nowadays invisible but, perhaps, lingering psychological lines of frontier between the West and the former East. Landscapes, portraits, interviews, and multiple voices shape the whole piece.
After the decay of the so-called Grand Narratives – and having Europe come together under the symbol of the German reunification – what has happened? Is the former socio-political dialectics East/West still relevant in the minds and lives of people? Is there anything to be rescued from both sides? What kind of new dialogue could emerge? How do I place myself in such exploration, subjectively investing on my position of fascination, yet otherness and detachment?
By no means this artwork aims to a formatted political discourse, but rather to a more overarching essay. There are no conclusions or easy judgments, rather an understanding of complexity, fragility, and contradiction. Teixeira is mostly interested on a hybrid language by pursuing artistic, subjective, poetic, and also anthropological framings of reality.
Between Clarity and Fog: an odyssey into one’s perplexities and doubts, a journey across former lines… wondering about new and different ones.