EL PROTAGONISTA ES EL FUEGO

The exhibition The Protagonist is Fire forms part of the project The Need to Have Walls (2019), which takes as its starting point the film The State of Things (1982) by Wim Wenders. In the film, a director and his crew move to Portugal to shoot a science fiction movie called The Survivors. Wenders’ film explores the director’s struggle to finish the movie. A hotel and a seaside swimming pool serve as the main location of the film, and also become the central setting of this narrative: the idea of survival, the experience of being close to the edge, the approach to the end of something.

Following a stay in Lisbon, the project unfolds around the relationship between fiction, the filming locations, and a constructed environment filled with symbols, grottos, and lakes that point toward the idea of the end of the world. A structure that holds water, a wall hiding a text, a voice narrating an absence, a survival protocol. All of this is fiction. Stories only exist within stories. And the protagonist is fire.

The video installation The Need to Have Walls consists of a large structure that supports a series of images referencing the places where Wenders’ film was shot. The video, through a fictional narrative, references my personal experience in Lisbon: the attempt to reach the seaside hotel, the expectation of a swimming pool, the encounter with a green lake and a series of statues.

Nota al pie (Footnote) reinterprets a scene from the film in which one of the characters looks through photographs taken by her daughter while speaking into a tape recorder. She explains how, in most of the images, female characters appear cropped—“as if her camera doesn’t see them.” The piece begins with an archival image showing a statue of a goddess and a lion in Quinta da Regaleira, where a footnote refers only to the presence of the lion. A series of contemporary photographs show the same statue, now seemingly hidden by its surroundings. An audio track plays from an iron structure, narrating this situation from the statue’s point of view. At its base, motion-sensor LED lights illuminate the presence of the viewer.

Liquid State explores the relationship between expectation, reality, and fiction through water. A green lake, an altered image of the pool, and the sea form a dialogue between fiction and distorted reality. Alongside these images, a still from the film showing its characters staring out to sea floats inside a fish tank filled with green absinthe.

Through a series of foam panels simulating a wall and a vinyl print of an image from the film, Stories Only Exist in Stories reflects on the interference of fiction in life—the influence of narrative and the layering of stories in the construction of history.