By Agnaldo Farias
Created in co-authorship with filmmaker Célia Freitas, Swimming (Nadando) and The passing (Passantes), both by Daisy Xavier are not properly videos, but rather, video installations. More than a technical specification, this term implies the incorporation of the architectonical space and, therefore, the involvement of the bodies of those who contemplate them.
Differently from works exclusively aimed at the eye, to be seen from the outside, from a distance you may calculate as you wish to get more or less involved with what you see, Swimming and The Passing demand a lot more than that. Seeing them means being inside them, in the case of
Swimming, following the sequenced rhythm imposed by the swimmer as she cuts the water plan longitudinally, twisting her body as if being involved by the image. The same happens with The Passing, which, composed of two simultaneous projections, demands harsh and intermittent decisions as to which projection should be followed. Once inside it, your body will be activated, forced to a movement made in obedience to this work. By experimenting both of them, observing this particular experience in which space-temporal dimensions merge, you might wander: who's in motion?
The problem of the movement seems to be the touchstone of Daisy Xavier's poetics, starting from the proposition of the image, which functions as a double of the viewer. That's where the question begins: who's this that I see cutting the water horizontally, without any signs of fatigue or disheartening, without losing the rhythm? Whose body is this, which takes me along, brings me to the surface of the water towards the infinitude of the blue?
Similarly, we can see in The Passing the tension between body and house, a body that we can see through a net, this weird apparatus which, at the same veils and unveils, reinforcing the reciprocity and the exchange between in and out. An undefined shadow turns into a defined body inside and outside a house. We rush through this house, flowing along its walls and floors, in a flux that is interrupted by the machines that will tear it down. The body as the other, the net as skin, the house as the body.
The debris that fall apart disorderly tell us about a disintegration of time, this inexorable lord, who transgresses the space, exceeding the borders of the screen, assaulting our body, surprising us, who believe to be safe from the limits of time.
Instituto Tomie Ohtake - São Paulo, 2007