Archive
Photography
Tent | Antenna
We propose the construction and experimentation of two devices for capturing luminous and sonic signals from outside and inherent to our planet. 1. Tent – is a photographic camera, based on the model of the astronomer Johannes Kepler – inserted in research project in development (*). Construction, installation, observation, exposure and development of photosensitized surfaces. 2. Antenna – capturing sounds through an antenna sensitive to low frequencies; capturing the natural sounds of the landscapes around the residence. Electronic editing and modulation of sounds and construction of a sound piece. Radio broadcast back to the stars.
*The present research project involves the design and construction of an optical and photographic device allowing to see and print the stars in the sky (at night). This device is inspired by the tent-camera or camera obscura of the astronomer Johannes Kepler. As far as the “state of the art” is concerned, we can say that there aren’t known artistic antecedents aiming to explore Kepler’s invention in order to contemplate or register the night sky. Even the hypotheses of its scientific use, by Kepler, are hesitant: did he try to see the Universe projected in two dimensions on paper? Was it used to draw the stars and thus represent the sky map? In any case, at the time (early 17th century) photography had not been discovered yet, Kepler could never have drawn all the bright stars, deprived of enough hands to compensate for the rotary movement of the Earth. Hence the novelty on which our project is based, with two components: building the tent-device with the double function of light-imprinting (camera obscura) and photographic development (darkroom). The biggest problem to be faced consists precisely in the articulation between these functions inside the tent, being necessary to conceive a material structure relatively agile, sufficiently blackout and relatively wide. Agile to allow its mobile vocation and easy installation outdoors, blackout to fulfil its design as a printing and developing chamber, large enough to allow the permanence of (at least) two observers at a time. The group of researchers, gathered around the Principal Investigator, aims to respond to the multiple technical and scientific aspects that such an artistic project requires: the optical, chemical and equipment design aspects. In a world saturated with images, as is ours today, in a world where paradoxically there has never been so much technical and phenomenological ignorance about the reality of an “image” (worthy of that name), the main result we aim is the following: to make the gestation of the image inhabitable again, witnessing the cosmic latency of the light emitted by the stars (ancestral time) and the chemical latency of photographic revelation (time called “present”). In this meeting between latencies, the observer may rediscover the time of the image – the time that any image, after all, asks of us.
Pedro Tropa
Is an artist, trained in Drawing and Photography at Ar.Co. He was awarded with a scholarship by the Luso-American Development Foundation / IAC – Ministry of Culture at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, USA. For about two decades his work in drawing, photography, text and sound has been strongly linked to the landscape and his practice as a mountaineer. He belongs since 2009 to the group of artists of Galeria Quadrado Azul. He is a collaborating artist since 2018 of the collective Osso and is a founding member of the project Matéria Simples. He has been a teacher since 2007 at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte de Comunicação Visual where he is currently the head of the Photography department. Since 2010 he runs the course ‘Saída de Campo’ which brings together students of Drawing and Photography in a fieldwork regime in the central massif of Serra da Estrela.