21 Jan 2015

Nuno Nunes Ferreira at EMPTY CUBE project

For the 35th edition of EMPTY CUBE, which will be held in the Appleton Square gallery (Lisbon, Portugal) on January 23, 2015, Nuno Nunes Ferreira will present his 'circa diem' project.

The work consists of a mass of archive materials, specifically gathered by the artist himself for this ephemeral project, which will cover a span of about three hours; it will be presented in real time as a video, and also as an archive that can be accessed and consulted during the presentation of the work. The project's title, 'circa diem', is closely connected to the concept of circadian (from the Latin circa diem) rhythm, or cycle, and means 'roughly one day'.

The working process Nunes Ferreira displays here consists in collecting and archiving a variety of elements that highlight and reconnect histories and stories, as well as the apparent affinities and relations of various references; in his work, the archive acts as a conceptual sub-structure that confronts us with our perennial and irreversible condition, in which memory is made to reconcile with the precise reconstruction of its fragmented legacy.

In the human species, the circadian rhythm or cycle defines behaviors that can be associated with what is normally called the biological clock, a part of our brain's central structure (more precisely the hypothalamus) that acts as a regulating system. But this phenomenon is also echoed in animal migrations and in plant growth, within a temporal cycle that is punctuated by the presence of sunlight and its absence during the night: a metaphor of the natural (and sometimes contradictory) order that defines itself between wakefulness and sleep.

Nuno Nunes Ferreira explores this model exponentially by amassing a bibliographic archive that covers a whole year and is continuously dissected until the last second of that same year, whose reference in time is the exact day of the project's presentation at EMPTY CUBE: January 23, 2015. The work's metrics condenses temporality, juxtaposing it to a textual palimpsest that possesses a clockwork-like quality. Indeed, it is as if these texts were the face of a clock, on which we can constantly pinpoint time via the tangible possibility of recognizing the referential moment of a particular second in the sequence of the next movement.

This work will be photographically documented, and some of the photos will be displayed on the project's site – www.emptycube.org