In Double Exposure, André Alves probes the possibilities of artistic experience in representing and interpreting reality and the limitations of making it accessible through a video-poem which narrative details the conversation between a traveller and its shadow. An expression of what is absent, peripheral, invisible, of that which cannot be explained or documented, the video script departs from Nietzsche’s work The Traveller and his Shadow, the story of a walker surprised by his shadow.

Quoting Nietzsche’s text in his video, André Alves moves from dialogue to monologue, essentially in order to convey the perspective of the shadow and thus paying attention to that which cannot be explained or transmitted in the documentation of experience, while giving presence to an invisible world, to that which is hidden, to that which we do not see, to the existence of the formless, to that which is beyond representation but nonetheless defines it.

The narrative and summoning up of this metaphor also allows André Alves to construct a reflective space in which he investigates the most significant political, ideological, philosophical, cultural and identitary characteristics of the history of modernity and the condition of the contemporary subject within the current regime of communication and information in which connection and digital networks, speed of communication, visibility, exteriority, positivity and conformity reign. In this context, the shadow is essentially a figure of resistance that brings into play the incommunicable, that which unsettles, disorients and transports us to an invisible world and to the sensory dimension of existence, experience and language.

Double Exposure was developed for Research Pavilion: The Utopia of Access, an initiative of the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Arts of Helsinki for the 57th Venice Biennale (2017).

Sandra Vieira Jürgens