Contemporânea

Forming a synesthetic space that is realized through indeterminacy and disorientation, the video installation Identical (2023) by the artist Emily Wardill begins symptomatically with the combination of enigmatic elements that move indistinctly among themselves. Through a path that goes from abstract to figuration and from figuration to abstract, the work seems to be based on the construction of a misaligned space of apparently contradictory “realities” that deeply compromise the imagination. Therefore, Identical is a work that disarticulates our common perception of the relationships between things and situations. It is, therefore, an installation in which imagination is produced from a continuous correspondence between differences, and in which dissimilarities give rise to a plural operation of contiguity between reunion and separation.

Identical has a disoriented structure of images that refer to disparate visualities and emotional states. These different, and sometimes even supposedly opposing, orders of “reality” are combined through sequences of images that are coordinated with each other by way of sudden cuts. In this sense, the installation combines a variety of images and sounds, ranging from abstract visual elements, physical fights or sexual moments in a hotel room, sequences of actions by professional athletes, or excerpts from films and series. The artist, therefore, reconciles these diverse moments, in which their reassembly and expansion express a tension between imaginary and concrete elements. In this way, the questioning of the relations between consciousness and the imaginary are central to Identical – a work made of transience and discontinuity of its fragments, as well as their movements of disturbance and disorder.

Intersecting film, drawing, photography, sculpture and other artistic practices, Emily Wardill’s work often implies something that is not immediately comprehensible and is, consequently, experienced as strange, summoning “misremembered histories alongside popular culture’s dreams and nightmares, and carefully sequencing the ghosts that haunt personal experiences and shape social relations”1. This consistency and variety of cultural, imagetic and sonic references are the basis of Identical, which overlaps narratives in which, for example, the image of unidentified mass graves of enslaved people appears, covered by a mini-golf course in Lagos, Portugal. 

The fragmentary and simultaneous dimension of Identical is enhanced by the fact that it is a double projection, causing a circulation of images between screens that reverberate, divide and combine with each other. According to the artist, this formal structure is based on the concept of expanded cinema. This expanded understanding of cinema was first conceptualized by media theorist Gene Youngblood in his book Expanded Cinema (1970), although the expression that names this work was originally coined by artist Stan VanDerBeek, who incorporated the expression into his manifesto Culture: Intercom and Expanded Cinema, a Proposal and Manifest (1965), in which he defended the idea that artists of his time should invent a new non-verbal language, the main tool of which would be moving images. This artistic hypothesis proposed the development of new machines and languages ​​that could enable what the author called Ethos-Cinema, an emotional cinematic experience. The term expanded cinema is, however, more closely identified with Youngblood's work, and was used by him to designate immersive installations from the 1960s, in which a spatialization of the moving image in a physical environment was proposed. In a convergent understanding between cinema, science and technology, Youngblood addresses the relevance of art as a vehicle for the improvement and expansion of human perception, thus establishing a second nomenclature – synesthetic cinema, which leaves the mind and transforms into visuality, generating senses beyond vision: “When we say expanded cinema, we actually mean expanded consciousness. Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light or spherical projections. Expanded cinema isn’t a film at all: like life, it is a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical impulse to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes.”2.

From this framework, Identical intrinsically involves an imaginary of "expansion" that evokes a widening of the formal elements of the image and of the active condition of the spectator. Therefore, form and structure enter into a direct dialogue with the spectator, in a regime of structural, emotional and sensorial deconstruction. Wardill therefore asks whether expanded cinema can be remodeled to pay attention to and confront the disorientations present in contemporary social consciousness. Expanded cinema also reproduces the intrinsic vocation of cinematographic forms to continually become other, conceiving forms of experience that seem to be situated on the limits. The artist's research thus expands to a series of sensorial relations between what is seen, felt, heard and deduced. On the other hand, the installation deepens the artist’s ongoing investigation into the concept of the imagined image, which involves an approach to its meanings, uses and traces. According to the artist, the imagined image can be defined as “the space of the example, the case study, the metaphor, the hallucination, the dream, the nation-state, the utopia or the ghost. Particular to these spaces is their dependence on a material that doesn’t ever materialize. These spaces reflect on desire, on how images communicate and on our relationship to fictitious materials”3.

Under the influence of the imagined image, the opening seconds of Identical portray the unstable and fickle nature of the work in an elementary way. In the images present on both screens, we see a red substance, difficult to define, moving indefinitely. This mysterious introductory sequence returns punctually in the film, interspersed with images involved in simultaneous layers of separation and confluence between matter, intensities and drives. Among alternation and fusion, the installation polyphonically intertwines pleasure with domination and comedy with tragedy. Such an unstable space conveys opposing places that blur the apparent boundaries between images and sounds. The same process of disorienting editing appears in the sound part of the film, adapted from various sound sources, such as a more melancholic piece performed by an eight-member choir, or reassemblies from excerpts of songs, such as “Losing My Religion” by REM, or “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles. The sound part of the installation thus matches the same abrupt structure of the images, where a moment of melodic softness can be steeply interrupted by more ferocious sounds.

Through these processes of deconstruction, Emily Wardill uses narratives and structural content that question the ways in which reality is constructed. In Identical, deconstructive processuality also emerges through estrangement and disorientation, creating a distance from the common way of perceiving the world and a break with the automation of perception. Challenging the limits between the normal and the abnormal, the real and the imaginary, the installation values ​​the differences, relationships, clashes and conflicts present in the representations that surround us. Identical is, therefore, a work about the complexity and hybridity that inhabit a plural and fluid experience.