on its way; it was here yesterday

bárbara baron
"[...] television is, in its origin, a machine capable of infinitely producing the present-represented:
it is a memory capable of storing the 'becoming archive' without limits."8

– – – Jean Paul Fargier

– – – in Video Gratias
–––
–––
index
notes to the english translation 05
prelude 07
preface 29
‘on its way; it was here yesterday’ 32
haviklaan, 4 37
quintessential 43
hic et nunc 48
afterword by ivi brasil 52
bibliography 53
special thanks 54
appendix: text of letters and other materials 55
notes to the english translation
chicago, november, 2019.

Portuguese is nothing like the English language: English is very simple and
pragmatic, while portuguese is very diffuse and idealistic. In Portuguese, everything
can end in –inho (sometimes a less common –ota or –oto can also be used). Coffee
is cafézinho, a little – tiny coffee. Mommy can be called mãezinha while daughter
can be called filhinha or filhota. These diminutive suffixes enquire sentiment by
themselves, as everything can have a cute little nickname. On top of that there’s the
fact that everything in Portuguese is very gender specific, which makes it a little
difficult to present an accurate English translation. When I finished writing the
Portuguese version, back in December of 2018, I was in my hometown of
Florianópolis, Brazil. We are now reaching the end of the decade. Having now lived
in Chicago for a while, I wanted to make sure that the subjectivity I had previously
managed to transmit to Portuguese speaking readers would also be experienced by
an English speaking audience. That means this version was both translated and
edited in order to reach its full potential and still ring true to my original intentions.
Some of the words weren’t translated at all to avoid the sterilization of
Brasilidade’s*brazilianness intricacies, which explains my use of the *superscript.

Memory is human connection, and being human exceeds both language boundaries
and geopolitical borders. This work is a little piece of myself. I hope that, after
reading and watching, your data bank of information is able to access and absorb
something meaningful to you; and when that happens, our connection will last a
lifetime or more.

Sincerely,
Bárbara

5
prelude
6
Descriptive Evaluation
School of Centro Educacional Menino Jesus
Early Childhood Montessori
Bárbara Vandresen Baron
Date of Birth: May 4th, 1995
Year: B-1-B, December, 1995.

2nd Term:
[...] sleeps well. Likes to listen to stories that her teacher tells her from books. She
understands what people say to her.

3rd Term:
[...] Bárbara is doing very well, and likes staying at school. When she arrives, she
throws herself into the teacher’s lap and plays the whole time. She plays with
dolls, but she prefers stories.

7
8
9
10
11
bárbara dictated the following text below in 1999

John and Mary who take care of lambs on a farm:

Once upon a time there was a boy called João. One day, there was a clap of
thunder, and he called out for Maria. Then, the following day, the sun came out and
they were a bit hot, and played on a trampoline. The following day, there was
thunder, with the sun of a rainbow from sidereal space. They were afraid that it could
be a wolf, but they were actually aliens from the outer reaches of sidereal space.
The aliens were all evil. João then fell in love with Maria; they wed and then the
aliens appeared, but this time they were nice.

12
bárbara dictated the following text on July 12th 2000

I have hope. Hope is a very pleasant word. I really like my friends Eduarda and
Thaízinha. I also like to play and to have fun, and also Pokémon. In terms of clothes,
I like skirts and dresses. We also like to pick leaves and then put them on our hair.
Love and hope. I ask for a little sister, right now!

Cat heaven is in outer space. Dog heaven is in planet mars sky.

Our heaven is around the clouds in the sky. When we’re in the sky we don’t feel
saudade* because we have a lot of work to do. You can work with thunderbolts, with
hail storming or regular rain making.

Bárbara,
May 2001

*saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent
something or someone that one loves.

13
14
15
16
Descriptive Evaluation
School of Centro Educacional Menino Jesus
Bárbara Vandresen Baron
Date of Birth: May 4th, 1995
Year: 3rd Grade, 2003. 1st Scholastic Term.

‘She is a very polite, calm, carinhosa*affectionate and loving girl. She has good
relationships with her peers as well her teachers. She takes part in school with
interest, always providing interesting facts to the group. She often finishes her
activities with the teacher, as she easily gets distracted talking to her friends or
fidgeting around with small objects. In these cases, her work is often cast aside and
her scholastic results are not always the best. With regard to essay writing, she
needs to implement writing exercises at home to help her better organise her ideas
and thus give better structure to her texts.’

17
18
Diary Excerpts, 2010-2013*high–school

My daydreams were handed over to me, carefully placed in a box as a present.

Could small Lucifer bet his own wings in exchange for an empty canvas? Poor child,
fallen angel. He fell from a cloud while tying his shoelaces. [...]

19
Diary Excerpts, 2010-2013*high–school

On an autumn morning, without any rush, I will contemplate the dry leaves of the
well-aligned silver maple trees as the leaves fall to the ground. Sip by sip, with a
hazy yet calm vision, the image of my recent past will create a frame for itself, and
only then I'll be able to say that this act is over.

[...]

20
Diary Excerpts, 2010*high–school

I wish for a lot of things.

I wish some things would be eternal, for example.
I think that every moment in life should be preserved.
Because, in a matter of years, it shall be nothing but a memory.
Memories are so comforting... on some occasions.
However, when I look at the sky, every night,
One can see that daily routine is just a torturing suicide.
It is now eleven twenty-four in the evening.
I am placing the tips of my fingers on the roof tiles.
A busy man is driving in a hurry, going to a building in the city centre.
A child is being born in Vancouver, Canada.
There is also a man arguing with a staff member on the London Underground. She has just missed her train.
A lady is taking her medication and going to bed, at this very moment.
Little Ndali is writhing in agony, experiencing true hunger in which none of us have experienced before: her
mother was not able to get anything for them to eat for an entire week.
A shooting star is making its way through the skies.
Ana has just been kissed for the first time; for some reason, she ran off.
The last bus reaches its final destination.
There is someone in it.
No-one even cares who the passenger is.
A deep and utter silence makes its way into our souls, and kills us in the worst possible way.
Slowly and painfully.
Right now, at this moment.

21
22
Diary Excerpts, 2014-2015?????

From a very early age I have been able to remember moments that seemed to
pronounce my connection with things linked to the past. This does not necessarily
mean that I yearn for better moments in my life, although this does indeed occur
quite often. It began as an intense fear of my mother's death - one time, I remember
passing by her bed at night and moving her hands from her chest, because I related
her intertwined fingers to the position in which corpses often rest their hands at their
funerals. On another occasion, she told me that she had woken up one night when
I was young to get some water, and saw me sitting by the garage floor, sobbing,
sure that both of them were gone*there’s more to this story. This fear may have passed, but
the nostalgia*saudade somehow remains. I woke up crying uncontrollably today, and I
can’t remember exactly all the events that happened in my dream, but all the houses
I’ve ever lived in and kept in my memory were all merged into one, and an
uncontrollable fear that they were about to be demolished settled in. Then I burst
into tears, paralyzed in a plush armchair. From the window I could see my father
opening the gate as he smiled at me and waved hello, this being the exact memory
I had of summertime when I was five and he finally brought me a computer game
that would become my favorite throughout my childhood and early teens*it was the sims.

A similar thing happened about eight or nine years ago, I was probably about
thirteen. I dreamed that I was at one of my birthday parties at a specific place where
I have many childhood memories. While guests jumped on the trampoline I talked
to myself, my five-year-old self; she could not stop crying. I woke up sobbing that
night too.

“Heimweh” and “Fernweh” are two German words that have opposite meanings, the
first one meaning saudade, and the second one meaning wanderlust. Fernweh is
wanting to leave and Heimweh is wanting to stay. Heimweh, when it was coined as
a term, was even considered to be a mental handicap. Saudade was referred to as
mal du pays or even “the swiss illness”, given its frequent occurrence among swiss
soldiers in France around the year 1688. They were even prohibited to sing their
beloved swiss songs as a form of punishment.

23
Even though sometimes I feel as I’m trapped in the past, I also long for a different
future somewhere new. So I ask myself: if there wasn’t such a thing as change, if
the world could stand still, would there be such an unique feeling as saudade? I
wonder if there can be a balance between both. Maybe the present is a combination
of both. Maybe the past, smelling of warm bread and fresh coffee, the sight of my
father holding a newspaper as big as myself; or waking up in a shooting star printed
bed at ten on a Saturday morning with my mother’s laughter (I've never found a
better way to wake up, if not with laughter from my mother); or even when you yearn
for a time where you weren’t even born...

But all of this could simply just be my own brain’s self-sabotaging mechanisms
keeping me from digging deeper. I don’t know. But I refuse to put aside saudade;
whatever – past or future, real or imagined – because at this point of time: where I
am now, three in the morning with my cheeks boiling with salty tears, they’ve
embedded themselves (these saudades) to my identity. Other discussions remain,
and I may or may not look more deeply into this issue.

Wish me luck.

24
25
August 2nd, 2018. Florianópolis, Brazil.

A few weeks ago I was at Ceisa–Center’s parking lot, a historical building in

downtown Florianópolis, and I found myself staring at a wall made of yellow tinted
glass blocks. I caught myself thinking: the framing of what I was seeing at that
moment had probably been the same since 1978, when the building was
inaugurated. This raised questions in my mind: was it really important, at that exact
moment, to know whether it was 2018 or 1983, or even 1978? The view that I had,
evidently, had not been aged like photographs or videos. Even so, what I viewed at
that moment was the same image, the same view, which would have been seen at
any point in time between the construction of the building and that fraction of a
second. Everything surrounding that frame was the only thing that did in fact change,
of course – but what was inside remained the same. It seems that I want to say
something very complex with the innocent and limited vocabulary of a child. In fact,
I was much wiser than I am today...

26
preface
 I've always had a very intense feeling of attachment for all things marked
by the past. Through diary entries dating as far as I was able to write it's
perceptible that I seem to have been born with a perpetual feeling of wistful
longing. As you know, the concept of identity is always linked to our notion
of time. And if you think about it, we are all enslaved by it – some people
like me, more than others – and there’s no running away.

“Time is linear, it expands”. I learned this when I was around thirteen years
old. I was in 7th grade and had an obsession with films about time-travel. At
that time the ultimate dream, a desirable yet unfortunately unrealistic goal,
was to travel back in time. I wasn’t interested in visiting any specific close–
by point in time, as my teenager tunnel vision could only focus on years that
preceded my birth; which meant the destination needed to be both within
the 20th Century and before 1995. The idea of closing my eyes and waking
up twenty-something years in the past seemed very attractive to me. One
summer afternoon between 2006 and 2008, I tested a fictitious method,
taken from the 1980 film ‘Somewhere in Time’. In the film, the leading actor,
in the midst of an existential crisis following a break-up, falls in love with a
woman portrayed on a photograph from the early 1900s. He then promptly
purchases clothes and currency from that time and then, through self-
hypnosis, tries to convince his own mind that he is there, as an effort to
meet her. Obviously, my attempt did not work. However, had it succeeded,
the young Bárbara would have been prepared: she was at her
grandparents’ house on Daniela Beach1 in Florianópolis, a neighborhood
which had been populated since the second half of the 1970s. On top of
that, she had prepared a backpack with some Cruzeiros Reais2, one
change of clothing, and some chocolates. My point is that, on that
afternoon, I learned something I had already read about on the Internet, but
had refused to accept. That time is linear, it only expands, and most likely
if scientists ever managed to finally figure out a way to travel in time, it would
not be possible to go backwards. If the possibility only allowed traveling
forward in the chronological arrow of time, one would never be able to
return.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Thinking about that, and trying to
apply that desire to my reality, I became interested in the capture,
appropriation and manipulation of a past-time. To the extent that such a
faithful capture of a given reality was proven to be impossible – since
clearly, the march of time is inflexible, and a copy would end up abstaining
from an aura – the hypothesis of some sort of temporal-simulation has been
demonstrated as the only alternative for my inability to effectively travel to
the past. "Ah, to capture, slow, to arrest time. The world’s illusion."1 Now,
finally, I can capture and manipulate the past. Provided, of course, there is

1. Beach located to the North of Florianópolis, on Santa Catarina Island, Brazil.

2. Currency used in Brazil between 1993 and 1994.

28
 record of it. An attempt at a maximum frame 1, without duration: a true
prototype of an atom of time, which is neither truly past, present, or future.
Such a framework could not exist in time, since by definition, without
duration its existence would be impossible. So imagine that there may be
bubbles parallel to the natural line of time. The inflexible temporal arrow
would allow for its points to multiply into infinite space-time warps curated
at my will. These time-pockets (see page 34) would become actual lumps
on linear time, curvatures allowing for one or more pockets to compress
and accommodate a specific time-space chosen and edited accordingly.
The depth present in a specific time and space could allow me to put
together archives of extra-realities available for indefinite visitation.

Finally, some good news.

With a certain melodramatic tone, and in hopes of having caught the

solution of maybe having some kind of infinite reproduction machine of a
past-present represented with a memory capable of storing the 'becoming
archive' without limits8 in my hands, I would like to end this letter with an
excerpt from Walter Benjamin’s Image of Proust:

“One might say that our most profound moments have been equipped—
like those cigarette packs—with a little image, a photograph of ourselves.
And that ‘whole life’ which, as they say, passes through the minds of
people who are dying or confronting life-threatening danger is composed
of such little images. They flash by in as rapid a sequence as the booklets
of our childhood, precursors of the cinematograph, in which we admired
a boxer, a swimmer, or a tennis player.”

Hopefully,
Bárbara Baron
6:52PM, September 21st, 2018. Florianópolis, Brazil.

29
on its way: it was here yesterday
Bárbara Baron
"On its way; it was here yesterday."

– That’s what artist Hreinn Friðfinnsson told curator Hans Ulrich Obrist when
asked what the future of art would be like.

When is the estimated arrival time for the future, if the present is nothing
but a point where the infinite future is separated from the infinite past?1 Like
a snake who swallows its tail, the psychological experience of time is an
uninterrupted action responsible for the future becoming the past, and
during the process only for a fraction of a moment everything is present.
The future has really been here, and I can prove it. I have everything
documented on video. Going well beyond Susan Sontag’s statements in
her book On Photography, I can attest: to videograph is to appropriate the
thing videographed. Videotaped images are bits of the world, miniatures of
reality that anyone can make, acquire and manipulate. But also everything
that you watch ultimately becomes a part of who you are. Every single frame
constantly being scanned by your eyes is rapidly being added into your vast
data bank of information.

It’s undeniable that we all yearn for meaning. And with meaning, images
are full to the brim. When nothing else makes sense and life looks like an
arbitrary lottery of meaningless tragedies and a series of near escapes,
images assume the comforting power of grasping what remains of our
purpose. As director Wim Wenders would put it: “Most images that we see
are out of context. [...] But the most basic human need is that something is
telling us something. Like a child that, when it goes to sleep, it wants to hear
a story; not so much because it cares about the story, but the very act of
storytelling creates the security that comes out of any story, whatever it is
about. The structure of the story creates meaning, and most of our lives
happen without much meaning. So we’re all sort of craving for meaning”.
That meaning, at times lost completely in a universe immersed in
disposable images, can be found shining through memories of momentous
occasions– images that help us remember who we are and where we came
from.

“Who am I?”

“Why am I here, specifically?”

“Why am I myself, rather than any other person at any other point in time?”

31
Electronic moving images are also reflections of human behavior. Within a
light emitting magic box, lives that are no longer among us can remain
preserved. That’s evidence that the moving image has the power to both
manipulate the truth, as well as cross space and time. Video transcends
human existence by surpassing the fraction of photographic time and
uniting these intervals of time and space. As artist Bill Viola said, cameras
are guardians of the soul. A part of ‘me’ remains and enters video,
becoming immutable for the rest of eternity. If we observe the things around
us, we see that everything is memory in its own context. All things and all
objects, especially those made by human hands have lives of their own,
they are alive. That might be the most powerful characteristic of an artistic
object created by a real individual, the capture of their very essence.20

“On Its Way; It Was Here Yesterday” is a four-channel installation in which

I attempt to archive moments of my own life into a space residing outside
of time, trying to spare them from entropy and neglect. While attempting to
archive these ‘little bits’ of a ‘whole life’ that make me who I am – on the
way – I was able to capture on tape what life is all about. Throughout the
making of this project I navigated the network that is human connection,
equipped of a VHS camera, and was able to capture moments and different
little glimpses of reality that constituted who I was during the six months in
which it took for me to finish this piece. The first video, “Cara-Tevê (Face-
TV)” shows a metaphysical, amorphous Bárbara that experiences the
space without the passage of time while being projected onto a wall by three
block monitors that display continuously the videos “Haviklaan, N.4”,
“Quintessential”, and “Hic Et Nunc”. My basis was the fact that the television
monitor (as well as all its subsequent formats) which displays a sequence
of images through a screen, is not only displaying those images without a
context: these representations are also materializations of a specific time
and space. The totality of the piece was also made possible through the
collection of records from the past, scattered moldy tapes found in the
households of family members, as well as the school I used to go to as
child. We are all products of the past culminating in the eternal construction
of the present, and video modifies time itself, capturing it and manipulating
it. In his essay “Time Must Have A Stop”, Kenneth Anger describes this
relationship temporality has with his montage of film frames: “[…] In the
viewer of my cutting table, I could stop time, and isolate one picture as the
essence of the moving event”.1

Like a child who believes there are puppets eternally performing inside their
home’s television set, I rightfully choose second-hand reality over reality, or
output time and input time over “live” time. I carry out my own edit of a time
and space introjected into a ‘space block’ placed right outside the
chronological arrow of time. Inside that block, I’m eternally available for
visitation. Cara-Tevê (Face-TV), myself, faced with our quintessential (or
quintessequential) moments compiled in to melodramatic flashback

32
sequences. Given the work’s installation format, I wanted to be able
examine my own life inside an empty space. I wanted to actually be able to
see myself detached from my ‘self’, like one would in astral projection: as if
an outside perspective could be concrete proof of my own existence. After
watching the Wim Wenders film Alice In The Cities, I realized that’s a quality
I share with main character Philip, that is contested by an ex-lover on his
escapist habit of constantly taking Polaroid pictures of everything he came
across. After hearing him complain about how he had lost touch with the
world, she tells him: “You did that long ago. [...] You lose touch when you
lose your sense of identity. And that is long gone. That’s why you always
need proof, proof that you still exist. Your stories and your experiences –
you treat them like raw eggs. As if only you experience things. And that’s
why you keep taking those photos. For further proof that it was really you
who saw something. That’s why you came here. So somebody would listen
to you and your stories… that you’re really only telling yourself”. After
watching this scene, I realized that I had been doing the same thing, but
with magnetic tape instead of instant film. And I really think I could be doing
worse things than treating my experiences like “raw eggs”...

“On Its Way; It Was Here Yesterday” is life development hyperaware of the
fleeting aspect of the constant experiences of a lifetime. But memory can
be unreliable, something emphasized by the dramatic, almost theatrical,
quality of the work. That creates situations that constantly shift between
“reality” and fiction: such situations are actually quintessequences (see
Quintessential) crushed by an eternal pile of countless timelines edited into
this project. The block of space where Cara-Tevê (Face-TV) exists reveal
the perception of time as experienced by the individual subjected to the
Time–Pocket (see Haviklaan, 4): the projected creature-line stretched face,
duplicated out of myself, is deposited inside the block of space solely to
contemplate those events without the passage of time. In Haviklaan N. 4,
video shown on the first monitor, I solely contemplate the past: by carrying
through and materializing the concept of Time-Pockets, I finally go back in
time. Merging present with past, I manage to attend my parents wedding in
Den Haag in the year 1993: an event initially only united by space and
separated by time, was later unified through video. The second monitor
displays Quintessential, and so things begin to get a little complicated. The
“maximum frame”1 reveals itself through the flashing blue screen. It’s a
scene, both in the cinematographic and dramatic sense of the word. In “Hic
Et Nunc”, we have here–and–now: but not quite. By trying to locate it so
badly, I ultimately wound up placing the Present within the same timeless
compartment I had placed the Past. So the Present becomes pure
momentum: It’s only essence. In opposite ways as I had brought the
Present to the Past in “Haviklaan N.4”, in “Hic Et Nunc” the present
inadvertently becomes past.

33
 cara–tevê (face–TV) (2018)
video projection
0’13’’, 1440 x 1080, 4:3, color, no sound

34
haviklaan, 4
Bárbara Baron
The domestic quality of the VHS image is inherent to the documentary utility
of the equipment itself, as the Video Home System became popular in the
late 1970s and soon was present in most middle-class homes. VHS
cameras replaced all the complexity of the film: even in its most amateur
format, the Super 8 demanded a care and knowledge only found among
the most advanced amateurs. The VHS was, besides economically and
technically accessible, an analog technology: the image still existed on a
medium – the magnetic tape – thus keeping a certain analogy with film. The
digital image on the other hand, is merely a numerical representation,
usually binary, of a two-dimensional image. It’s a set of numbers that can
be read through a screen. The VHS, though electronic, produces true
analog images: when you roll the tape it’s still possible to see the remnant
of reality, the light reflected on something and that was recorded onto the
magnetic tape. There is no more image in the digital system. The image
itself is lost, after all we can only see it through a screen. In his essay
"Chronotopic Anamorphoses or The Fourth Dimension Of The Image",
Arlindo Machado states that in fact, "electronic cameras are the first devices
capable of recording time in sequence images, since cinema only simulates
an effect of duration through a succession of fixed frames".20 This is
because the electronic image is no longer, as all previous images were,
occupation of the topography of a frame, but the temporal synthesis of a set
of mutation forms.2 VHS, is also a true In Between in video technology. Not
only it’s considered a terrible long-term storage medium for archival
material, it’s also unviable for exhibition playback, as the magnetic tape
wears off each time it is played. Personally, I believe that only adds to the
profoundness of the Video Home System as it represents a fine line
between the past and the future.

On January 31st of 2018 I carried out a video performance entitled "Analog

Melodrama" at a historical cross way in my hometown of Florianópolis,
which guided me to utilize VHS as my preferred medium. The analog signal
was scheduled for interruption exactly at midnight, something that would
affect all television monitors located in the city. It was planned that by the
end of that year the analog signal would be extinct throughout all of Brazilian
territory, and The Brazilian National Telecommunications Agency
(ANATEL) was responsible for it. This melodramatic confrontation
happened with myself standing beside me, both in real life and inside a
television monitor, as the signal interruption happened through the airways.
Partially disconnected from reality, I tried clinging on to obsolete
technologies. This sentiment started after watching the piece “Television
Delivers People” by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, leading me
to an obsession with Blue Screens and the fact that they seemed like
electronic waiting rooms. My performance was set in the midst of a mental
breakdown, a neurotic fit triggered by the symbology of the imminent shut

36
off. I would ask everyone if they knew about the change, and nobody
seemed to really care for it. I felt as if everyone was willingly being delivered
to the High Fidelity Way Of Life. No one seemed to have understood what
was about to happen, the analog was dying and so was the image. The
analog signal is ‘human’ because it makes, captures and emmits mistakes.
The digital signal is nothing more than a binary copy: it is perfect, but devoid
of any essence.

– o sinal analógico é humano

– por favor – – –
– perdoem o sinal analógico.
– the analog signal is human
– please – – –
– forgive the analog signal.

When we dream our nostalgic dreams, we don’t return to the past as it

genuinely was. We are in a process of eternal present-future contamination.
This means that our memories of the past are not necessarily memories of
things as they really were. Nevertheless, this does not remove the appeal
of the past; as a subject can still experience an intense feeling of
longing*saudade for something; something that the subject may have lost or
which may been separated from them – even if one cannot understand the
pretext. After all, nostalgia – as suggested by Svetlana Boym, a professor
of Compared Slavic Literature at Harvard, “is a feeling of loss and
dislocation, but also a romance between a person and their own fantasy”.4
In his book ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, Jean Baudrillard explains such
nostalgic irrationality, which occurs when we lose touch with the world*with
reality, which ends up triggering an overvalue of original myths, signs of reality
and authenticity.14

37
We seem to be part of a never-ending lineage. However, there are always
breakages, interruptions, shifts and intermissions. In most cases, objects
don’t exist forever, and everything has a limited life span.4 Just like time,
identity is always something evasive and slippery, nearly always an
ambiguous mixture of predefined factors and future goals. In video, on the
other hand, time may be compressed or expanded, sped up or slowed
down; it may remain in the present or be transported to the past or to the
future; or even be frozen for as long as one wishes. Similarly, space can be
reduced or expanded; moved close by or far away; presented in a true or a
false perspective; or be completely recreated in a place that only exists
within the film.2 After the stage of accumulation of facts, having gathered
objects, pictures and other materials as part of an archiving process, looking
back, every time one comes across documental audio-visual records, it is
only common sense that each visualization should be made distinct. After
all, we know about the present, constantly dragging along the past. Each
and every sequence of pictures, experiences and information received by
our eyes now becomes part of who we are. For this reason, the very idea
of an identity is indivisible as time goes by. So if the contamination of the
present is inevitable, why not exacerbate it to the most extreme point of
saturation? With that in mind, inspired by Serra and Goodman’s blue waiting
room, I thought of a mental space to which I refer to as a Time-Pocket.
They are like cysts, saturated and contaminated by the essence of a given
moment. Manipulated, stretched or compressed, these are constructions of
a different time period, expanding and contracting parallel to the
chronological arrow of time.

In the year 1993 my mother was living in Den Haag, precisely in this
address: Haviklaan Street, Apartment N. 4, Netherlands. She had left Brazil
a year before that to pursue her master’s degree studies. My father later
joined her, sometime during the second half of her stay. They got married,
in a small ceremony around July of that same year. In august of 2018 I had
the opportunity to visit Europe for the first time, to visit a friend who at the
time happened to live in the small town of Enschede, also in the
Netherlands. By some strange coincidence, exactly one week before my
trip, my grandmother Graça found the VHS tapes of their wedding. That
tape had gone missing for over a decade and the last (and only) time I had
seen it I was probably about seven years old (I believe it was on the same
day that I took a photograph hugging my mother, which has been included
in this publication on page 16). So, of course, I went to The Hague. Without
tourism in mind, my visit had the sole purpose of attending my parents’
wedding. The contamination of the present occurred instantly during my first
stop: The Church of Our Saviour, an English Roman Catholic church. There
was no record of them ever being married on paper, and the minister at the
church, who was very friendly, offered to register them right there and then.
I shrug and smiled awkwardly as they are no longer married. He also told
me that most of the weddings at which ‘Father David’ (seen on Haviklaan
N. 4) had officiated had not been recorded correctly. He was an alcoholic –

38
a problem that apparently led to his demise – as well as disorganised. Years
later after the wedding he would have been ‘retired’ by the Church, because
of his involvement in a paedophilia case. So in reality, everything was
different: both the Parish House (my second stop) were the ceremony was
held and the garden of their house on Haviklaan street (my third stop). But
one must visualize the world four dimensionally. In terms of a four-
dimensional life, everything is layered, all instants of time, all experiences,
all monuments and all people; it is up to the artist, properly equipped, to
select each element and only then make appropriate materializations of
time-pockets. So with 2018 and 1993 united by magnetic tape, I was able
to attend my mother’s wedding. Tele-Vision reaches its potential of Time-
Machine, “of storing the 'becoming archive' without limits."8. Video Gratias.

39
 haviklaan, 4 (2018)
single-channel video
monitor #1
22’06’’, 1440 x 1080, 4:3, color, stereo

40
quintessential
Bárbara Baron
In Quintessential – or Quintessequential – I’ll explore two possible
meanings of a scene: the dramatic scene (oh*the sentiment! oh*the drama!), and the
cinematographic scene (rhythmic frames*compare hans richter’s rhythmus 23 to woody and
steina vasulka’s noisefields).

The quintessence (fifth essence) is an allusion to Aristotle, who considered

that the universe was made up of four key elements – earth, water, air and
fire – and also a fifth element, an ethereal substance that permeated
through everything and prevented the heavenly bodies from falling down to
Earth.3 Typical, prototypical and archetypal. Classic, model, representative,
ideal, consumed, exemplary, definitive. Sequences, compilations, music
albums and retrospective television programmes have the word
“quintessential” included in their titles, providing the public with a curated
basis of what is essential within a certain topic, subject or individual. Either
in music, where ‘The best of…’ albums are common, or film scenes where
the main character faces a film sequence through nostalgic flashback
scenes; these momentous collections separate specific moments, placing
them outside of where they would remain naturally. In doing so, these
moments are fragmented and reconstructed with a present perception. So,
whenever there’s a reflection of the quintessence (or quintessequentiality)
of a given moment, I point my imaginary camera towards both the oneiric
quality of cinema and the fragmented nature of memory. Memories hold the
power to be summarized collections of an extension of a body of work, as
they can be summaries of an entire life. The dramatic quality of these
“quintessequences” lead us to the creation of a theatrical scene, perfectly
described by Roland Barthes in Fragments of A Lover’s Discourse:

“No scene has a meaning, no scene moves toward an

enlightenment or a transformation. The scene is neither practical
nor dialectical; it is a luxury-and idle: as inconsequential as a
perverse orgasm: it does not leave a mark, it does not sully.
Paradox: in Sade, violence, too, does not leave a mark; the body
is instantaneously restored- for new expenditures: endlessly
lacerated, tainted , crushed, Justine is always fresh, whole, rested;
the same is true of the scene's partners: they are reborn from the
past scene as if nothing had occurred. By the very insignificance of
its tumult, the scene recalls the Roman style of vomiting: I tickle my
uvula (I rouse myself to contestation), I vomit (a flood of wounding
arguments),and then, quite calmly, I begin eating again.”9

42
The memory of the quintessential moment is a melodrama by its very
essence. It manipulates, cinematographically, the films we bring into our
brain. But in doing so, detaching them from the real event and
contaminating them with sentimentalism, the image-memory suffers with its
unreliability: so two subjects could have completely different recollections
of the exact same event. Just like memory, that excludes the sequentiality
of facts with no importance and which serve as frameworks for the
quintessential moment, compilations are based on curating moments, but
that is also involuntarily carried out by the human brain.

In the cinematographic sense, the scene is an unit of both time and space:
two different scenes may unfold in the same space, yet separated by time;
they are still different scenes. In any scene, there is rhythm, the frame rate,
which moves 24 frames per second. The rhythm is the regular and periodic
movement during any process, valid for the frame rate of film projections
but also for the digital or analog electromagnetic waves issued from a
transmitter to a receiver, such as radio, television or a mobile telephone. In
the piece ‘Analog Melodrama’, the cinematographic sense of the rhythm
present in a filmic scene gets mixed up with the dramatic scene itself. In
that melodramatic performance, evidently contaminated by sentiment and
confusion, I thought of the waves emitted through analog signals as human,
as they pick up mistakes and noises: they are imperfect. In contrast, the
waves emitted through a digital signal pick up whatever is being emitted
with utter perfection. Whatever is received through the digital signal is an
exact copy, a contrast between analog–digital that is evident through the
characteristics of their waves. A digital wave is made up of right angles
resulting in a “staircase” structure, while its analog counterpart is organically
imperfect.

Analog technologies were a part of my childhood, and maybe due to their “hoarder”
aspect; of being able to stash away memories that collect dust and with that
building some sort of physical character and value is what drove me to care so
much for it. It drove me to think of digital technology as somewhat unreliable, of
having a short life due to their programmed obsolescence. Cloud storage seems
very sterile and disguised when compared to chunky cassette decks and VCRs.

43
Another aspect of ‘Analog Melodrama’ was the use of the blue screen (which was
also used on the piece ‘On Its Way; It Was Here Yesterday’), something I found
when I first watched Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s video piece
“Television Delivers People’’. I got the impression that the blue screen, in that
context, was like a waiting room: somewhere the viewer could remain forever.
Which, in a more electronic and ontological way, does share a similarity to today’s
Cloud storage.

After that performance had been carried out and the death of the analog signal
had been made official by Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency, I started
seeing blue screens everywhere. It seemed to me as though these blinding blue
waiting rooms were following me, and so I started noticing them more. During my
daily life I started noticing computers, projectors, or virtually anything as they went
to “sleep”, leading to these things to start emitting that “NO SIGNAL” blue screen.
It was haunting me in its own mischievous way. Wanting to find more concrete
information on the meaning of the Blue Screen, I turned to the internet and then
verified the facts with a friend whose father was an engineer. The blue screen on
television sets, or the ‘blue screen of death’ on computers, is an audio-visual limbo;
a waiting room. I found that blue is the color screens revert to when there is no
entry (on television) and that could be due to how the wiring sends its electrical
input, meaning that the color returning to the screen is 100% B on the RGB scale.
The color blue is also the easiest to be generated on a screen after a black and
white picture, and in addition to that, Blue is the only ‘emotionally neutral’ color in
the RGB scale. Red means something is wrong, and green is taken as “all is good”
or “go”. With that in mind, while zapping through television channels, in the fraction
of a second separating one channel from the next, like some kind of maximum
frame1, we have the blue screen. It isn’t really perceptible to the human eye, but
depending on the speed of the dramatic accumulation of events, normally due to
some interference or loss of television signal, the blue waiting room could be
revealed.

In "Quintessential", the bombardment of images is uttered through rhythm: regular

and periodic movements which demonstrate the sequentiality and overlapping of
scenes as well as life events. Through the manipulation of my own home video
footage and a few shot by myself, quintessential becomes quintessequential as
rhythm and drama intensifies. The first scenes shows Ceisa-Center’s yellow tinted
glass blocks. Built in 1978, the building seemed to remain static in time, and those
glass blocks made me think that the frame of what I saw at that moment, in 2018,
could be the same image seen at any point in time between the construction of the
building and the fraction of a second to which I was standing there. Towards the
end, the video diverges to the breakage of the rhythm – – – the blue screen:
emulating the signal interference. This becomes a constant and extended apex,
something which challenges the very quintessence (perfection) that makes up the
work as a whole. The quintessentiality of my very own “the best of...”, my own
flashback sequence.

44
 quintessential (2018)
single-channel video
monitor #2
19’59’’, 1440 x 1080, 4:3, color, stereo

45
hic et nunc
Bárbara Baron
We are in the future: looking ahead, for a change, Zygmund Bauman states:
“The ‘here and now’ world is nothing more than one among infinite possible worlds:
past, present and future.” 4

– aqui e agora.
– here and now.
– hic et nunc.

Hic Et Nunc is my present circa 2018, while I was working on this project.
Sometime before that, while trying to think of a word that could define the feeling
when a subject lives a great moment and at the same time becomes deliberately
aware of its passing temporality, I wound up mixing the literary genre "Coming Of
Age" with the Latin term "Hic Et Nunc". This confusion could be explained by
linguistics, as I was writing this publication in Brazil, which was originally written in
Portuguese. At the time I was trying to capture the moment that precedes
decadence. Thinking well about it, the two terms do share some similarity. Hic et
nunc, used in existential philosophy, is Latin for here and now while Coming Of
Age is a literary and narrative genre that includes stories comprising the change
of growing up. I got to know the expression Hic Et Nunc while reading ‘The Work
Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction’ by Walter Benjamin. In his opinion,
the original of a work of art is always provided of its Hic Et Nunc, an aura that
would assure its authenticity. He also stresses that, with only one original having
been produced at a specific moment, place and time; created by one specific
individual, an aura would ultimately be assigned to the work by the public, ‘…the
only apparition from a long-distant reality, however close it may be’. This all got
muddled up in my brain with the perception of capture of a moment in time; as well
as nostalgia*saudade and zeitgeist, ‘spirit of time’ in German.

When thinking about a specific hic et nunc moment, a summer afternoon back in
2015 is the first thing that comes to mind. A week before my return to Brazil while
living in Milwaukee, I visited Chicago with a friend to attend a music festival. The
sun was burning hot, and we waited in a line that stretched on to miles. I wanted
to see the band Perfume Genius perform their song 'Fool', and they were one of
the first acts scheduled for that day. While we waited in line, I got more and more
anxious, as their show would start soon. I also assumed that since the song was
not one of their most popular, it would be one of the first to be performed. After
waiting for a while my friend suddenly grabbed my hand, urging us to reroute as
quickly as possible after realizing we had been waiting in the wrong line that whole
time. So with our hands held tight together, we ran towards the front gate where
that line ended. We proceeded along towards a significantly smaller line, up to the
iron gates that divided the street and festival grounds, through which we managed
to cross surprisingly quickly. Finally inside, still holding hands, we made our way
running as fast as we could towards the stage. During that moment, as we ran, the
stage sound blasted the melodic piano introduction of ‘Fool’. This specific moment,
recorded in my mind with a cinematic structure not unlike that of retrospective
flashback sequences, was both a coming of age moment and a quintessential
moment. A moment that overflows with hic et nunc. A moment of definition. A
moment which is the most important experience. A moment which explains and
clarifies everything. A moment when we can see the light.

47
The truth is that the fleeting aspect of the present constantly places it in the past.
But the impossibility of capturing the quintessentiality of a passing moment ends
up making it even more valuable; after all, the attraction of anything new lies
precisely in its ephemerality. The video Hic Et Nunc, is flux. “Hic Et Nunc”, as well
as the video installation “On Its Way; It Was Here Yesterday” as a whole, attempt
to capture something initially given as uncapturable. And these ‘attempts to
capture’, are also attempts at proving myself of my own existence. The spatial
possibilities in video installation allowed me to explore the fluctuous aspect of
memory in its most expansive form through extensions and contractions of time.
The video “Hic Et Nunc” specifically, demonstrates the rotating continuity which
allows a given apparition from that “long-distant reality, however close it may be”
to be seen: in the Benjaminian sense of the word, it’s the aura of a moment.
Present becomes pure momentum, emotion and essence. A model I thought of,
and of which made sense to me as a way to visualize this concept as follows.
Similar to jumping rope: two people are holding both ends of a line that spins
eternally. You must join in while the rope is already being skipped. The “maximum
frame”1 is the moment you’re able to intuitively jump inside.

When I was first writing this, I hadn’t finished making “Hic Et Nunc”. At the time, I
didn’t know if I would actually be able to capture it. I thought that if I wasn’t able to
capture the moment, I could at least simulate it. I took it as an experiment of trying
to look at my own present, as it was happening. My only rule was that if its purpose
was achieved – of capturing the present moment, then I would move over to here
and now: the conclusion, allowing me to look forward. At that moment I was
required to place myself facing the camera lens, as one would face a mirror,
confronting myself. The new confrontation is here and now. The frame rate
drastically increases from the first video, “Haviklaan N. 4” to “Quintessential”. That
increase in speed and rhythm doesn’t stop at “Hic Et Nunc”. It gets faster and
faster, and at the end moves at the speed of light. Only then – at hic et nunc – as
a consequence of its extreme saturation, finally reaches ebullience. The explosion
of the moment.

Dá-se um tchau, liberta-se.

A corrida continua, todavia, ininterrupta.
Ela pode mudar de direção e até de pista – mas não vai parar.

You wave goodbye, you free yourself.

The race continues, however, uninterrupted.
It can change direction and even change the running track - but it will not stop.

48
 hic et nunc, 2018
single-channel video
monitor #3
16’01’’, 1440 x 1080, 4:3, color, stereo

49
afterword
Ivi Brasil
 I see the future repeating the past
I see a museum, full of good things new
Time won’t stand still
Won’t stand still, no, won’t stand still... ... ...
...

Bárbara,

This Monday, the date of the electoral hangover, I remembered

Cazuza3 and his song ‘O Tempo Não Pára’ (or ‘Time Doesn’t
Stop’). This is a very old song for you, isn’t it? But then you call me
on Messenger and we talk about eternity – that’s too much time!
We forget, cast things aside, and pretend that things never
happened. Then, some things change and facts are shown,
updated, and performed once again. Sometimes it is a case of déjà
vu, sometimes it is reality repeating itself, as if in a circle. This is
the time machine, within ourselves.

So I’m here, contemplating… saudade is a powerful time machine,

you know? It is a blend of feelings… absence, loss, distance, time
that has gone by. The Portuguese word for nostalgia*yearning,
saudade, comes from solitatem in Latin, which means loneliness,
solitude. It is in this lonely existence that we see ourselves from
inside, and only then we may have the strength and the power to
continue our way along the timeline. March! 1, 2... I mean, to say
that the memories of the past and the inventiveness of the future
are keys to the present. The here–and–now action is stronger than
the static sculpture; more colourful than the static painting; intense
and captivating for taking us to distant or to close moments in time.
It is like a History lesson.

Our bodies are time machines, with duration and accumulation of

information. At the same time we unfold information and join it to
millions of experiences, we incur wear on our parts. My heart has
not yet failed, and my brain continues to make synapses; when I
met you, at the age of twenty-something, I was transported to an
afternoon when I came from São Paulo to visit your mother, and
saw you sleeping calmly inside your crib. The hustle, with other
people and with daily routine is the real machine that takes us to
many different places; and that doesn’t even require satellite
connection.

Onwards!
Ivi Brasil

Cazuza, real name Agenor de Miranda Araújo Neto (1958-1990), famous Brazilian singer who died from complications related
III.
to HIV.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. ANGER, Kenneth. O Tempo Deve Ter Um Fim. [Time Must Have An End]. From Caderno SESC
Videobrasil. Publication by Organization SESC São Paulo. Videobrasil Cultural Association. Vol.
3, N. 03. 2007. São Paulo, Brazil.
2. MASCELLI, Joseph V. Os Cinco Cs da Cinematografia: Técnicas de Filmagem. [The Five Cs of
Cinematography] São Paulo: Summus Editorial, 2010.
3. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN JOURNAL. "The Quintessencial Universe", Vol. 12. Number 2, 2002.
4. BAUMAN, Zygmund. Retrotopia. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2017.
5. OBRIST, Hans Ulrich. Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Curating *But Were Afraid
To Ask. New York: Sternberg Press, 2011.
6. HERNANDÉZ VELÁZQUEZ, Yauza. Arquivando Para O Esquecimento. [Filing To Forget]. From
Caderno SESC Videobrasil. Publication by Organization SESC São Paulo. Videobrasil Cultural
Association. Vol. 10. 2017. São Paulo, Brazil.
7. DYANGANI OSE, Elvira. Usos da Memória. [Uses Of Memory] From Caderno SESC Videobrasil.
Publication by Organization SESC São Paulo. Videobrasil Cultural Association. Vol. 10. 2017.
São Paulo, Brazil.
8. FARGIER, Jean Paul. Video Gratias. From Caderno SESC Videobrasil. Publication by
Organization SESC São Paulo. Videobrasil Cultural Association. Vol. 3, N. 03. 2007. São Paulo,
Brazil.
9. BARTHES, Roland. Fragmentos De Um Discurso Amoroso. [A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments].
Translation F. Alves, 1984, 4th Edition. Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
10. VOSTRY, Jaroslav. VOJTECHOVSKY, Miroslav. Image Narrative: On Scenity In The Plastic and
Dramatic Arts. Kant Books, 2011. Prague, Czech Republic.
11. BAUMAN, Zygmund. Identidade: Entrevista a Benedetto Vecchi. [Identity: Interviewed By
Benedetto Vecchi] Zahar, 2005. Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
12. GARCIA, Dora. Sí/Yes/Oui No/No/Non. MUSAC, Museo De Arte Contemporáneo De Castilla Y
Léon. León, Espanha. FRAC, Bourgogne. 2005. Dijon, France.
13. BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Senhas. [Passwords] Rio de Janeiro: DIFEL, 2001.
14. BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Simulacros e Simulações. [Simulacra and Simulation]. Relógio D’Água,
1991. Lisboa, Portugal.
15. WENDERS, Wim. A Lógica das Imagens. [The Logic of Images]. Verlag Der Autoren, 1988.
Frankfürt, Alemanha.
16. WENDERS, Wim. Imagens Que Obedecem [Images that Obey].
17. DELEUZE, Gilles. A Imagem-Tempo. [The Time-Image]. Brasiliense, 2005. São Paulo, Brazil.
18. BENJAMIN, Walter. A Obra de Arte na Era da Reprodutibilidade Técnica. [The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction].
19. SONTAG, Susan. A Fotografia. [On Photography]. São Paulo: Companhia Das Letras.
20. VIOLA, Bill. HANHARDT, John G. Bill Viola. Org. by Kira Perov. São Paulo: Edições Sesc São
Paulo, 2018. L&PM, 2017. Porto Alegre, Brazil.
21. PARENTE, André. Imagem-Máquina: A Era Das tecnologias do virtual. [The Machine-Image:

52
thank you,

Cláudio Brandão for being my first gateway into photography and art theory, and for teaching me that ‘art is discourse’.
Evandro Baron for being my father.
Gustavo Paim for the creation of the original score used in this work.
Ivi Brasil for writing the afterword in this publication, and for coming all the way from São Paulo to be a part of my undergraduate thesis committee.
Maria Laura Cabral for creating the graphic design project for this publication.
Monique Vandresen for being my mother.
Raquel Stolf for being my first gateway into video and sound art, for agreeing to be in my undergraduate thesis committee, for the guidance as my teaching
assistantship advisor, and for having written the curatorial statement for my first solo exhibition that resulted from this project.
Regina Melim for being my first gateway into both curating and performance art, and also for the guidance throughout all the stages of conception of this
thesis project as my advisor and mentor.

53
appendix
text of letters and other materials

[page 4]
Florianópolis, 6/10/96

Filhota,
I’m leaving to Chile tomorrow, and my heart is so heavy. This is because I’ve been away from you for six days
now. And also for being twelve days away from your father. Because Leila Diniz died and stayed far from her
daughter, because I really don’t know what I am doing, I really don’t know.

I am afraid that something is going to happen to you, as I am so far away, and I am also afraid that I may pass
away and remain far from you.

However, we must not let fear paralyse ourselves. I love you, and on 9/11 we shall all gather here, together
and happy, and more travelled.

Monique

[page 6 - top]
NEW BABY!

HAPPY EASTER BÁRBARA

ISADORA

[page 6 – bottom]
Remember someone you like. A post box at the entrance to the restaurant awaits this postcard. We pay the
postage.

TRATTORIA FAMIGLIA MANCINI

THE SOUTH OF ITALY IN THIS KITCHEN

Dear Bárbara,
Mummy really loves you!
Monique

Rua Avanhandava 51 – Postcode 01306-000 – Telephone 3156-4320 São Paulo SP, Brazil
[page 7]

54
 Dear Bárbara,

Yesterday, your father and I went to watch ‘Sabrina’, the remake of the famous Audrey Hepburn film. This
film has a lot to do with me, and says so many things that I would like to tell you…

One of them is that you should never be afraid of being alone. Go further than I have ever gone, take longer
walks over the bridges of Paris, and find yourself…

The rest, you can see for yourself, if you watch the film.

Monique
March 18th, 1996

[page 8 – handwritten]
“Bárbara’s first concert”

[page 9 – caption]
4/DECEMBER/1998

[Labels] Monique - Vandresen

[Letter in Envelope – Illegible]

[page 14 – bottom]
Bárbara:
Mummy does not want to be away from you, but if something should happen, I want you to be very happy. I
will do a bit of everything in heaven: lightning, rain, and angels, to always be close to you. The best thing in
life is being able to live without showing any worry about the future.

Always be true to who you are, ok? I love you!

Monique
June 6th, 2001

55
[page 16 – top]
January 2003 – 1st Day – 31 Friday

Hi children!

This is my first day of lessons at SENAI.

Today the day will be quiet, very quiet.

Let us now learn the letter ‘P’! I know you have already learned it before, but this school is for studying.

[page 16 – bottom]
Luiza Ferraz

Street: [blank space]

Postcode 88015-640 – Florianópolis, Santa Catarina

56
 Bárbara Baron
Chicago, IL. November, 2019.

57