15 Jun — 12 Jul 2024

A Velocidade da Queda, by Hugo Flores, Teresa Arêde and Teresa Arega

Falling implies movement. Whether fast or slow, we do not know. It can even be an imperceptible passage of matter through space. In imagination, falling does not have to be continuous. It can encounter air pockets or gusts of warm air that alter its route and monotony. It can question the laws of science and reverse the fall, ascending. To fall is to be pulled and repulled by celestial bodies, inventing imaginary orbits in the vacuum of outer space.

But here, falling is a reverie and a reflection of invention. We fall backward into the chair of dreams.

The day masquerades as reality, and to it, we seek ideas, the beginnings of images. We are three, and we divide ourselves among the things we find in the fall: magic, memory, and voice. Amid the movement that transforms into thought, we carry with us the trajectory of sound, the shape of fluttering specters, and stories revisited by time. We transform everything into images. What we manage to, at least. The passage from thought to hands also works like a fall—sometimes in windy conditions that complicate the translation, other times in the most silent viscous stream that flows easily from the head to the hands.

With images, we always attempt to translate, but like in the world of words, we often fail. The image is a sort of rough impact with the ground, the end of the fall. However, that end is deserving of our attention—it was the debris left from thought, from contemplation. Debris that, like a meteorite, lost matter upon entering the atmosphere of (more or less) concrete things.

We fall at different speeds, we are different. But it is also this speed that alters the shape of the traveling thought. It changes its shape, like altering color as if playing with a crystal in a beam of light. Our Speed of Falling insists, through as many avenues as we can find, on bringing to the waking day the place of dreams, the invisible, and things without a body.