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2015 » Portugal » Section of Countries and Regions
| Curator: | José Manuel Castanheira, Marta Carreiras, Rui Francisco |
| Designer / Architect of exhibition: | APCEN Portuguese Association of Scenography |
| Institution: | APCEN- Portuguese Association of Scenography |
ID (Entity) Box – Think Outside the Box
The programme, rules and space restrictions made us realize that if we wanted to represent the ca. 90 individual members of our our Portuguese Scenography Association, we needed to have a POLITICAL and AESTHETICAL attitude and to re-size, re-rule and re-programme the conditions.
The idea is to buy the Kafka Box G30 (the space assigned to Portugal) a ticket to visit Portugal so that each of our members can have a personal meeting with the Box in the form of a multi-video intervention.
The Box travels to a different country, with a different space-time context. All the ingredients that you can you use when profiling an identity are different: landscape, culture, weather, space, food, time, colors, movement, perception, knowledge, development, economy, politics, behavior, etc.
A place shifted from its historical, cultural and architectural context for a foreign territory and a different geography becomes an object of study, and is immediately assigned symbolic meaning consisting of the fictional places that the performing arts are used to create.
In summary, these restrictions gave us the Kafka Box G30 as an object of reflection, and this reflection on the use and sharing of space made us realize that we wanted more space, more time with the space, and more freedom to use the space. To solve this problem and to create identity actions, we built a replica of the Kafka Box G30 in Portugal and make sure it had a nice stay.
The result is as a group of videos made by all the participants, reflecting their experience with the Kafka Box G30 in confrontation with the themes of PQ'15.
The entire process is recorded in a catalog containing images and visual materials from all the projects.
When the journey ends, the Box returns to his original place, but it is not the same anymore – or, rather, it is the same but slightly different. Something has changed forever. It looks the same but has a lot to tell. It may have lost weight, all tanned and salty, and now prepares to tell its experience.
The videos, shown as part a video and space installation in Room G30 of the Kafka House, show how the same piece of limited interior space can be in so many different places at the same time and can be inhabited in so many different ways by so many diverse identities.