Zapatos de Mi Pueblo
“Shoes of My Village” is a project within my visual research on the relationship between body and space as away of know ledge that enlarges our perception of the world.
Its focus is on the relationship between art and life,given the formal characteristics of the process for collecting the material in the immediate environment, resulting in an installation that identifies and links the subject with the object.
It uses, for this, different disciplinary means with in the artistic practice,materializing it self into an essentially polysemic and cross-border language.
This work, made with in the thematic of “boundaries”, has a close relationship with my personal history. The spatial and temporal boundaries are open lines through memory and imagination.
FIELD DIARY OF AWALK
Experiences during artist residency in Nodar, Fronte(i)ras – 18September–01 October2007.
18/09, 10:30 AM
I went around the village, visited the Paiva River and the daily transit life of villagers through their common spaces.
I found some people waiting for the bread that comes in a van,always at the same hour. Others were checking the mailbox,waiting for the letter of a relative or perhaps a bill of some kind.
A very old woman dressed in black (something very typical),wearing sportshoes (quite atypical), hand-pluckedthe weeds growing between the side walk of a street, constantly repeating:Damn herbs! Damn herbs!
The colours of Nodar are very particular. Vegetation has different shades of gray and dark green with some purplish tree branches.The land is of a warm ochre tone, and the stones are marvellous white sculptures.
There are a lot of slate rocks, a lot of wood, a lot of different textures, so much as to wallow in it.
In a handrail nextto a water tank a pair of white shoes was hung, tied by its laces, perhaps left there drying, perhaps left there to enjoy the splendid scenery of the river landscape.
12:00 AM
I found a house in ruins.
It had a mixture of materials among the elements found there:earth, stones, pieces of wood, spider webs, candles and personal items.
Objects that tell stories.
A patent-leather shoe from a five-year old girl, a few high-heeled shoes from women between 30 or 40, some shoes used in the field belonging to young men, each one carrying their own dreams.
The disposition of those odd objects in an abandoned space brings me images of a not very remote past, where life and movement throbbed.
Now there is a feel of desolation and neglectas if people who lived there had gone, as well as the time when they walked on these stairs on their daily and familiar journeys.
The sound of laughter and kitchen utensils yielded its place to silence.
9/19, 5:00 PM
I began to borrow shoes fromthe villagers.
In general,most of the people expressed their willingness to cooperate with the project. Only a few were sceptical and hesitant about showing their intimacy through such a personal object. The ones who showed resistance usually came from bigger urban centres and were just spending a few days in Nodar.
In these places there is a bewildering quantity of vineyards. Every residence has their own and the roads are full of grapes, white and dark, mature and sweet and the unmistakable smell it releases accompanies me on my way home.
It is difficult to describe the smell or the sound of Nodar. It is a fabulous blend of grapes, dung, goats and fig leaves mixed alternately with the sound of bells of a distant herd and running water through the rocks. It smells like earth, season, work, time. It smells like my grandparents and my childhood.
The time there takes its own quiet walk, without rush,with each loose leaf that breaks and falls,with each breath of air.
“With the lamp we go back to protect the sleep, the house-watching of past times, lost homes but in our dreams still faithfully inhabited”.
Marilídia Martins is a Portuguese born visual artist living in Venezuela, where she studied and presently develops her work. Having recently obtained a degree in fine arts (sculpture), she has more than 20 years of studies and collective exhibitions of photography, sculpture, installation and pottery. With her last individual exhibition, the site-specific installation “Espacio Vivido” (“LivedSpace”) that took place in the Center for Latin-American Studies of Caracas and that was based on the use of perceptual elements in the sculptural space, the artist aimed to put in discussion the ways to see, convoking the look as a construction of new languages, from structures that seem to be run out in a daily transiting.