Smog #15 is one of 22 images in the Smog series, a work presented by Nuno Cera in partnership with Noé Sendas in the year of 2000 at Sala do Veado in Lisbon’s Natural History Museum.

 

The installation was created following Runaway World (Matadouro Municipal das Caldas da Rainha, 2000), in keeping with the reflection and plural discourse on cities, spaces, its inhabitants, globalization, anxiety, disillusion, isolation, in a mix of environments photographed by Nuno Cera in different cities, unidentified by the author, and of situations created through scenarios with anthropomorphic dolls of Noé Sendas, which complemented the photographic representation and established a dialogue with it, by bringing into the exhibition space a tension and a drama “humanised” by a reality that was closer to the spectator. A video screen with looping images of a man running (from Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel) complemented the installation at Sala do Veado.

 

The image Smog #15 is paradigmatic of this universe, in the sense that a corridor is always a “territory of transition”, an element of drift, a space of passage, a platform of convergence and, at the same time, divergence. The absence of human element and the image symmetry reinforces a challenge posed to the viewer; to face that passage without subterfuges, to hold the “line of flight” as the only possible escape, to handle the change into an unknown space as the inevitability of a dynamic imposed by an ever-shifting society.

 

On a more pragmatic stance, this image served other purposes of Nuno Cera, who stated to us: “Sometimes in my work, there is a photo that triggers a new series. That is the case with Smog #15. It was that photo that made me create the series The Corridors, which was only exhibited at the 27th Biennale of Pontevedra in 2002”.

 

JO

November 2011