PORTFÓLIO TIAGO CASANOVA

photographs that are kept invisible on our archives, play
an important role on the construction of our identity.
UNCOVER
2016
Texto de text by
Tiago Casanova
Uncover, 2016
Instalação Installation
700 x 350 cm
(EN)
“I always mistrust everything which I see, which an
image shows me, because I imagine what is beyond
it. And what is beyond an image cannot be known.”
(Antonioni)
Uncover is an image based installation created
to respond to curator’s Martim Dias proposal to
“Question Society”, exhibited at Sala de Arte Joven in
Madrid and at Centro Cultural Vila Flor in Guimarães.
This project takes as a starting point a real and
personal story of a breakup with a woman that I have
been together for more than 7 years (from the age of
18 to 25), a relationship that ended unexpectedly and
without a single word or explanation, even until today.
The project makes a self-critic and deep analysis to a
period of time that I searched for answers or truth,
a sort of an obsessive-compulsive investigation that
drove me into depression, using photographic images
and texts founded online through social media, in
order to create an interpretation of reality. A reality
or truth that I never came to reach.
In this project I am interested to play with the
binomial Reality / Fiction, an installation that goes
around the psychological and physical processes
between what is visible and what is yet to be
discovered, and how this creates an imaginary
representation of reality throughout the captured
images. At the end, this installation is not so much
about her, but about the way I dealt with the
memory of her and with my quest for truth, without
being able to find any. Also following my current
investigation around the meanings of memory
through the documental function of photography, and
the way we all use captured images to archive our
personal moments, I am interested in the fact that
every single photograph that we produce represents
a memory we wanted to keep, meaning that even
the photographs with some kind of failure or that
are aesthetically uninteresting, or even the millions of
This installation has 4 different levels of visibility/
invisibility, being the first one a curtain that is used to
cover the entire wall constellation. The public has to
play with it in order to be able to find something more,
but never being able to completely open the curtain
and visualizing the entire work.
The second level are 7 photographs of this women
on her back, printed with a reasonable size, allowing
visitors to see this images from afar. These photographs
are a direct analogy to the way she turned her back
on me, but also imposing an imaginary process to the
audience, driven by curiosity. I want people to wonder
how her face looks like. I want people to create an
idea of reality with their imagination, yet a reality that
they will never be able to find. Her face, intimate
body or identity such as her name, will never be
revealed in the exhibition. There is also 1 photograph
of her printed on vinyl on a very large format, where
although she is facing the camera she is still an invisible
figure, emphasizing the fact that photography never
represents reality.
The third level is a set of objects, written texts and
photographs that are only viewable from a close
distance. This objects tell our personal story from the
time that we broke up, using for example print screen
from Instagram, the social media I was using to find
more about her and her feelings (Aka: Stalking).
The fourth and final level is a copy of the letter that I
wrote to this person just 2 days before the opening,
telling her about my feelings and about the exhibition
I was presenting. Every visitor may take one sealed
copy of the letter, allowing them to feel from a very
personal perspective the project and the story itself. I
want people to feel that they are somehow trespassing
a line, making then some kind of voyeurs on search
for reality or more information. This letter is in fact the
Descriptive Text of the exhibition, therefore I invite
you to read it in order to go more deeply in the story,
specially on the objects that represent the third level.
Uncover | Vista da exposição “Cuestionamiento” Sala de Arte Joven, Madrid, 2016
Exhibition view “Cuestionamiento” Sala de Arte Joven, Madrid, 2016 | Fotografia de Photograph by Luis Marino Ciguenza