Anna Maria Maiolino is presenting for the first time the two-channel video Twice: X & Y (1974-2022). X and Y were recorded in the midst of Brazil’s military dictatorship as a manifesto of grief and condemnation from a feminine standpoint. Starting precisely from those years, the multi-faceted practice of Maiolino includes an intense experimentation in the field of videoart; a time when she figured among the principal contributors to the Latino American film production.
We chose the words of Paulo Miyada – renowned expert on Maiolino’s works and curator of her latest solo exhibition psssiiiuuu… on view at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, Brazil, from May 2022 – to introduce this new project: “Contrary to metaphor, metonymy does without narrative. It comes about through contact with chunks of materials, signs of actions, and fragments of ideas. Because of that, it is the fundamental tool of poetry, montage, that which is repente, publishing, edification, culinary matters…it is the dearest recourse to Maiolino’s poetic trajectory, whether in her videos, sculptures, drawings, performances or installations”.
In Twice: X & Y the close-up shot dissolves the physiognomy of the artist to record bare expressions stripped of any sophistication. Maiolino’s face acts as a metonymy of the political being that remains a human being, with a body that breathes, swallows, shivers, screams and above all sees. The seventies came to history in Brazil as the peak of the dictatorship brutality: it is then significative that in X the artist is blindfolded and after, in Y, has her eyes covered but – despite the harsh censorship – they still manage to see. Nearly fifty years after its creation; the clear message that Anna Maria Maiolino states through the pairing of the sharp cut of the images, their clean composition and the stark power of the voice is more actual than ever – exposing every conflict that marked recent and current times. In Twice: X & Y torture is shown through an essential cinematographic device – stillness in place of the movement that everyone would expect. Simultaneously the complexity of Maiolino’s research is present: We see scissors and a blank page, the film stopping and becoming a photographic image, the word itself splitting at the same time between poetry and onomatopoeia.
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