Director: James Newitt

Producer: Maumaus Artists-in-Residence Programme/Lumiar Cité

Year: 2013

Runtime: 35’50’’

2 Channel HD Video

Colour



Funded by: Governo de Portugal/Secretário de Estado da Cultura/Direção-Geral das Artes/The Australia Council for the Arts

James Newitt’s exhibition is fragmented, divided into parts evoking concepts and metaphors of Heterotopias and of Plato’s Cave. Moving and still images – a video installation and photographs – are combined with texts and drawings in the form of a screenplay and a series of ‘mindmaps’, presented inside and on the glass façade of the space. The light from the videos merges with diluted daylight, an effect created by covering the gallery’s windows with a reflective film. The video which, is projected on both sides of a suspended screen, depicts two young boxers training alone in front of a mirror. The young men only confront each other in an imagined space. The movement of the camera as it films, circling the protagonist, anticipates the movement of viewers around the screen – which produces further reflections in the windows of the gallery space. The viewer positions themselves physically and mentally within the range of heterotopias of a boxing club and an art space, both occurring on the frayed edges of their areas of action and their common location in the outskirts of Lisbon. The reflections of bodies in the impossible ‘there’ of the reflected image in the mirror merging with the ‘real’ image of the Alta de Lisboa landscape which exists just beyond the frame.