Our second reading for this year’s Reading Room is Orto by Ana Vala, in collaboration with Rita Borralho. Ana has recently completed her Cotangent Residency programme.
Orto is the time of day when the sun becomes visible, leaves the horizon and reveals everything that was hidden by the absence of light.
For this Reading Room session, Ana Vala has designed a book and an audiovisual installation that proposes a tactile, visual and sound reading of a set of images. These images are activated and transformed through light, mimicking and exploring the Orto phenomenon. This revelation of visual elements revealed through light will be accompanied by a sound performance created by Rita Borralho. This sound performance will work as a subjective translation and to contextualise the visual images - like a caption that adds meaning to the images.
The event will function as a collective performance, where every audience member will receive a small book/fanzine to open and read together. A shared reading without words and languages, instead relying on images and sounds - coming close to communication as primordial as the apparent movement of the sun.
Ana Vala works between Visual Arts and Cinema to investigate and speculate on the use of moving images as a means of self-representation and a way to represent the world and its relative notion of time.
Ana uses primordial elements and concepts such as light, reflective and translucent materials, planetary gravity and rotation in order to create videos, optical+sound devices, and installations that induce an off-screen cinematic experience. She focuses on issues such as Material and Immaterial Culture, the Ludens Instinct, Self-Representation, Spirituality and Astronomy. For Ana, the notion of Moving Image begins and ends (in loop) with the first self-reflection in the flow of a river - of water and of algorithms.
She currently lives and works between Lisbon and Barcelona.