Adriel Visoto: Dancing with ghosts

       Upon entering the house,

       I felt I could cut the air with a knife.

       Two glasses.

       I served the other before serving myself.

       If it’s not possible to defeat the ghosts,

       I could sit, toast, and dance with them.

       And so I did.
 

The works gathered here comes from a research that began during an artist residency in Lausanne, a result of the partnership between Bridge Out Culture and Fondation Bugnon. The displacement and isolation experienced throughout the residency are highlighted through compositions in which I portray myself alone or represent empty interiors and isolated landscapes. In these images, I aim to evoke impermanence and memory through spaces, objects, and other fragments of the past.

The perception of absence and the estrangement it awakens are elements that allows thinking about the idea of ghosts. Not necessarily in a spiritual perspective, but as metaphysical one, in the sense of how memories of the past become present in now through their fragments, transcending them beyond their physical existence.

By recording my body in this space and the fusion of my personal objects with those present in the house, I propose a meeting between these two material and singular universes. A meeting between past and present.

The paintings and drawings, these visual records, function as an intimate diary, capable of inscribing the memories of the experiences during the residency and, more than that, the strategies for dealing with the excess of past that hung over the house, the residence’s headquarters.