WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > THE DAY AS A PERPETUAL MORNING

HEART OF HAWICK, ROOM 205
THURSDAY 1 – SUNDAY 4 MAY
10:00 – 17:00

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Mónica Baptista’s latest analogue work, made during a residency at Porto Botanical Garden, explores materiality, rhythm and time. The Day as a Perpetual Morning pairs the separate vertical projections of a single reel of 16mm film and eighty 35mm slides. Both projections are abundant with images made at the residency site. Some of these images are crystal-clear, texture-heavy close-ups of plants; others are abstractions created through phytography – the permanent imprint of an image onto film through direct exposure of seeds, fruits, flowers, leaves, stems and sap.

While the film loops every three or so minutes, the slides unfold on a timed carousel whose own rotation lasts around 15 minutes. Ostensibly, these numbers enable the cycles to neatly sync: for every five film loops we have a single carousel rotation. But the mechanics ensure otherwise. Due to minute variations in projection speeds and subsequent fluctuations in runtime from one loop to another, any snapshot combination of the two projections will never repeat itself.

This is less a technical gimmick than a deeply philosophical commitment, one whose broader concept translates to the work’s granular makeup. While a looped reel of film entails repetition, the machinic method of projection is such that the reel picks up blemishes – dust, scratches – every time it threads through the projector, so that in time it comes to bear the marks of its own life as a film. Put another way, the material condition of a strip of film is formed in dialogue with the machine through which it is threaded: to project a film for the nth time is in some way to evidence, however fleetingly, all previous projections.

Baptista’s work speaks to this tension in ways that are simultaneously abstract and specific. On the one hand, the artist’s images – resulting from the ritual-like gathering of plant matter when walking the grounds of the botanical garden each morning – are distinct, site-responsive indices of a particular place in time. On the other, for sustained stretches here the images segue into one another – beautifully, brilliantly – in a way that seems to transcend time and meaning, highlighted by the seemingly endless whir of the 16mm projector and the continual rhythmic intervals of the rotating carousel. You can easily find yourself watching this work for longer than the loops’ duration without realising it. Like each morning, it’s different every time.