Martin Heade, Orchid and Hummingbird near a Mountain Waterfall, 1902.
Ana Filipa Garcia, "Nas Asas de um colibri", 2013, filme, 24:05 min., stills do vídeo.
The video “On The Wings of a Hummingbird” is born out of an old homemade super 8 movie, a never before seen film of my parents’ marriage. This object constituted the fetish element that influenced the video narrative. The video is created upon the idea that the project’s artistic object does not concretely reside in the matter of the film, but in that which is suggested and we cannot see, extrapolated to an ulterior or atemporal reality. Such as it happens in cinema this domestic typology in calling for a specific time, creates a sort of phantasmagoria, a narrative that can be revisited as many times as we want. Based on the assumption that remembrance is one of our everyday dimensions, “On The Wings of a Hummingbird” reflects in fact on the ontology of the image and coming from the visual production of phantasmagorias propounds a territory of new meanings in the interpretation of the everyday reality.
If, on one side, the super 8 movie doesn’t show the marriage as such, in the sense that the shot circumstances are redundantly circumstantial, on the other, the film calls for a personal, irrepresentable imaginariness, one only possible by approximation.
“On The Wings of a Hummingbird” reveals us a place of spatial non-permanence; the travelling body is nowhere to be seen, but appears to move on the dimension of dream and thought. Hummingbird, the bird that gives a face to the video piece, also known in Portuguese as flower-kisser, is usually associated to the world of fancy. Its wings flap 80 beats per second and being so fast they are almost invisible. The bird is able to hover in mid-air while feeding. The peculiarities it displays make of its silent and fast flight something difficult to follow with the eyes and something whose movement you can only intuit. The hummingbird flight metaphor expresses the fanciful and ghostly side of the work and shows itself in the video piece through a specific visual element.
If, on one side, the super 8 movie doesn’t show the marriage as such, in the sense that the shot circumstances are redundantly circumstantial, on the other, the film calls for a personal, irrepresentable imaginariness, one only possible by approximation.
“On The Wings of a Hummingbird” reveals us a place of spatial non-permanence; the travelling body is nowhere to be seen, but appears to move on the dimension of dream and thought. Hummingbird, the bird that gives a face to the video piece, also known in Portuguese as flower-kisser, is usually associated to the world of fancy. Its wings flap 80 beats per second and being so fast they are almost invisible. The bird is able to hover in mid-air while feeding. The peculiarities it displays make of its silent and fast flight something difficult to follow with the eyes and something whose movement you can only intuit. The hummingbird flight metaphor expresses the fanciful and ghostly side of the work and shows itself in the video piece through a specific visual element.
