INSIDE THE BOOK
THERE WAS A GROVE
The essay “Inside the book there was a grove” presents the occasional meeting between a photographer and a reader. The record of this event is given in the analogue enlargement of photographic images on sheets of paper extracted from a book. The set composed of images and text articulate the intermedial relations between photography and literature: while the text expands the states of descriptive observations, the image raises the coexistence of multiple narratives in the same space-time.
INSIDE THE BOOK THERE WAS A GROVE
(Report on a photographic micronarrative)
The images shown refer to:
A traveller.
A grove. A reader.
I don't remember why I went to the rice paddy. The drift brought only surprise and confirmation of my ignorance. I had an old camera, the object joked about by the Japanese.
...
After a short walk, near the urns, I took a break and had lunch with the dead. Along the path covered with opaque prisms, I left one or two reflections in the mirrors installed along the edges.
Soon, the sounds from afar, emitted by the school's loudspeakers, seemed to order the pattern that the black uniforms formed on the court. Hoping to reach other paths, I climbed towards the highest point of the hill, before the clouds, between flat and top.
The reader on the way:
shoes, socks, uniform, branches, the book he was reading,
pages, interval separated by fingers and the infinite extension of approximation.
Foreigner, I waved suggesting a photo.
Without posing, she perhaps consented.
I estimated my bifurcation distance: a front and a side image.
Points in sight, Akutagawa recalled.
I went into a grove.
I don't know for how long.
…
I returned to the place of intention.
Not an instant unique.
In the space of your absence, I was as many others as there were those on the pages you read.
Original essay by Paulo Costa: " Dentro do livro havia um bosque"
@Studium Journal n.40 online
Arts Institute - Campinas State University (UNICAMP)