Narratives of memory, displacement and transience are central to the context-responsive works of Laura Belém. Her poetic and meditative interventions touch on the essence of human emotions and by so doing cause us to shift our perspectives of the everyday. In her 2005 installation Enamorados (Enamoured), for example, two rowboats animated by searchlights continuously signaled to one another across an expanse of water, as if they were lovers engaged in a romantic tryst.
The delicacy of her artistic gesture often contrasts with the gravitas of her subject matter. Exemplary in this sense is Shipwreck, a video that documents a caravel gradually melting into an indistinct pool of colour. A sense of loss, death and disillusionment rises as the image gradually becomes unrecognizable and then disappears. The work specifically references the colonialist occupation of South America, but also acts as a wider metaphor for immigration, exile and nostalgia.
Similarly, the installation created for Liverpool Biennial International 10 focuses on the relations between past and present and introduces the viewer to a new realm of possibilities for the future. It is a free adaptation of an ancient legend, the story of an island temple whose most remarkable and distinctive feature was its endowment of a thousand bells. Allegedly, travelers crossing the sea even at a great distance from the island could hear the sound of these bells. Over the centuries, the island sank into the ocean, and so did the temple and its bells. But the island and its shrine are not completely forgotten, as shown by the unremitting attempts of a sailor to hear again the music of the sunken bells. Although their sound has long vanished into the depths of the ocean and his undertaking seems pointless, the man does not give up trying and obsessively pursues his search.
The artist cannot guarantee that the lost music of these bells (possibly symbolizing our continuous and somehow frustrated quest for spirituality) will be heard during the exhibition period. But traces of their sound might find a resonance in the ears and hearts of those who are most able to open themselves to their surroundings and interpret silence.
Text originally published at the catalogue of Liverpool Biennial International 10 Exhibition, Touched, 2010.
About the author: Lorenzo Fusi works for Liverpool Biennial and was a curator for the International 10, the lead exhibition of the Liverpool Biennial Contemporary Art Festival. He worked as a curator of SMS Contemporanea in Siena and until 2008 he was chief curator at the Palazzo delle Papesse (Italy).
