Women Cinemakers meets
Tânia Moreira David Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal
‘A house as an endless body’, corporealizes an osmotic encounter between a human body - a woman dancing - and the body of architecture Lisbon's aqueduct underground gallery. An intimate and sensorial architectural experience presented through the cinematic apparatus. The film had its origin in Frederick Kiesler’s Endless house, which shows an organicist approach to architectural space: the house as a living organism, an extension of the human body, as opposed to modern functionalist architecture, materialised in Le Corbusier’s house as a machine for living. Kiesler writes: “The house is neither a machine nor a work of art. The house is a living organism, not just an arrangement of dead materials: it lives as a whole and in the details. The house is the skin of the human body”. Exhibiting an experimental approach to the representation of the sensorial experience in architectural space, the project investigates a way to reveal a sensitive and intimate experience, exceeding the geometrical representation of architecture, which shows a distant relationship between spectator and film. The representation of the sensorial experience of architecture is presented beyond its rational character revealing it self on the sensation. This means that rather then representing a body as a distant object, the film looks for constituting it self as an experiential body. By recreating new connections between its parts, which appear beyond continuous space-time, the film presents an architectural space with a new logic: the fixed elements and references of architecture - form, dimensions, and coordinates - are deconstructed, unfolding the space to new possibilities and new sensations. Simultaneously, the use of haptic visuality emphasizes the corporeal relation between spectator and film, by appealing to the former’s senses as a whole, thus creating a new body. Dance is shown along with the cinematic devise as a high means of recreating architecture, due to its ability to transform chronological time and objective space.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Hello Tânia and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to invite our readers to visit
http://www.taniamoreiradavid.com in order to get a wider idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you studied Architecture, Fine Arts, and you also hold a master’s degree in film