Canadian artist duo Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller have been invited by the Coimbra Biennial in Portugal to create the exhibition A Fàbrica das Sombras – The Factory of Shadows for the ANOZERO’ 25 SOLO SHOW project at the Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova. The exhibition will be open until 5 July 2025. In the presentation brochure, Luìs Antònio Umbelino describes the work of the two artists as “an exploration of the border regions where the real and the imaginary, the tangible and the virtual meet to continually renegotiate their meanings”. These pairs of opposites, on the one hand what the eyes make us believe is real and tangible, and on the other what listening is able to stimulate in the imagination, invite visitors entering the now uninhabited Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova on a journey that stimulates their imagination and memory.
The exhibition unfolds through thirteen audio-video installations that retrace the works of the two artists, not always working in tandem, from 1993 to 2024, located in the corridors, stairs, small and large classrooms, the water collection cistern and the garden, all spaces once dedicated to the community of Poor Clares who lived there from 1649, then became a military barracks for more than a century, and finally left to the mercy of nature and now part of an important contemporary art centre.
The journey begins at the end of a very long corridor, with the projection of House Burning, a work from 2001 in which the 3D crackling sound of fire invades the space together with the reflection of the flames on the mirrored walls of the corridor, enveloping the body of the visitor as they enter with its dry vibrations, announcing imminent danger. Here, sound is not just a medium, but becomes the very content of the installation, enveloping the limbs, putting them on alert. The widespread crackling of the fire is not “like” a fire, but “is” the fire that instils terror.
Starting from the destruction of an old farmhouse, the most distinctive feature of the exhibition, and indeed of most of Cardiff-Miller’s work, is memory, both personal and shared, the traces of something that is no longer there, as in the shadows of the hundred or so rotating antique mirrors in Infinity Machine (2015), or in The cabinet of curiosities (2010), an old chest of drawers from which voices emerge to tell stories, then a suspended cathode ray tube television in Imbalance.1 (Wings) (1984), and finally an old mellotron on whose keyboard people can “play” memories, old stories, music and pre-recorded songs in The Instrument of Troubled Dreams (2018).
Antiques from junk shops and obsolete technological instruments come to life through sound, they speak.
Phantasmagorical figures from memory proliferate in every room, leaving a feeling of absence that is as disturbing as it is powerful, because the high-tech stereophonic sound system transmits with extreme precision what Roland Barthes called the “grain” of sound material, its texture, the absent body of its source, whether animal or inorganic.
The observer-listener can thus close their eyes and imagine, invent bodies and stories they cannot see, such as when they find themselves inside a choir of forty singers in Forty -Part Motet (2001) and is physically part of it: he or she is alone, there is no one around, only forty black loudspeakers on pedestals of the same colour, metallic simulacra of the bodies whose singing they transmit, projecting their anthropomorphic shadows onto the walls.
This brings to mind an installation (not present here) seen at the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, where visitors sat in a tiny cinema reconstructed as a habitable perspective model, in which excerpts from various old films were projected. Here, each visitor was provided with individual headphones with sound insulation. One had the sensation of being alone, yet, precisely through those headphones transmitting binaural sound, the room was filled with the ghosts of invisible, absent spectators who coughed, whose mobile phones rang, who answered in low voices, who whispered in the spectator’s ear. Here too, the protagonists of the installation were not so much the actors as the absent, reconstructed as sound sculptures, shadows of invisible people with whom technology allows us, or perhaps rather forces us, to enter into a relationship.
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, A Fábrica das Sombras. The Factory of Shadows ANOZERO
Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova, Calçada Santa Isabel, Anno Zero
Coimbra Biennial – solo exhibition, Portugal, until July 7, 2025
images: (cover 1) «House Burning», 2001, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. «A Fábrica das Sombras», Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova, Coimbra (Portugal), 2025. © Jorge das Neves (2) «Curtain», 1990–2024, George Bures Miller. «A Fábrica das Sombras», Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova, Coimbra (Portugal), 2025. © Jorge das Neves (3) «Imbalance.6 (Wings)», 1994, George Bures Miller. «A Fábrica das Sombras», Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova, Coimbra (Portugal), 2025. © Jorge das Neves (4) «The Cabinet of Curiousness», 2010, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. «A Fábrica das Sombras», Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova, Coimbra (Portugal), 2025. © Jorge das Neves (5) «The Instrument of Troubled Dreams», 2018, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. «A Fábrica das Sombras», Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova, Coimbra (Portugal), 2025. © Jorge das Neves
