In a dark room some small lights are focused on a table with a number of filing spikes, which we will remember from traditional shops. In my particular olfactory memory there then emerge smells which are very familiar to me: the humidity of Porto and the granite walls of its shops.
Impaled on those filing spikes, which are connected to concealed motors which make them rotate on their axis, are stacks of upside-down photographs. We cannot see the images but they are proof of work processes.
The filing spikes cast their shadows on the wall. In addition to the invisibility of the installation, there is now another level of intangibility: the files are moving shadows which we cannot touch, nor can we see their content. At that moment I try to freeze them by means of photography, an attempt that gives the photograph its ability to fix but not to reveal what the shadow hides. In this movement towards immateriality and invisibility the filing spikes approach the lightness of those contemporary files expanded by clouds and algorithms. The smell has changed, or maybe it has gone away, because … does the immaterial have a smell?
Dalila Gonçalves