Portal inside

Single channel video

2'40"

2020

 

The portal is not the door. The RAE tells us that it is more about the "entrance or the first room of the house, through which one enters the others, and in which the main door is". The portal, then, is already inside the house and defines the very act of having entered. It is one thing to open the door and quite another to already be immersed in the domestic space.

 

Finding yourself immersed in the domestic space is perhaps the mark par excellence of the days we live in. All of us locked up, confined, separated from the rest, we have mostly fled towards that first space inside the house –and nevertheless I am referring to the material structure– and, perhaps still, we find ourselves paralyzed by the fear of starting to explore it.

 

What's in this house? What other entities inhabit it? What is hidden inside that makes us doubt about transcending the portal and definitively diving, inside the portal, into a space that we may not know?

 

Daniela's work tends to suggest different instances of what we can call "interior space": the closet, the bathtub, the washing machine, all devices that allow the exercise of immersing, cleaning, changing, giving the body a chance —absent or barely intuited—of being contained and, at the same time, being renewed.

 

In its beginnings, Daniela Vargas Victoria's project was going to take place in the showcase without a doubt, a container physical space that, moreover, opens to the gaze, putting what it contains in the place of exteriority. The situation of a pandemic brought the initial idea to a point of total infeasibility and put Daniela, isolated in the field, to confront what the supposed opposition between inside and outside implied.

 

In his house there is a fountain in which the birds constantly dive to clean themselves, cool off and drink. Based on the sustained observation of birds, the game of iterations and a sometimes misty, ethereal record, the only thing left to do is wonder if it is possible to dive into the same fountain more than once, or if the interaction between the flight of birds and the emanation of water build spaces in a reiterated relationship where particularity and difference delicately emerge in the midst of repetition.

 

Inside the portal you may find an open space and not the confinement of being, but you have to bravely enter your own house and inhabit every last corner to discover that, eventually, a garden, a fountain, a bush or a jungle.

​

Víctor Albarracín Llanos