Vera Sofia Mota Reinterpretations

Walking and Movement Dissolves, a reinterpretation of work by Nan Hoover for UNFOLD.

For the 2021 edition of UNFOLD: Nan Hoover, LI-MA invited artist Vera Sofia Mota to re-interpret Nan Hoover’s work. On May 19, Mota presented two pieces: Movement Dissolves: Composition with Red and Shadow and Walking – Method, both taking different works from Nan Hoover as reference and work material. The works were the continuation of preliminary research on the artist's work, re-interpretation, documentation and archival practices carried out in collaboration with Fransien van der Putt and LI-MA between 2015 and 2020: Untitled (Unfold, Nan Hoover). Here, starting points were formed from the development of practices of approximation, editing and recomposition of the archive, traces of which were naturally mixed and embodied by the resulting process.

“Being confronted with such a huge archive of works by an artist with whom I feel a strong artistic connection, but I hadn’t had the opportunity to become so close to it until this invitation, I wondered from start how could my practice reshape and transform itself when diving in the process of working directly with another artist's work. LI-MA provided me this opportunity to work so closely with the material, editing and reinterpreting so that the identity of the author was/is often enigmatic, even to me.” (Vera Sofia Mota)

Walking – Method

In this work, Mota explored both Hoover's and her own working methods, and combined them in the form of an interactive performance-installation. The slow walk performed by Nan Hoover in her video Direction of White Walls (1978), was used as the choreographic score. Image-movement feedback, walking loops, repetition, multiplication and accidental variations occured in a piece which invites the audience to collaborate with the performers and Hoover to develop an improvised, emergent group composition.

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Vera Sofia Mota - Walking, 2021 (excerpt) - Commissioned and performed for UNFOLD: Nan Hoover

Movement Dissolves: Composition with Red and Shadow

The piece was influenced directly by three works from Nan Hoover: Light Composition (1977), Movement in Dark Part 2 (1978) and Intercept the Rays (1982). Movement Dissolves was a game of subtle interactions and reverberations between slow movements, variations in light, sound and a black and white landscape punctured with red. This environment was inhabited by shadows of a body in movement and a rigid architectural structure which multiplied and fragmented the visual perception of the body. The piece created an immersive and meditative landscape in which sound and music, body and shadow, light and dark, movement and dance delicately combined between concrete and abstract forms, becoming indecipherable.

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Vera Sofia Mota - Movement Dissolves: Composition with Red and Shadow, 2021 (excerpt). Commissioned and performed for UNFOLD: Nan Hoover

The programme of the day also included an interview by Willem van Weelden with Vera Sofia Mota. The recording of this interview is available on request.