Camera obscura projection at NMNM, Monaco 2020, "Variations - Eugène Frey's Light Set Projections presented by João Maria Gusmão".
As early as 2005, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva started developing a particular kind of cinematic projection which excluded an in-between medium – a cinema with no film. At the time, their studio enabled them to place a lens in a wall between two rooms. In one of these, they would hang a very bright artificial light, while in the other there was total darkness. The image conveyed through the lens was focused on the opposite wall of the darkroom. This technique, called camera obscura, has been used through the centuries to project the outside landscape in closed rooms – a kind of replica of the eye and the historical archetype of the photographic camera.
Camera inside camera is a camera obscura installation which projects the scale model of a windowed room with a view. The model is shaped much like a theatre stage set: a door is perceived on the right wall and in the background, beyond the window, there is a landscape made of silhouettes of trees and hills. The artists were thinking of H. G. Wells’ description of time travel in his novel The Time Machine from 1895. As a kind of thought experiment, Wells depicts the visual effects of acceleration exerted on astronomical bodies through the sensory experiences of his main character. It is like seeing the skyline in fast forward: the sun and the moon are seen moving quickly, forming celestial arcs, while day and night become indistinct from each other. Inside the technical room of Camera inside Camera, a sequence of light projectors are placed to simulate the movement of the sun from daybreak to sunset. The stage model, functioning like a kind of sundial, describes this movement in approximately 8 minutes on a loop, creating the paradoxical effect of deceleration and emptiness, like a picture of eternity: time with no beginning or end.