If you haven’t yet read it, start the text with Flare – Part 01

Each portrait that I made of the moviegoers lasted approximately 15 minutes and, though I had two cameras to look after, I had a lot of free time as the showings repeated.

After a while I brought in a third camera. In the beginning it served to entertain me during the wait time: behind-the-scenes photos, documenting the environment I had gotten myself into and some detail or another… However, at a certain point, positioning the extra camera exactly in the center of the screen pointed and aligned with the movie projector, I started to take some photos and footage of the actual projection from the inside out and, to my surprise, the images obtained were beautiful and seemingly inexhaustible in variety.  They were colors and shapes mixed with the reticulated fabric that, gradually, began to remind me of the pictures of stars and galaxies that we see in specialized magazines and the science sections of daily newspapers. Session after session, I started to accumulate dozens of photos of these stars and, in just a short time, I already had thousands of them…

I tried to edit them, but how could I edit thousands of photos that seemed unique, differentiated only by subjectivities without much criteria? I decided then that, rather than editing them, it would be better to catalog them. But how?

Thinking about their resemblance to the stars, I decided to consult an astronomer to understand how stars are catalogued. I tried by sending some fruitless emails to members of astronomy associations who never replied, until I remembered a friend of mine who was close to Marcelo Gleiser, a physicist who writes a weekly column for a newspaper in São Paulo. She put us in touch and he answered me:

“Hi Marlos, This is not really my area, but the stars are in digital catalogs that are always being expanded. For example, you can take a look at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey website for stars and galaxies. Regards, MG”

I thanked him kindly and followed his recommendation. Reading about the subject, I decided to use an example as a reference (and with proper poetic license) to start my own cataloging: 3C 273, which can be seen below in an artistic interpretation of NASA.

Quasar 3C273 according to NASA’s artistic interpretation.

3C 273 is the closest Quasar to the Earth, named as such for having been inscribed in the third (3) book of Cambridge (C), the observatory that spotted it, and for being the two hundred and seventy-third (273) star to be seen in those parts. Therefore, I separated the movie theaters, the numbers of the screening rooms where the movies had been shown, the name of the movie and the time of the sessions and, from that point on, all the “stars” seen in those conditions, became part of the constellation of that session. For example, the aforementioned film by Agnès Varda, Le Plages d’Agnès, seen at the 3 PM showing at Cinesesc, would be:

CS LPdA 1500

The complete list of movies seen looks like this:

And, below, the image of the great Constellation organized according to the movie in which it was recorded:

The great Constellation organized according to the Movie where it was recorded

And, in this way, from discovery to discovery and allowing time for the different stages of the process to mature, the work I call Flare was born. I’m not the type to use names in foreign languages, I prefer good old Portuguese but, in the case of this English word, a friend alerted me to the various meanings that seemed to conspire in its favor, for example:

• light used to signal, illuminate, attract attention (which reminded me of the issues related to image privacy);
• a place that expands (like the new perception that opens up when I discovered the possibility of going behind the screens)
• sudden increase and decrease in the brightness of a star (direct relationship to stars);
• light resulting from reflection (such as light reflected from the screen that lights up the viewers’ faces)
• effect of reflected light (referring to the technical term “flare,” used both in photography and movies)

Since I couldn’t find any word in Portuguese that would bring so many relevant meanings to the work, I went with Flare.