Fear no thunder, nor lightning (Braille text/landscape pictures, 2006)

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe’s only complete novel, tells the story of a group of sailers that after countless calamities and misfortunes arrive to an island close to the south pole inhabited by a large number of black natives that will end persecuting them. In the middle of the narration of this chase we can find a few drawings that represent maps made by the hounded sailors while hiding into tunnels. In a postscript Poe tells us (supposedly Poe is just the transcriptor of the story, originally comunicated to him directly by Gordon Pym himself) that those drawings seemed somehow familiar, and after some research he found them to resemble Arabian and Egyptian characters with meanings of "Shaded", "White", and "Region to the South".
What we have here are letters printed deep into the ground, written by God or Nature (or perhaps a demon). Thou they are not meant to be seen by human eyes, they are “pronounced” every time we walk through them.

Fear No Thunder, Nor Lightning is the video documentation of the act of reading performed by blind people while reading a braille book. All the pages into the book were printed with full-page landscape images as well. The text describes someone crossing a forrest (a fragment of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, -when the creature decides go looking after his creator, in a journey through different countries, understanding as well that no mother language belongs to him-).

“...Although we cannot read the text in the book (those who cannot read braille, of course), when it is activated, I mean readed, we can actually see someone crossing a forrest, just as the text describes, covering for a moment this gap on thanslation...”

It may seem for a moment that meaning prevails, and in one way or the other it finally reach us, but the title of the piece comes as a reminder of the loss and leaks in all of our communication attempts. Fear no thunder, nor lightning, a mechanism where alternately for each of the readers, the sonority of language is lost as well as its visuality.

Watch video here...