REDOX is an ongoing project that consists of a series of video sequences recorded in Amsterdam of a park, a bar and a street and a script about identity and nationality. REDOX #01 was made in 2007 when two close friends from Portugal visited the artist in Amsterdam. The artist lived there for five years now and qualified for the Dutch nationality. Taking on the Dutch nationality however, would mean giving up the Portuguese: an impossible paper decision. During the visit the friends asked her systematically: ‘Don’t you want to come back to Portugal?’ After the friends left, the artist decided to film the places they had been together and had these conversations and wrote a script. When another friend asked her in 2009 to make a more personal work the artist returned to this material for REDOX #02. In 2010 the artist was invited to participate in a gathering of artists and curators that was part of an exhibition at Tate Galley and REDOX #03 was developed for that occasion. When the artist was invited to participate in a film festival in Porto, she decided to create the video essay REDOX #04.
REDOX has no fixed form, but is a process that revolves around the ever-changing position of the artist in relation to the question of returning to her native country Portugal that she left in 2002 to settle in the Netherlands. The project is a memory exercise as well as an investigation into the construction or fiction of identity, nationality and the geographical and temporal condition. The artist never answers the question though. REDOX is an ongoing project and within each context in which the work is show, the artist re-evaluates the original material and applies it to the specific context and specific moment time. The screening of REDOX #04 was particularly interesting as this time the artist was confronted with the country she left and the city she had lived in and was trained as an artist.
Daniela Paes Leão 