Curator’s Note
What does one do when dreams burst overwhelmingly into reality, becoming... real? How does one deal with the angels which, representing these dreams, give body to a new world, but a world which can suddenly age because it is just a part of memory?
The virtue of dreams’ intrusion into the real is losing our sense of time; it is ignoring the compartmentalisation of the existing past, the expectant present and an uncertain future. It is looking at what surrounds us as if everything were real, and not just a projection of what once existed.
‘YiiMa’ is the bridge between dream and reality. It is the privileged vantage point over a time without time. It is a movement which oscillates between two realities: between what exists and will cease to exist, and what dreams project, prolonging its existence. But also, paradoxically, between what dreams reveal about an existence that was once real, giving new life to the testament of a Macao rich in content.
An allegory forces us to arrive at a synthesis of the discourse of the ‘other’. It means building a bridge between the story we tell and the meaning we wish to attribute to it. We are in the fantastic world of two intersecting realities. And the project revealed by the ‘YiiMa’art group is a good example of this crossing the bridge. But by always doing it, we in the end cannot distinguish between dream and reality, the symbolic and the substantial. We lose ourselves in memories, but, on waking, we soon realise the dream is real and that nothing ‘YiiMa’ shows us can be relegated to the shelf of the fantastic, the delirious, the imagined. It exists not only to give meaning to the awareness that society should have of its own history, but also to foster the feeling of belonging that each of us can have in it.
Macao is the point of departure. However, before the journey, ‘YiiMa’visited the places that existed in the city, showing us a perspective which merges land and ‘sky’, combining in a single view that no other gaze can show us, at least not in the same way.
Macao is a city full of stories. An avalanche of traditions, of an intense existence, exudes through the pores of the city. And the images chosen for this project show the richness and density of some hidden corners of Macao. The intimacy of the unique places is never accessible. These images still show a past in which dreams transform into the present; being present, they live on in our memories, collectively and individually.
On the other hand, Venice, along with its Biennale, is a point of arrival, the synthesis of syntheses. The ‘Milk of Dreams’ to which we are led by this unknown, mysterious, seductive and inviting reality of Macao, a city with a unique history and multiculturalism, where at every turn we detect the imprint of built heritage, and which emanates a cultural richness and set of customs and traditions characteristic of the intermingled Chinese culture it seeks to preserve.
This project is the perfect demonstration that we can integrate the real into dreams, and with dreams, reality is made eternal. Furthermore, the combination of both shows the human condition in the context of a city that wishes to open up and reveal itself to the world.
João Miguel Barros
Curator