NiNA MiRANDA
Toque toque touch touch
Multimedia project with Antonia Dias Leite
We were fans of each others’ work before we met. I was entranced by Antonia's films that shared my fascinations
and she was a fan of my music.
On our first meeting we immediately hit- it- off.
We decided to make a film together to celebrate our overlapping passions within the prism of the joy of touch.
This is just the beginning.
‘Toque Toque touch touch’
As the world revolves and we move with it and against it,
reflecting, reacting and endeavouring to nurture it .
We started started filming just before the first Covid Lockdown. Our plan was to have an immersive exhibition where the gentle human touch that we felt was missing in modern life, was projected on big screens above and surrounding those who came to our immersive exhibit, visitors could lie on comfortable, tactile cloth. They can feel the texture of the cloth beneath them and reach out to touch our hand-made sculptural percussion made from materials reflected back from the screen.
When the pandemic hit the need for human touch and connection was missed even more keenly and the films reminded us of the places we could once go that are now forbidden.
Nina and Antonia continued to work at a distance, from the Uk and Brazil respectively. Nina making more percussion and sculpture, old satin curtains became shapes reminiscent of bountiful buttocks, breasts, and phallus-like tails arms or fingers, creatures of love and comfort.
Things reaching out to touch but only finding dismembered parts of themselves, that somehow all fit together. We look at something that is apart from us and part of us. Soft cloth cigarettes were formed and topped with golden pubic-hair-like thread, the cigarettes such a comfort to hold pursed in-between lips that can no longer smoke. To be plucked from the ceiling and mantle-pieces, pulled from the soft bodies at the future private view that they manifested.
Toque toque touch touch
Back to touch
Return to nature
Back to seed
Back to flourishing diversity.
Re-comfort.
Awakenings realisations.
Slow daydreams.
Warm sensations
The ecstasy that is possible
The arrival at the escape
The rain that hydrates
tears that clean the face
Octopus, snake, anemone,
mushroom, ball,
balloon and chest.
Toque toque touch touch
De volta ao toque
De volta à diversidade fluorescente
A cor da pele,
a textura da pele e do polvo,
da cobra, anêmona,
cogumelo, balão e bola,
mama, testículo,
festinhas, tapa, e cócegas.
Raízes
Re-conforto
O êxtase possível
A fuga alcançada
A chuva que hidrata
Lágrimas que limpam o rosto
A noite que descansa
Encobre os segredos
Um lugar de sonhos e devaneios
O som do couro rangido
Penas amplificadas
Leite de veludo
Calor total
Cheiros doces
Gostos salgados
Acontecimentos inesperados
Endurecer, suavizar, despertar.
From a distance accross the sea Antonia received footage from Nina and added it to her own visual banquet of micro-filmed fungi, snakes, decadent parties, three-way caresses, decomposing fruit, giant ants, sea, cockerel feathers and more. She asked Nina for music and played with the sounds, pulling her favourite elements out and adding the music of her keen eye and editors razor-sharp timing. She took footage they'd made together of balloons being slapped in time, like giant grapes, drum skin and testicles. The softness of wool, the way it ties things up and pulls things together then comes apart, tracing a line between us like a very long and loose umbilical chord . As the world opened up again Antonia and Nina regrouped in Rio to put on the first ‘Toque toque Touch touch’ exhibition at Casa De Cultura de Petrópolis RJ. The exhibition had to take into account Covid restrictions so the viewers had to sit and stand apart. The film was showed on two screens and presented on painters' easels. .. the music from one working in magic -like synchronicity with the overlapping image of the other screens, a touching conversation . Amongst the chairs were placed the amorphous figures, like quiet guests in sumptuous reverie. Elements of the film were describing themselves in situ, woollen balls brought from england tied round and round the baroque chairs of a once-stuffy grand room. The decaying grandeur of golden lace curtains and flock wall paper conversing with the gold thread of soft cigarettes, and carnaval-esque tinsel, deflated balloons and taught giant golden ones. Antonia’s photographs of snakes in grand rooms, protruding from a flowing dress is referenced again by an old wedding dress hanging from the wall.. like the player has left the scene naked.
25 February 2023 Rio de Janeiro
Antonia Dias Leite & Nina Miranda showed their film with KINA collective at Casa de Cultura Eva Klabin. Their film was projected across the façade of the museum and in its cinema in the centre of the house.
