Passagens 2

[Passages 2]1974  
Video B+W 
Sound : ambient street noise 
Duration : 11’23
Camera : Jom Tob Azulay

Summary 
Anna Bella Geiger walks, left to right, across an outdoor stair, at various levels. She descends from the top, veers left at the bottom

Overview
A still camera frames a wide, empty, auspicious outdoor staircase of the institute for the blind. In regularly paced intervals, ABG traverses in and out of frame, walking briskly, always from left to right, at higher and higher levels. At the top she is again out of frame but re-enters to descend the steps. Reaching the bottom, she exits the frame moving to her left. 

Historical note
In 2007, artist/critic, André Parente observed, In Passagens (I and II), Anna Bella Geiger slowly goes up an down stairs in a steady rhythm, as in a rite of passage. Exhibition catalog essay, Cinema de vanguarda, cinema experimental e cinema do dispositivo in Filmes de artista: Brazil, 1965-1980 (Fernando Cocchiarale editor,2007).   

Anna Bella Geiger reflects 
To me, those steps represented a page of a notebook…I asked them to shoot it as much as possible from the side, so that my body would look as two-dimensional as possible. 
Interview, Hans Ulrich Obrist: entrevistas brasileiras. Vol. I, 2018. (p. 182).   Note: Geiger created Passagens III, 2016 (Video. Color. Ambient sound. Duration : 3’. Camera, Lew Geiger) and provided this statement for IT Gallery website, translated here : The meaning of the word itself, Passages, continues in my work, not only in the title of the 1974 videos but in other media, such as photographs, from various times… for me, (it) is closely related to the passage of time and the space that connects with my body, being a “passenger” in every possible sense, a word…beyond the ephemeral – that which lasts all our lives.… in Seville (in 2016), while exhibiting at the CAAC (Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art)… I came across some stairs in the Alhambra, (and) I felt the impulse… Although the first videos(of) climbing stairs have a character of (determined) effort and subversion, in this latest video…the meaning shifts – to go down towards the south, go down by going up or going up by going down, with a slow and deliberate rhythm without apparent effort. It is this moment in which the artist finds herself in her life. (I felt) The nostalgia of my childhood walking down the stairs…in Rio de Janeiro, where the blue tiles shone and everything was vivid…(like)Yves Klein’s blue…