Written by Water – Film series

2019
Works

Written by Water, 2013–
HD videos, color, sound, ongoing work
Durations and presentations variable

The work consists of a collection of hundreds of empty notebooks, which the artist has immersed in different places in the Mediterranean Sea during his travels, letting each page soak up the memory of the water. In this part of the work, he kept track of some of these actions through videos, which retrace from one side the process of writing by the sea and the other that of the artist's reading of this invisible language.
Forming a library of invisible stories written by the sea, this work invites visitors to ‘read’ the poetic traces of the artist’s journeys around the Mediterranean borders, to transitional spaces fraught with palpable tensions on either side of the divide. Marco Godinho’s project started in 2013 in the Bay of Gibraltar. The notebooks presented here are the traces of actions carried out between 2013 and 2019 in Ceuta, Djerba, Carthage, Lampedusa, Catania, Marseille, Nice, Ventimiglia, Umag, Trieste and the Lido of Venice.

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    Installation views of the Luxembourg Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2019

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    Stills from one of the videos

Installation views of the Luxembourg Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2019

Stills from one of the videos