Bridal veil (2000)
In the year 2000, while I was living in Lisbon, I was invited, with my friend, the artist Ana Vidigal, to produce a work for the Baltazar Dias Theatre in Funchal, the capital of the Madeira. The Bridal Veil (O Véu da Noiva) is the name of a cascade on the island. This was the title we chose for our collaborative piece.
A satin wedding dress is suspended from the ceiling at one end of the hall, and a silky train, made from a huge white backdrop used in the theatre itself, attached to it in such a way as to fill the entire room.
We wanted to create not only a connection between the theatre and a specific geographic feature of the island, but also to work on a project that, while clearly the outcome of working in tandem, had points of contact with our individual work.
With what does one fill a room when one fills it with a bridal train, a wedding dress? Bringing with it the memory of a body, the empty dress suggests both presence and absence. Immersing ourselves in the suggestive, culturally specific and mythologised power of the white fabric – train, veil, water, table-cloth, sheet, shroud – we wanted to evoke the ambiguity that makes rites of passage such powerful points of social connection.
In the evolution of these ideas, an epistolary project evolved, which we titled Sentimental Surgery. This began as a written exchange of thoughts, impressions and free associations around the nuptial theme. But the written exchange broadened to include small objects that we fashioned and sent each other by post, each riffing on the work of the other. There was a wonderful sense of anticipation around the dispatch and receipt of these gifts, an exchange of transient thoughts materialised. Marriage and weddings, brides and dresses, hearts and veils, all had their place in the iconography of this exchange, but so did water, dislocation, travel, disillusionment, loss, frustration, anger, impossibility.
