“Dark Forces is a video in which destruction, emptiness and solitude are the main elements. The landscape of the forest captured by the artist’s camera is dark, and in the place of nature there are charred beings in which life can no longer be sensed. The dramatic aspect that is felt in this dark landscape – intensified by a symphony by Górecki – is also shown by the camera movement: it seems that redemption is tried by continuous movements, by incursions into the forest in an attempt to discover resistant elements.

One might say that we are in the presence of a sort of still-life, not in the sense of the lack of life, but rather as a way as identifying what has resisted, that which survives and keeps alive in the midst of the greatest devastation: in the middle of this black desert there emerges a spider’s web, and from that moment on, from inside the black, one starts to notice the signs of resistance of nature itself and its unbeatable energy. The game that this video constructs has a specific gaze as its main point: the succession of images has the sole aim of maintaining our concentration on certain details and on determined intensities.

This video – made in 2004 in the forests near to Viseu after the unforgettable fires of that year – evokes not only a particular reality that the artist wishes to document, but also all and any landscape that is affected by cataclysms: fires, nuclear accidents, spillages etc. Events that are a sort of trauma inflicted on a living being and which leaves marks that can never be erased: no matter how hard one tries, the consequences of these events will be felt forever.

The passage from black and white to colour does not mean the birth of optimism and belief in the possibility of renewal of the world in general, but it underlines the cyclic nature of the world through a subtle manipulation of time. What at first seems to be insurmountable and unthinkable now emerges in this light as a point located in a time and in a place, and the historical narrative is seen in a Heraclitean manner: a river that runs in a process of permanent renewal.”

— Nuno Crespo

 “This work is an experiment in light, space and time. The dramatic effect of the sparkling of the lens in the film creates glimpses of light and darkness. It is a search for beauty using the relationships between light, camera and film. Movement and repetition, forests and nature, reflections and refractions are discovered in a trajectory that will end up leading to blindness. Light as an origin and as an end. Everything that exists in between is irrelevant. Only light lasts.”

— Nuno Cera

In his film “Pure Light”, Nuno Cera creates an impression of the late sixties or early seventies. The Super-8 film seems to have been produced at the time of extreme psychedelic experiences. The images, the chromatic quality, the several connected sequences of the gaze, repeating an upward path through the leaves of the forest treetops towards a flickering sunlight. The music intensifies this psychedelic impression. Ken Kesey wrote parts of his book under the influence of LSD, and describes situations that can only be seen under the effects of drugs. Naturally, Cera doesn’t do this; however, the observer appears to take on the viewpoint of someone influenced by drugs. The images gradually disappear, fusing into one another, their contrasted outlines are always vague and the light becomes white against the darkness of the foliage and of the branches that also blend into one another. The colours become uniformly grey due to the effect of the camera, and the only touches of colour, which are strangely abstract, are inserted through the blending effects of the images, with spectral colours.

— Wolf Güenter-Thiel