​Still Life

1.a still life, is an attempt to keep for eternity a moment of a composition, which elements are decomposing uninterruptedly towards vanishment.

2.an image is an abstract light beam aiming to infinity, intercepted by a surface in a given focal point.

3.epiphanies, instead of revealing meaning in something, withdraw it, giving them back to their own insignificance.

4.independent dramaturgical units cross the performance length simultaneously, sometimes touching each other in provisory moments of semantic revelation.

5.the theater is unset: the scene is laying on the stage.

6.a dinner table can be a dialogue territory.

7.intimacy happens when existence is stronger then the need to produce sense.

8.meaning wraps existence.

9.I don't exist.

about Still Life [by David Antunes]
"Still life is a performance by Dinis Machado, which explicitly seeks the spectator's gaze, as if the artist wished that we really saw something. However, it is a visual allegory for plato's allegory, where very little is seen or only that which is not "the event" is seen and, therefore, nothing is known. The proof is the still life arising in anamorphosis. However, i don't see the artifacts and media gadgets - computers, televisions, projectors,slide films, cameras, videos, screens, subtitles, images over images... - as another metaphor for the inescapable contemporary life's mediation, followed by the gloomy conclusion that we can no longer access nothing without a third party mediation, or that knowledge is diluted into the contemporary images surplus. On the contrary, the scenic display seems to present the actor's "home-made technical mastery", controlling everything without moving from where they are cooking a risotto which, at one point, floods the images with odor and whets the spectators' appetite.The set is a structure partially covered by a translucent screen, beyond which we see an artificial paradise with grass, palm trees and lots of plastic flowers (there is even an aquarium and the sound of water running) and, a strange element a small kitchen. Dinis Machado doesn't waste time in their artificial paradise, where they can cook their real food. They distract themself with poses and they overcome themself in an everyday life love story, to which we can only access through subtitles projected on the translucent screen. But, even artists - who, as creators, cannot hide the smile caused by the power of being able to destroy everything with a wink - , are human beings, and maybe due to that, Dinis Machado presents us with a ethical program as a beginning and the possibility of beauty and consolation as an ending. During the the intermezzo."