VAST/O

VAST/O is a collaborative project that crosses fields such as Comics, Animation and Graphic Medicine.

The title arises from the clash between the sound of the Portuguese word “vast” and its English equivalent, “vast”. Visually, this confrontation takes place through the closed “O” with which the Portuguese word ends, turning what should be open and wide into something that is claustrophobic and enclosed, thus reflecting apparently opposite anxieties, such as agoraphobia and claustrophobia.

This installation was based on personal, spatial and paradoxical experiences related to these phobias. In order to reflect them, it combines spaces of diverse (and sometimes adverse) nature, such as those found in architecture, comics, animation, and the word, as well as those of narrative itself.

The spaces that inspired VAST/O are those that repel the presence of the subject as if they were entities for which the human body is perceived as something alien. The installation becomes a reflection on feeling detached from one’s own body, which is experienced, at the same time, as a mobile site and an immobile alien, unable to relate itself to what surrounds it.

NOTE: Practice-based research component of the doctoral project “Augmented Reading: spatial combinations in graphic narrative installations” (FCT Fellowship PD/BD/113767/2015)

Presentations

VAST/O: an exhibition by Carolina Martins, Alexandra Alberda and Nathalie Woolf. Bournemouth University, July 2019. [catalogue PDF]

VAST/O: Interdisciplinary Installation by Carolina Martins, João Carola and Nathalie Woolf. Atelier Concorde, Lisbon, 25 November-5 December 2019.

VAST/O: Interdisciplinary Installation by Carolina Martins, João Carola and Nathalie Woolf. BAG – Banco das Artes Galeria, Leiria, 14 November 2020 – 24 January 2021.