Helen Mirra. Edge Habitat – Appendix Library

In a room at Culturgest in Porto, we can watch two films by Helen Mirra, listen to music that she herself composed and recorded, and thumb through some books conceived by the artist or some catalogues about her work. This room serves as an appendix to Helen Mirra's exhibition in Lisbon. The two (hand-coloured) 16 mm films are umbilically connected to the visual maps of different latitudes displayed in Lisbon, putting into perspective the references to cinema, and even more so to the materiality of the film strip itself, in the works that form the core of her Lisbon exhibition: the strips of cotton fabric dyed in single colours, 16 millimetres high and of varying lengths, which are frequently used by the artist as a support for the typing of text. As we listen to the music recorded by the artist, we are led to think about the rhythmic quality of those works, resulting from the segmentation of the cotton strips or certain uses of text. The books that the artist published are directly linked to some of these works.