Visor Rubens Mano (2004)

'Visor'
urban action/ installation
Biennale of Sydney – streets of the city/ Museum of Contemporary Art

the project consists of producing and distributing a large number (approximately 10.000) of eye 'masks'‚ whose format resembles that of masks offered by airline companies on night flights. unlike them, for they usually dark and designed to block out light altogether, these 'masks for seeing'‚ have been cut out of colorless, transparent PVC and finished with other clear materials - like the white Velcro used in finishing the piece and its natural polyethylene packaging.

titled Visor, the project alludes to the intentionality of our perceptions and the way we relate them to space-building structures or to the visual organization of form. in this sense, the material employed in making the masks possesses an important feature: it 'stifles' the sharpness of what is 'visible'. thus, we might say that the work acts directly upon our vision. by wearing the mask, the same landscape can be perceived in an entirely different manner. instead of signs and contents, we see fields of light and color, activating a landscape or a sound field through the conversion of visual stimuli. in putting on the mask, the observer (now a potential 'perceptor', or 'perceiver') experiences a kind of interval that
is related to a given space - the '(re)construction' of his surroundings in an experience amplified by the project's transitive nature.

translated by Steve Berg