Last month, during a one week trip to London, I spent around three hours happily immersed in several multi-screen presentations of Isaac Julien’s films at the ‘What Freedom Means To Me’ exhibition at Tate Britain.
The film that made the biggest impression on me was ‘Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement’ from 2019, based around the life of the Italian-Brazilian modernist architect who died in 1992 aged 78. If you want to know what dancing about architecture looks like, you should watch this!
Bo Bardi is played by two actresses, movingly contrasting her as a young and older woman. The older self is played by Brazilian stage, television and film actress Fernanda Montenegro who, at the end of the film, recites lines from Bo Bardi’s correspondence in the form of a poem: “Linear time is a western invention. Time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement, where at any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning or end.”
These words resonated with me and I think subconsciously prompted me to purchase a copy of Time Shelter (Времеубежище) by Georgi Gospodinov which was on prominent display in Foyles Bookshop as the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize . The novel was translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel and is Gospodinov’s third novel to be published in English.
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In the foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of this mind-expanding Booker-prize winning novel, Ben Okri explains his creative purpose: “All things to do with spirit compel art beyond the rim of possibilities. The visible must be used to invoke the invisible. This compels our art to go beyond itself and find a new language for impossibility.”
