25 min. digital experimental optical illusion animation film
Written, directed & animated by Margarida Sardinha
Soundtrack by António Vilhena d’Andrade
Voices by Margarida Sardinha & Stephen Brennan

London Memory multi+city is a 25 minutes optical illusion experimental film relating the Bergsonian idea of memory with that of duality in a contrapunctum of movement, colour, text and sound. Memory thus appears as a mirror of the mind being the reminiscence of time and space reflected. The holistic transcendental synthesis of a pure past over ten years lived in London by Margarida Sardinha renders itself in a stream of consciousness through the works of those Londoners who influenced her, such as Howard Hodgkin, Virginia Woolf, John Latham, Anish Kapoor, Sri Aurobindo, William Blake (to name a few) as a geometric-sonic abstract continuum. London personifies the ideal description of a long lived, loved or imagined city used by Bergson to convey the impossibility of the analysis or creation of concepts through recursive points of view – reductionism – for it will always fail to give the true feeling of walking in the street of the city itself and the zeitgeist of its collective unconscious at a given time; the city being such a fluid phenomenological cluster can only be perceived by intuition’s capability of grasping the absolute and has always tested the limits of its concepts much sought by religions and several thinkers alike such as Italo Calvino through the words of Marco Polo in Invisible Cities: “Journeys to relive your past?” – Kublai Khan was asking, which could also be formulated as: “Journeys to recover your future?” and Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognises the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” The city thus becomes the archetype of Nemesis where the foreigner traveller constantly faces duality whose structural process embodies dogma, organisation, simulation, derivation, fragmentation, pluralisation, deconstruction, assimilation… suggesting the ratio of multiplicity being to duality as duality is to illusion, further doubled within ubiquity being to illusion inasmuch as symmetry is to the mirror - the concept of duality as being a twofold impression (Maya) of the same substance and opposites as ideological correlates. Hence, dichotomy emerges as a fractal symmetrical and illusionary phenomenon through which human consciousness commences to understand oneness besides its derivative ever evolving multiplicity. Thus, by converging into the union of mind effected opposites such as original & copy, objective & subjective, time & space, male & female, cause & effect, light & dark, heart & mind, harmony & chaos, spirit & matter, random & determinate, individual & collective, motion & inertia etc. the whole surfaces as far greater than the sum of its two parts and polarity as a simple differentiation within which we are able to define and categorise its pluralism. Consequently in the film this gestaltic reenactment of coincidentia oppositorum is implicitly analogous to the holism of Bergson’s duration through a myriad of overlapping afterimages that create an illusionary sequence merging single immutable geometric solids and random impressions. The optical illusion performed by the angular velocity of a static symbol renders the multiplicity of a codimension as interlaced mirror-images of the same icon, which are then integrated with yet another background illusion of concave and convex duplications - two internally consistent worlds that when juxtaposed make a completely inconsistent composite world. Dynamic symmetry and poetical-sonic repetition act as a metaphorical bridge to this union and thus the inversion of polarities becomes possible symbolising a sacred marriage between the several dual manifolds. This hieros gamos, remembrance of a sacred love, is the foundation and the culmination of duality, akin to the words of Tagore: “In love all the contradiction of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not a variance. Love must be one and two at the same time. Only love is motion and rest in one. Our heart ever changes its place till it fin.” Concluding further and beyond the inevitable logico-mathematical paradoxes implied in self-referential meta-dualism, Shakespeare discloses this oxymoron of schism in Phoenix and Turtle as being equally within love that the illusion of doubleness can be overcome:

“So they loved as love in twain, Had the essence but in one,
Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance and no space was seen
‘Twixt this turtle and his queen; But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine, That the Turtle saw his right
Flaming in the Phoenix’ sight; Either was the other’s mine.
Property was thus appalled That the self was not the same;
Single natures, double name, Neither two nor one was called.

Reason in itself confounded That I cried, ‘How true a twain
Saw division grow together; Seemeth this concordant one:
To themselves yet either neither, Love hath reason, Reason none,
Simple were so well compounded, If what parts can so remain.”
(25-28)

2013-15 Official Selection

Winner of Best Cinematic Vision Awarded by London Film Awards, UK
Study of Stillness film screenings presented by Blake Bertuccelli, Los Angeles, USA
Athens Animfest, Athens, Greece
Bideodromo, Bilbao, Spain
Paradise Remade, Hastings, UK
Kolkata Shorts International Film Festival, Kolkata, India
Moab International Film Festival, Moab, USA
IFFEST Document.Art., Bucharest, Romania
Simultan Festival - 'Popular Unknown', Timisoara, Romania

25:00 min. 3D anaglyph optical illusion, experimental 3D animation digital film
Written & directed by Margarida Sardinha
Soundtrack by António Vilhena d’Andrade
Photography, animation & image editing by Margarida Sardinha
Voice by Margarida Sardinha
Chanting music - Sūrah Yā-Sīn, Quran-Surah 36

“Know oh brother... the study of sensible geometry evokes skill in all practical arts, while the study of intelligible geometry evokes skill in the intellectual arts because this science is one of the portals through which we move towards the knowledge of the essence of the soul, and this is the root of all knowledge...” - Rasa’il Brotherhood of Purity, translated by S.H. Nasr

Symmetry’s Portal is a 3D animation screened as an experimental 3D anaglyph digital film. It geometrically expands an extensive photographic research and documentation on Alhambra in Granada performed by the artist during an on-site stay. This photographic collection was digitally manipulated to deconstruct 17 two-dimensional, or plane symmetry groups and provoke illusory semblances of manifold space. Therefore, Symmetry's Portal constitutes a series of optical illusions in which symmetry and randomness are diluted in composites containing a two-dimensional background superimposed by a three-dimensional polyhedron and a 3D anaglyph “gate or portal” of Islamic tessellations. The three film layers reveal plane isometries of geometric symmetry groups complemented or deconstructed by 3D polyhedra using similar tessellations and evoking hyper spatiotemporal dimensions illusorily. This multidimensional interlacement was conceived following Keith Critchlow geometric and mathematical descriptions - in which the study of Islamic patterns is analysed under metaphysical and cosmological principles - Marcus du Sautoy and Roger Penrose.

*Symmetry’s Portal has been exhibited as a solo show at the Aga Khan Foundation Ismaili Crentre of Lisbon in 2015, at Carousell London in 2016, at Capela do Solar dos Póvoas in Simpósio Internacional de Arte Contemporânea of Guarda in 2017, and at Ericeira Cultural Centre in 2014. A selection of works and the film were also curated by Neil McConnon for the Reflectios exhibition at London’s Opera Gallery in 2015.

Written & directed by Margarida Sardinha
Photography, animation & editing by Margarida Sardinha

KNOTWORK is a digital animation film and a search study based on Celtic knots called Icovellavna and knot theory mathematics. The artist became interested and has been producing this work mostly based on the Book of Kells that she came to know in 2004. She explored endless knots regarding their spiritual and religious symbolism in addition to their aesthetic, geometric and mathematical qualities. Comparing Borromean rings that resurfaced in different cultures symbolizing unity, the adaptation of Celtic knots in Christian monuments and manuscripts, such as the 8th-century St. Teilo Gospels, the Book of Kells that captivated her, the Lindisfarne Gospels with its appearance in Tibetan Buddhism. In Knotwork, endless knots, named strange loops or paradoxes by Douglas Hofstadter, symbolise a union of opposites for in topology a circle is bound by all its homeomorphisms and the knot is an embedding of a circle in knot theory (study of mathematical knots in topology). By replacing topological knots, which cannot be disentangled, with Celtic endless knots that also have connected ends, Margarida creates a symbolic-continuum, where string theory could be discrete. The strings made of small partons threaded together as points describing the topology of its interactions on the string render space-time as event-symmetric in string field theory. Where the string’s partons may cross randomly through space-time events for they are tied to the strings. Thus, in an otherwise unstructured event-symmetric universe, the strings tie together space-time events providing an origin of topology. The strings are entwined when formed from loops of partons with fractional statistics, continuing ad infinitum with space-time itself endlessly entangled.

“Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism. Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories… human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon...” - Douglas Hofstadter

*The trailer of Knotwork was screened at The New Art Fest ’16 in Fábrica Features shop window in Chiado, Lisbon