This video installation consists of a video projection with the same title and a light box that sets a context.

The light box shows an enlargement of the tax income receipt corresponding to services provided by the artist to the Portuguese Cinémathèque. An experience tied to utility and functionality induces the artist to produce artistic work at the workplace and in the working hours. In this way, he enters the field of pragmatism, reflecting it as much as reflecting on it, as he endeavours to conquer a space of liberty.

The video alternates prose texts with image recordings of a projectionist in his cabin that have an almost documentary quality. The sentences are cut out in unusual ways so as to suggest poetry. In doing so the text actually becomes poetry. The mimicry of the form takes us to the essence of the model.

Some of the texts are short descriptions of scenes of Hitchcock’s “The Birds” motion picture which alternate with other short and curious narratives where it is difficult to discern the fictional from the autobiographical. These two levels have in common, at some point, the vision of a bird that is associated with an emotional state, a thought or a situation. The texts are also sprinkled with terms borrowed from the jargon of film making (e.g. “fade in - fade out”, “low angle view”). In different ways, these terms refer to a particular episode in the narratives or to what is going on in the images. As the video proceeds, it becomes less and less clear what is real and what is fictional, what is a personal memory of the artist and what is a scene from “The Birds”, which memories belong to the projectionist, and which belong to the artist. All this happens in a space that is conspicuously devoted to memory: a cinémathèque.