By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Ah, the ways of seeing. Wittgenstein wasn’t alone when he tried taping his window as to recreate a screen into which he would locate a particular element of the landscape before him. Piece of tape after piece of tape slowly framed correctly what the philosopher’s wanted to see, as if creating his own proto-cinema. Tsai would reconvene with these images (knowingly or not) in Visage (2009), when Laetitia Casta, in an attempt to deny her view and obscure her room, would also tape her whole window, in a painstakingly slow shot, which attempted to drain one’s spirit, the mere exercise of blacking out, the loss of sight as a declaration of impossibility. While watching Chris Kennedy’s outstanding program at (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico, I came upon his Tape Film (2007), a simple exercise on stock material and the labour of the filmmaker, and immediately I recalled these early images. This would be a proper start to the discovery of this Canadian author and his particular obsession with the human gaze, the ways of perception, the image collages of nature and the edification of stories from different perspectives.