SUSANA BACA



Single Channel Video
Original Score: Susana Baca
Full Length: 3 min 42 sec
Year: 2006 – 2011
Country of Production: USA

( English / Espanol )

Synopsis

SUSANA BACA

“To have naked feet means “freedom” (“la liberta”). Since I was little I always had the sensation that when I freed myself from shoes, I would also free my body and the voice of my soul.”

For these reasons, Susana chooses to perform in bare feet – to free her soul – so that it can show in her voice. Susana’s elation is visible in her performance, and makes it more beautiful.

She has also told me of walking along a shoreline, watching the gulls float over the water. Their wings are like her bare feet, she feels, opened to the air to carry them freely in their dance with the waves and the sky. As the birds can only fly with their wings bared to the wind, so she can only dance with her feet bared to the earth.

This video, set to her songs “Se Me Van Lo Pies” (“My Feet Are Leaving Me”) and “La Noche y El Dia” (“The Night and The Day”), is an expression of this connection that Susana makes between physical and creative freedom. I use images of sea birds from my travels in Iceland to evoke my own experience of this freedom, and to connect it with Susana’s. These video images create visual parallels, expressing the feeling of the song, of the singer, and of my own creative process.

An artist can free the soul of a viewer through an unencumbered expression of their experience. In this work I am both viewer and creator, lending me a freedom that connects me with Susana’s and with my own soul.