The King of The Rood
Pi
Pi
Pii Pi Pii Piiiiii
You hear it.
You can actually feel it, the sound breaks the auditory barrier and enters your body, making you feel it all over, it’s a sound that you can see and feel in the reverberation, you could even say it tastes like sound, tastes like a car, tastes like smoke, smells like petrol.
You can feel Egypt. “Cairo, you’re full. Cairo, you’re friendly. Cairo, you’re tricky.”
When communicating by sound, green, yellow or red, it doesn’t matter, in Cairo you can feel it, in the complicated dance the juggling of the road is tested to the limit between glances and honks. The poor child who invented the sound “Pi” in a hopeful honk will never have been to Cairo, he would certainly have lost confidence in the act of playing. In car culture, whoever is inside is king.
The viewer is taken for a walk through the streets of Cairo, subjugated to what it is like to walk in the city, in a pure exercise of observation, useless actions under the noise of the horns, words drowned out by a “Piiiiiii”. In The King of the Rood, artist Maria Peixoto Martins takes the audience on a journey in the back of a Chevrolet T, through the chaos of stimuli in the metropolitan city centre.
An intimacy is created with the drivers and the cars, one an extension of the other, through a precision voyeuristic gaze that enters through the windows. In the detail of the images due to the blur of speed, one feels the discomfort of intrusion when the camera lens receives the driver’s gaze. In the same way that she observes, Peixoto Martins feels observed among the noise of the horns, in the absence of silence, a new piece in the puzzle emphasised by the difference. The artist positions herself from the outside, in a confusing nucleus that only the confidant understands, with a lens open to the inside.
The King of The Rood is an authentic immersion, devoid of misunderstandings, an open door of interpretations for the viewer, without condescension or foolishness, an intimate and honest capture transcending three dimensions. Characterised by a heavy air of pollution, but light with irony and admiration, the work is encapsulated in its title, in an “a” lost somewhere in the streets of Cairo.
