The Narration of • Dar À Luz

Capsule Skin Biopantone created for Dar À Luz.

Dar À Luz

Portuguese: “to give light, to give birth, to generate”

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This is a text I have decided to write because the initial plans I had of filming Dar À Luz had to be postponed until after the end of Fabricademy due to the COVID19 pandemic. It consists on the descriptive narration of what images and sounds the film would contain. This narration is meant to be read out loud by a 3rd person that will guide the imagination of the final audience member.

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Lay down looking at the sun or at a strong light, this will help. Close your eyes. Imagine I am you; my eyes are your vision.

When my eyes go passed the blurry white effect of being closed facing a light I can see. And the scene in front of me is a very odd one.  

A laboratory room, the lighting in it is quite white, as most of the environment, the walls, the floor tiles. Whatever is not white is silver and metal; all seems very easy to clean. If there is a colour point I realise it is either a lab tool or a lab-developed liquid or object. In the centre of the room there is a woman, or a female creature, she looks almost real, but is she a lab creation? She lies down on a lit up table, it could be a lab bed too if a very flat one. The light coming from under her body is white. I see all that from the top, facing straight down.

It all looks very weird.

But it’s beautiful too, and her body in the light seems human yet ethereal, she is beautiful. Lying there. Still. Eyes closed.

Is she real though? She has exposed bones. They aren’t bones, they are like a bone armour. Maybe an exoskeleton. But it doesn’t cover up her hairy skin. And I can see her womb, or can I? I blink. My eyes are playing tricks on me. My vision is not well focused. I focus it slowly. The light is getting stronger.

White.

DAR À LUZ

White.

Again the light starts going down. I see the same scene as before. She is real, she is opening eyes! I feel like a cloud that moves gently towards that woman is carrying me. As I get closer to her I turn my eyes to certain bits of colour in the environment, each time with a white blink. I then decide to focus on the woman. She starts moving like she was underwater, so softly. Her gentle movements remind me, I never ended up finding out what is it that I saw, if it was a laboratory skin that she had, or if it was her womb with that funny looking purple liquid sitting in it. I see her skin, her true skin. It interacts with this over layer that looks, too, as a skin, but it’s hairy and slightly transparent. I move my eyes and see her womb-like liquid balloon. With the purple liquid, now that she moves, it moves together with her, slowly, spreading out till it reaches the limits of that transparent skin-like inflatable.

I move my eyes once again and can now see the white exoskeleton more clearly, it looks like cuts of her own body, but it’s rigid, like she casted herself in that structure. It looks very machine-made though, with a visible and super thin line addition construction. Within its holes I can see her skin, her real skin again.

I move my eyes again, the light of the room goes darker, with the main light point being the bed she lies in. Her purple liquid now looks as if they were glowing, no, must be my eyes.

Another white blink.  

The scene is still the same but I now see it from a side view, behind some of the lab items. The light goes back to being mainly white and pretty strong. My focus goes from the broad scene to certain items in the lab. There are bit of skin-coloured material hanging of the shelves.

There are lab tools.

Petri dishes.

Bacteria shakers.

Behind them, on the broader view, she moves very slowly, now caressing her purple-liquid womb. She cares for that weird lab baby of hers. She caresses her breasts, her whole skin.

White blink.

I see hands. They prepare petri dishes, they measure PH in the liquids. They pull more of the purple liquid from the glass measuring flask into a syringe. They pull it out onto the woman’s transparent womb. They are long hands. Female hands. Wearing many rings. She has silvery nails. She closes up the lid of that weird womb after adding more purple liquid inside it.

I blink.

I now see her, the womb wearing woman, through the funny looking liquid in laboratory measurement glasses; I guess they call it medium liquid. The ones I had seen before when that cloud took me towards her at the beginning. I can first see her distorted face; it is half behind the liquid and half just there. I keep starring at her through that “liquidy” view. There is a light focused straight on her face that creates a very cool effect through the liquid medium too.

She starts moving, she is dancing a very ritualistic type of dance, it seems. Doing it, she gets further and I now see her second hairy skin through the glass. I see her exoskeleton half distorted. I see too her womb and its liquid baby. The light now is very white but it lights up the whole room and allows me to see a bit of her shade too.

Again, a white blink.

Now I see from very close up that she is moving and my sight travels from the purple liquid inflated womb to her hairy second skin to her exoskeleton while she moves. She is in a rather white-lit environment, but its no longer that lab room.

As the camera starts moving away I see more of her body moving. Now I see that she is in another part of the lab. It looks like a plant-growth area in that lab. The plants are catalogued and the space is controlled, that’s how I know it’s still inside the lab.

She has arranged the plants in a circle and dances around them, almost like she’s doing a gestation tribal ritual, she touches her laboratorial womb. She manipulates its liquid. The whole theme of her dance is that relation between the rigid white 3D printed exoskeleton and her more internal second skin. She squats with her legs open, bouncing slowly side to side, rocking her liquid baby. The light goes down. Her womb baby starts coming to life. It shines. She dances to its light. She screams.

I blink for one last time. Of course it’s a white blink.

Credits roll up. Behind them is the empty lab room with the lit bed.

White.

I can now start opening up my eyes. Very slowly. Look around. You can now see through your own sight.

Thank you for letting me guide you through my imagination with your own touches here and there.