Tania Candiani was working on her exhibition Cuatro Actos, for Odeón Space, in Bogota, when she decided to film El principio, el paréntesis y el fin, el telón [The Beginning, the parenthesis and the end, the curtain]. She was focusing on the theatrical language, its mechanisms and codes of communication as strategies to reveal and hide a specific construction of reality, when she began to see the theater curtains as landscapes. Candiani saw in the drapes, pleats and planes of the fabrics of the curtains mirage topographies of mountain ranges, valleys and deserts.

In the Library of Congress in Washington DC, USA, Candiani researched texts investigating the curtains as landscapes and collected writings as diverse as the epic poem Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, El hombre del telón by Leila Guerriero and Fábulas de Fredo by the Roman fabulist Gaius Iulius Phaedrus, as well as works by five other authors.

Texts and words became the material of Candiani’s work that through the mounts, deviations and fragmentations composed a new text that lead the images captured from different theater curtains. The artist discovered that different types of theaters have different types of curtains that, with their specific methods of uncovering, provoke a variety of effects. Tania also captured the pleats of the robes of stone statues from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., USA, which resemble stone curtains. Luck allowed Candiani to record the moment when technicians removed and folded the curtain from the León Greiff Auditorium of the National University of Colombia.

Tania Candiani divided the film into three parts. In the first part, about images of static scene cloths, the text investigates the curtains as landscape of settings full of geographical accidents. In the second, the curtains sway, shake and open to reveal the scenes and their action potential to an audience ready to devour the possible narratives revealed. The texts there come from titles of moral fables and they sound ominous, ominous or blessed. In the third part, at the end of the show, the curtains close and the lights come on, revealing forgotten curtains, threadbare, full of dust and wounds.