Presentation text 2006
DVD bonus + about the artists + about the directors Bonus "Mau Wal: Translated Encounters" includes the making-of of the installation and performance "God Is Mouth" (2000), produced in Rio de Janeiro. In this work, Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg tackle the need for faith and the colloquies of persuasion that come from different lips: those of a pastor, a drag queen, a street vendor. Four projectors and four speakers involve the public with fast images and sounds while a performer in a glass booth pulls out random numbers and God receives forty-four four-letter definitions. The artists Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964, Maurício Dias graduated from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro's School of Fine Arts. Walter Riedweg, born in Switzerland in 1955, studied at the Musik-Akademie Luzern. A casual encounter in Switzerland in 1993 grew into a joint artistic practice that blends elements of performance, documentation, and installation designed to provoke interferences in daily situations that lead to a questioning of the social, affective, and hierarchical fabrics that connect and disconnect individuals. “The work of Dias and Riedweg invites us to rethink the relationship between aesthetics and politics,” writes critic Catherine David. “It is about poetic actions that temporarily or even permanently produce and open a flaw, an interruption, a distancing in the order of the senses and in the course of things.” Dias and Riedweg have shown at the Havana, Liverpool, Istanbul, Venice, Shanghai, and São Paulo Biennials. In 2005 they received a large retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland. The directors Marco Del Fiol is director, scriptwriter, and editor of documentaries and feature films. For the Videobrasil Authors Collection he has also codirected "Rafael França: Work as Testament" (2001). Other directorial projects include "Emoção Art.ficial 2.0" for Instituto Itaú Cultural in 2004 and "Marepe" for the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2005. He is responsible for the editing and coordination of the DVDs "Nomadisms: A Tribute to Waly Salomão" (2003) and "Antologia Videobrasil de Performances" (2005), from Associação Cultural Videobrasil. He has collaborated with the NGO Cedac on videos for Programa Escola que Vale [School that's Worth It Program] run by the Vale do Rio Doce Foundation. He teaches editing and camera at the Miami Ad School in São Paulo. Historian and art critic, Fabiana Werneck Barcinski graduated in Industrial Design, with specialization in Brazilian Art and Architecture. She also holds a master's degree in Cultural Social History from PUC-Rio. Her published works include the lead text for the book "Ivan Serpa" (2003) for Banco Pactual; a biography of José Resende for a volume on the artist's work published by Cosac & Naify, as well as essays on contemporary visual artists Nuno Ramos and Claudio Elisabetski. She wrote the script for the 2005 production "Marepe", directed by Marco Del Fiol. She is the editor of the children's/youth line for the Girafinha label at A Girafa publishing house.