Of flesh and bone Danillo Barata is one and many. A video maker, professor, documentary filmmaker, photographer, performer, researcher, and short-film and music-video director, he watches the other and himself, the world and the relations that bring men either closer together or farther apart, in order to create his poetics.
The ground zero for the artist’s investigations is the materiality of humans in the spaces that they occupy, their physical, bodily presence, and the ballasts of history, memory, culture, and social conventions stored in flesh and bone.
The body speaks of and for itself, and lays bare—in live appearances, on video, like a sticker in motion—the vicissitudes of a society that has it as god and slave, a machine of perfection and modelling clay.
Centered around the social construction of the body, the artist creates works such as the installation O corpo como inscrição de acontecimentos (2003), in which he approaches the configurations taken on by the “historical body” in contemporary times, which was also the subject of the thesis for his master’s degree in arts.
In Soco na imagem (2007), awarded at the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil (2007), he goes back to exploring his own body as a source of reflection and raw material, similar to what he had already done in Narciso, his first formal experiment with video (2000).
The grip of corporal patterns that seek validation in fleeting images and the resulting obsoleteness of the body are issues that emerge from the work of the artist, as observed, in the Essay, by UFBA professor Edvaldo Couto, who holds a master’s degree in philosophy and has supervised Barata’s master’s thesis.
Further info on this artist available at the collection
