Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The Word, the Image and the Music: the three graces

In the beginning it was the verb...

It would be necessary to inquire the three authors we have presented in the 10^th Festival Videobrasil. For these artists, Word, Image and Music appear simultaneously; there is no hierarchy in the three components of their creations, in spite of three authors being the opposite and complementary examples of what we can name Video Poetry. Coming from totally distant plastic backgrounds, they met in the video: no-one's land with the great virtue of sheltering the exiled - a land without frontiers, which produces fructiferous meetings of almost irreconcilable creators, as Antón Reixa, Francisco Ruiz de Infante and Rogerio Lopez Cuenca.

The first started his way from a plastic background, which led him to film (briefly) and video, combining the image and literary texts of poetic character. The second, with an academic literary formation, walked through rock music, theater performance and finally came to the Video Poetry. The third, which came from painting and from the semi-optical analyses of the marketing language, ended in the video-pasting which has the structure of the poetry books.

In the works of Francisco Ruiz de Infante, the text, the image and the sound are built simultaneously, based upon an idea that works as an outline script. The three components are not divisible and maintain an interrelationship of unstable balance as, following the author, in the moment that one element becomes more evident than the others, it undoubtedly gets an independent life becoming a text to be published, as a book or catalogue, or music. The frontier is very fragile "y no hay dos sin tres". His videos are works to be read, almost material relief, in which image, music and text make a whole with centripetal power, turning around the recurring themes that Ruiz Infante recognizes as his. Childhood, Religion, Time, Culpability, History and Death.

The work of Anton Reixa is based on more ludicrous parameters, which are not less deep. One may say that the use of Word to him is part of a political speech: the Galician nationalism. The claim of a language as a national characteristic is a historical demand, however the innovator in the work of Reixa is the formal result of this postulate to produce rock and roll and performances in Galician. For that, since the start of his 'fight", the video appears as the means of recording his actions/manifestations and of making them to go farther. The results, besides driving his songs beyond the Galician frontiers, are works as Salvamento e Socorrismo a historical piece in the Spanish art-video, where Reixa declaims the poems of his book Historia do Rock and Roll.

As an extremely actual lecture, his video Ringo-Rango is the assimilation of the Rap as the poetry of our times. Following Reixa, the Rap singers are the troubadors of the 21^th century. They are the real catalyzers and transmitters of the social conflicts and the daily life. In this video the artist declaims continously in a scene formed by short texts and poems, few of them inspired in the programs of the radio consults in which he often cooperates. There is no frontier, neither shape, everything is poetry. The works of Rogerio Lopez Cuenca are more sui-generis. His first contacts with the video happened in the beginning of his work, soon abandoned for a mature career as plastic artist. Nevertheless, the word, the language and the marketing iconography have been always present in his artistic speech. The video installation we present at this festival, Home Swept Hole, happens as a project of book and video for an exhibition in Malaga.

After a long investigation on houses and habitations - in decor magazines, architecture and grammar books, he decided to materialize the results of his search in a video two hours and half tong, with the text, polyglot and confuse, has been published on a book. The results are a visual-pasting and a poetical "remix", composed by images and texts bearing a subjective political message, not lacking ironic jocosity. It is a great honor for me having the opportunity of presenting this explosive combination of Spanish artists, which joining expressive powers, open new ways and bombard the linguistic and artistic frontiers. Video-Poetry, Video-Performance, Video-Pasting, Video-Rock and Roll, Video-Logbook, Video-Marketing Advertise, Video-Video. Three completely distinct views of a creative means. The word creates them, the Video joins them.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "10th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival": 20th to 25th November 1994, São Paulo, Brazil, 1994.