Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Question

Where, or how, do you situate the confluence of art and cinema today?

Today we have an “emergent fiction” which is not so much fiction as a deconstruction of reality, or a dialectical understanding capable of producing something new and personal. And though since its invention in 1895, film has always been closely linked with art, in the realm of critical thinking the confluence between cinema and art is more recent, as is its reappraisal by a new generation of artists helping to develop some level of wider acceptance of a hybrid and cross-disciplinary art form. This art form is achieved by means of cuts, juxtapositions, and the temporal trajectories of images. The “new” art history is presently focusing upon the history, context, and politics of visual interpretation.

Statement

Kinds of Images offers new ways to tell stories. In a time of mobility of people and ideas, and of globalisation and exclusion, of fear, power, and instability (and with all their murky yet sometimes challenging effects), the eight selected videos of this program visually depict and shape the content of those thoughts constantly in sight in our daily life. Kinds of Images presents works that deny the commonly accepted idea that media were merely instrumental technologies in the master domain of communicating messages. As W.J.T. Mitchell says, “if we are going to ‘address media’, that is, locate them, give them an address, the challenge is to place them, and to see them as landscapes or spaces”. The media-based works in Kinds of Images are landscapes and spaces addressing them not only in a literal sense but also from a global perspective as the images were captured around the world. This might be an attraction; yet their energy is independent of their accuracy as a representation. There is hope that not all that is left for the present is entertainment. Produced in the last three years, they have complex storylines occupying multiple positions and identities. The first film is Traveling Amazonia, a conceptual work by Marine Hugonnier on the utopian dream of opening a road in the Amazon jungle. It is followed by works that point to the unseen reality of building the new China; the contrasting milieu of the streets of New York; the helplessness at the Erez Crossing at Gaza; and the colonial past of a garden in Portugal. Their images move with vitality constructing around these places and spaces critical metaphors and political meditations about the present time. There is a strong presence of a documentary sensibility in this selection. The expanded field of “documentary” film results today in a mosaic of perspectives, including anything from those having a traditional narrative structure to those in which an encoded plot barely permits us to acknowledge “the authenticating trace” that connects a documentary film with its real referent. One of the few exceptions is Nacionalismo Domestico by Spanish artist Mateo Maté who reveals his characters through a montage of clips from existing films. Yet, the heart of the discussion may not reside in the extent to which a cultural representation is real or not, but in whether there is an adequate basis for examining the relationship between a work and its context. These eight works claim (and now the public has to decide) that they have found the blueprint for the relationship among innovative narrative forms, the production of meaning, and the present-day environment. Kinds of Images can carry the viewer beyond the everyday images of the present. Please, turn off your TV.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica SESC_Videobrasil": de 30 de setembro a 25 de outubro de 2007, p.16-17, Edições SESC SP, São Paulo-SP, 2007, p. 169.