Complementary technical description
Presentation text 1996
Bardo
The use of various artistic components produces a defiant and creative performance
Liberty"s Many Shapes
Marcondes Dourado is a young, 22 year old, “Baiano” (native of Bahia, Brazil) who tends to brand his multiple artistic manifestations with his strong personality. Uninhibited by conventional concepts he is a researcher at heart, and is constantly seduced by means or instruments which give a free rein to his unique and innovative aesthetics. He works with video and photography, but his fascination with theater and dance cannot be denied - it is this combination of elements which produces his unusual performances, which at times he calls spectacles. But, whatever he does call them, names, labels and formats don’t adapt themselves to Marcondes’ universe. It took only a year of formal academic studies at the “Escola de Bela Artes de Salvador”for him to decree a total incompatibility with conventional paths of learning. He questions regimes and adopts the courage and creativity of Glauber Rocha as his reference.
Bardo is a combination of the artistic expressions found in video, dance and theater, used here to promote and provoke new insights in the spectator. It is, according to the author, inspired on texts in which the poet Antonin Artaud describes the sensations he had as a patient in different psychiatric clinics.
"To revoke our annihilated bodies. Reconstruct our dismantled interior being, recover what is left of ourselves”, as Marcondes puts it. To this effect he uses the allusive nude body to represent our fears and secrets. Set in an inhuman environment made up of containers full of water and hair he creates a sensation of cold-steel discomfort. To create a sense of loss and emptiness he uses music, lights and video images projected on a big screen- all united they produce a peculiar and instigating aesthetic image.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "11º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil " [11th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival]: from november 11 to november 17, 1996, p. 81, São Paulo, SP, 1996.