There was a time when the documentary film was believed to be a mirror to the world. By suppressing any vestiges of intervention by the author in the reality documented, documentaries were thought to preserve the authenticity of representation. A simple spin on the mirror’s axis would show that the documentary film does not reflect the world, but rather the subjectivity of its author. Later on, there came the lessons of filmmakers such as Jean Rouch, who showed why documentary films are not mirrors to the world or to the author, in an isolated manner, but rather a negotiation between those two poles. 

Luciano Mariussi works in that territory of transactions in which contemporary documentary films operate. Focusing on the dialogues and mediations between contemporary art and the audience, his videos, installations, and interventions feature the same mirror-like complexity that configures the structure of a documentary film. Mariussi is the fourth and last artist in the Identidade/Alteridade [Identity/alterity] series, a curatorial framework of the FF>>Dossier turned to poetics structured around dialogues between the artist and the world.

The incommunicability between art and audience, the focus of works such as Estética (2002) or Não entendo (1999), is not only the result of an empirical research, conducted with camera in hand, in the urban space or exhibition site. The situation of art x audience estrangement presented in the work of Mariussi also reflects the doubts and uncertainties of the artist as a spectator of contemporary art. A mirror turned inwards, providing works with the quality of self-portraits.

Further info on this artist available at the collection