Interview Eduardo de Jesus, 04/2004
The landscape is a strong, recurrent element in your work. It becomes clear in the works Utopia, Plaff and Flatland, as well as in the visual programming created for the 14th Videobrasil Festival. Is there a landscape instigation to generate these works? Where do the perceptions come from for the production of these works?
we work while we wander. we can’t stay still for a long time. almost all of our ideas arise during strolls, walks. it implies time, space, passages, displacements. the landscape is there, all around us, and its transformation is mostly what interests us. we’ve got the sensation that we are living in a liquid world which is always redesigning itself. the landscapes of our works haven’t got fixed forms… they are extended, unfolded, recombined, realigned… they are transformation landscapes.
Your production displays transit between supports, techniques, means and spaces. How do you effectuate the passages in this transit at the moment of production? Is there a main element that determines the others?
if there is a transit between the means, that’s because we never take them as starting points. we pass by them. we believe they are there, at our disposal to be used. like paths that we take to get somewhere. our work begins with an observation, which leads to a conversation that can be transcribed into video, wooden ladders, piled bricks or a typographical font, but the determining element is the discussion we have between us or with others.
In fact, some works seem to be images of time. Maybe a more extended time, linked to other velocities. How do you articulate the notions of time in the construction of images and instalments?
the perception of time has always interested us because of the movement, its acceleration and deceleration, and because of the transitoriness, the passage of time. in ‘flatland’, we ended up confounding the perception of time, of what is slow or quick. a image that is apparently at high speed is actually a decelerated still unfolded in many frames. in ‘pilha’, we tried to remove the instantaneity of reading. The reader needs to ‘count’ the piles to read, and he ends up staying longer with the words… we try to give time to meanings… and meanings to time.