Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Of all Brazilian artists who use audiovisual as a tool of poetic expression, you are among the most accepted and recognized in the film festival scene. This is true despite the fact that you don't ever work within the limits of any given genre such as, say, documentaries. To what do you ascribe such acceptance? Is it due to the increasing receptiveness of film-related institutions, or to a particular feature of your work? 

I think it happens because I don't believe in limits or film genres! I am against categorizations, and cinema as an art form is still in its cradle. As you put in your time and work in getting the child to walk, then you become 'accepted,' at least by those who believe in the power of cinema as an art form and a 'tool of poetic expression.'

Looking back over your work, do you think you strayed too far from what you used to call “kitchen cinema”? If your work is no longer the “daily exercise of looking out at the world by yourself,” then what has changed regarding your lack of pretension and your intimacy with the medium? 

I don't think I have strayed from what I call “kitchen cinema.” It's just that I equipped my kitchen with ovens, refrigerators, more modern and sophisticated devices. Technological advancement is always welcome, but the ingredients for cooking good food usually remain the same. You can't get carried away with the electronic gadgets in your oven. It's better to always keep an eye on the batter, so you don't burn or overcook it. My work has never been a “daily exercise of looking out at the world by myself.” Perhaps that has always been my starting point. In order to make a film about, say, another world, I can't help doing it based on my own worldview. On the other hand, I can't help getting a little bored sometimes, because our world seems to be repeating itself a lot. Fear is what concerns me the most in our time. People are scared of being themselves lately, so they choose to stick with their peers, but difference is what generates motion.

Your works have different features: the more visual ones are contemplative; the more documental ones take a dive into the subject matter; while the ones that record actions are provocative. Is there a line of evolution there, or are they all equally important? Which of those features are you working with right now? 

Of course, all of them are important. All have been important in the moments they were born. I've always sought to do something different from what I had done before, to confront my own self in order to improve my self-knowledge. I came to the conclusion that it's easier for me to be in a position of contemplating reality and depicting it through my gaze. But it's hard to have a good idea sometimes, and even harder to plan out a work of art in advance in full detail. That's why I have been thinking about taking a breather from my own life for a while in order to write a script. Not because I find it important to write scripts, but because I have never written one. Every time I tried to write a script, I would end up with a literary text. I want to know what it's like to imagine a film before making it. Note that this is also a proposition for me to change my daily habits as well. A proposition for me to live in another reality (that of the imagined film) within my own reality. It can't be easy, and maybe I'm not much of a focused, objective person, but it sure can't hurt to try.

Starting with the title, Concerto para clorofila is a music-oriented work. As a maker of audiovisuals, and (at least originally) a “man of image,” how do you approach sound in your work? 

Just as image can be sound, sound can also be image. There are many similarities and fusion points between those two elements. Image and audio are like flour and eggs for the cake batter that goes in the oven. Each work has a measure in which a mystery is fermented. I have a romantic-baroque relationship with sound. I had to bump into O Grivo (through whom I got to know John Cage) and João Cabral de Melo Neto for them to teach me about the other side of sonority. I have learned to respect and care for each and every sound particle that reaches our ears (including the ones we imagine). I learned how to identify a sound that is pregnant, and then I learned how to translate that into images. If, for Cage, “silence is pregnant with sound,” then what screen is pregnant with image, the white or the black one? I wonder whether silence is white or black. I wonder whether silence is pregnant with sound, or is it a cemetery, a bone yard of sounds?

What are Gambiarras? What is it that keeps luring you into photography? 

Gambiarra is the synthesis of what we call “Human Being.” Unfinished beings, thank God! Each of us finding our own way to survive. Gambiarra is philosophy, religion, and art. Gambiarra also means finding that tiny little branch when you're falling into the abyss. Gambiarra means constant reinvention, it means redesigning the laws of nature. Gambiarra is God when He made the world. What always attracted me the most in photography is the ability to make drawings with light.

How did your collaboration with Marcelo Gomes begin? What does he bring to your work? 

I met Gomes two years ago in Belo Horizonte, when he was editing his film Cinema, aspirinas e urubus with Karem Harley. We became friends (maybe because I rescued him from a dirty, cold apartment hotel in the city). And we, as friends do, did a lot of daydreaming and thinking over glasses of beer and/or cachaça-we thought about the 'off-axis' revolution in Brazilian cinema; we devised off-the-wall films that never will be made; we talked about our heroes and villains, shared and otherwise, etc. In other words, we discovered similarities and common desires that are the embryo of every partnership. We then decided to try out that partnership in the editing of Concerto para clorofila, which was wonderful. His past experiences and his way of making cinema were different from mine, but didn't get in the way of my own methods. On the contrary, it was a combination of different points of view, coincidental or not, that came together in our desire to work and to exchange. Each partnership brings new elements to my work. In the specific case of Gomes, I think it was mostly his notion of cinematographic timing and his obstinacy/perseverance in making a type of cinema that had poetic expression and was free from the constraints and codes usually imposed by the industry (it took him seven years to make his first feature film, and I find that impressive).

What projects are you presently involved in? Will the trilogy of solitude, inaugurated with A alma do osso, go on? 

I'm finishing editing a film that is the second part of the solitude trilogy. It's a film about wanderers with the working title Com os pés um tanto fora do chão. Together with Marcelo Gomes, I'm beginning to write the script for the third part of the trilogy, based on the Edgar Allan Poe tale The Man of the Crowd. Together with O Grivo, I'm going to Mexico to make several short films for a DVD, and we're also having an exhibition at Museu Carrillo Gil, Mexico City. Together with Rivane Neuenschwander, I'm almost done editing a short film about carnivalesque ants. And finally, an extremely necessary work: this year, or maybe early next year, I plan to release two or three films in the cinema circuit. If all goes well, the films A alma do osso, Acidente, and Com os pés um tanto fora do chão will be seen by a wider audience than that of art galleries, museums, and film festivals. For such a thing to happen, a superhuman effort is required in trying out an alternative to this tired and worn-out system of cinema screening in Brazil.

When will your residency at Gasworks happen? Do you have a project in mind for you to do in your residency? 

The residency will happen in October, November, and December. I haven't defined a project yet, but I suspect it will have something to do with the thrill of returning to a city I used to live in (London).