Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Sometimes based on a watchful gaze, sometimes based on carefully designed provocations, the work of Cao Guimarães (Belo Horizonte, 1965) is a very particular brand of cinema, one which preserves the silence and the relative precariousness of solitary creation-based on gestures and ideas, never on gadgets-, and floats freely above genres and formats. The conceptual power of visual arts and the cinematographic exercise of “the action, the time, the gaze” converge in his work, giving rise to a unique body of work that has equal impact in the fields of cinema and art. Since always, image has been the common denominator to all of the artist's actions. Holder of a degree in philosophy from UFMG, Guimarães works primarily with photography and throughout the 1990s he has produced work that often deals with the language of cinema using scene construction and character creation. His images evolve into an exploration of their own physicality-examples of what art critic Tadeu Chiarelli has called “a photography that does not accept its own limits”-and flirt with installations in Decalques, from Projeto Arte Cidade III (1997): on the ruined walls of Moinho Central, São Paulo, Guimarães projected enlarged vinyl photos of traces and remainders left on anonymous walls by demolished houses. OTTO, eu sou um outro, a 35mm domestic road movie made in partnership with Lucas Bambozzi and selected for the 12th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival (1998), foretells the discovery of image in motion. Over the following years, during a period he spent in London pursuing a master's degree in photography from the Westminster University and deepening his knowledge of contemporary art, Guimarães experimented with a Super-8 camera he had inherited from his grandfather, whose habit of making and screening homemade movies was a family tradition. Using what he found out to be a tool at once visual and agile, the artist created a filmed diary of sorts, made out of “small everyday impressions.” The films, sent by mail for processing and returned a week later, gave the artist the feeling of exchanging letters with himself. The finished images were then projected and recorded on video, in a process he dubbed “kitchen cinema,” which requires “self-sufficiency in every step” of film creation. This was the framework for the delicate The Eye Land, the result of a long-standing partnership with visual artist Rivane Neuenschwander. Created within the same context, Histórias do não-ver was born out of a less contemplative approach: the artist would ask people to fetch him at home and take him down unknown paths with his eyes blindfolded. The experience was recorded using blind photos and described in texts, which were then presented in an object-book. Back in Brazil, the Super-8 format-now converted into digital video-was combined with music by the duo O Grivo, from Belo Horizonte, with whom Guimarães established a fruitful collaboration. The visual, installative ideas he continued to share with Neuenschwander reached their peak with Sopro (2000), a “small drama of form” in which a soap bubble floats across the landscape. The work, a poetic reflection on life and death, inside and outside, absence and presence, was acquired by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and featured in the competitive exhibition of the 13th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival (2001), as well as Word/World, in which the two artists created an intervention using the title words and an ant colony, harvesting the suggestive images that arise out of the interaction between insects and ideas. During the same period, Guimarães codirected, with Lucas Bambozzi and Beto Magalhães, the first in a series of five feature films: O fim do sem fim, which travels through ten Brazilian states searching for characters whose jobs are headed for extinction. Although impregnated with a silence unusual in the documentary genre, within the artist's body of work this is the most representative of his style. In the following year, Volta ao mundo em algumas páginas recorded an action carried out with Rivane Neuenschwander at the Stockholm Public Library. The performance consisted of cutting up a world map into small fragments and then inserting them into randomly chosen library books. The work featured in the 14th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival competitive exhibition (2003). Rua de mão dupla, which was born out of an installation project for the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, and then turned into a feature film, records actions organized around a game: pairs of people who don't know each other simultaneously exchange homes for twenty-four hours and use cameras to report, based on what they encounter, their idea of the other. “Using a video camera, participants insert their personality (through sight) into the personality of an absent other. Solitudes get (con)fused at some point in this flow of seeing and being seen,” claims the artist. More than just incorrect assumptions, the work shows what people reveal of themselves upon handling the camera, in the rhythm of their search, in the choice of what they look at. If, on the one hand, Nanofania (2003), which participated at the 14th Videobrasil, revisits the bubble in Sopro, now multiplied and repeatedly undone in a rhythmic, visual alternation, on the other hand, the feature film A alma do osso, made in the following year, once again reaches for the realm of the other. With no questions and no hurries, the film dives into the universe of a seventy-some-year-old hermit who lives in a cave in the Minas Gerais countryside. The best example of what the director's approach and his relationship with his characters-marked by ethics and by “mystery”-are capable of creating, the film was a beacon of light in the documentary scene, garnering grand prizes in both the national and international categories at the 9th It's All True International Documentary Film Festival (2004). In the following year, the event awarded the artist once again, this time for his short film Da janela do meu quarto (2004), a random sequence shot from a bedroom, and an example of his belief in art that is not made, but rather makes itself. For Concerto para clorofila (2004), a poetic and formal exercise based around elements of nature, Guimarães received two awards at the 15th Videobrasil: the State of the Art Award, granted by the jury, and the Videobrasil Residency Award Hosted by Gasworks, which will take him back to London towards the end of 2006 to carry out a project at the complex of studios and galleries. This year, together with filmmaker Marcelo Gomes (Cinema, aspirina e urubus), who coedited Clorofila, Guimarães will finish the second film of the trilogy that began with A alma do osso, in which he promotes a meeting, in Minas Gerais, of two vagrants, one from the Brazilian Northeast and the other from the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The two films are scheduled for commercial release still in 2006, along with Acidente, a poem codirected with Pablo Lobato and comprised of twenty names of cities in the state of Minas Gerais.