Associação Cultural Videobrasil

What is your background?

I have an academic background in communications, radio, and TV. I was a professional volleyball player from thirteen until twenty-one years of age, but even back then I knew I wanted to work with images. In volleyball, I struggled real hard with my body and got in touch with my physical limitations-a struggle I returned to in my work with images. I had no flexibility; I was slow. So I became interested not in the game itself, but in overcoming the limitations of the body. At the same time, I knew I didn't want to play volleyball, I wanted to make images. So I quit playing, saved some money and stayed in Europe for a year, just going to rock concerts and art shows. 

Did you have any previous contact with art or image?

None at all. Just photography. Although I had no formal knowledge or training, I was good at taking pictures. The contact with art got me further into the image thing: Francis Bacon, William Turner, William Blake. Stuff that changes your life a little bit. Video was there when I needed a tool to express myself, but if video did not exist I would probably be a painter.

How did you get to make videos?

When I returned from my trip, me and three of my friends bought a VHS camera. I was already studying communications in college. I felt a need to put something together, an image, but I didn't know exactly what it was. I had an emotional drive that exploded in my early works, which were totally unconscious. In No time to cry, I wanted to record a beggar in the street. While searching for someone, I passed by my grandmother's house and asked if I could record her. I also had some footage of the abandoned Matarazzo factory no one was allowed to enter. I went down there with my girlfriend, there was a hole in the wall and we went inside. I had these two images and did not know what to do with them, so I edited them, and they turned into the story of my family. This unconscious approach is still present in my work. No matter how cerebral or conceptual I get, no matter how many reference points I have, this approach is my foundation.

When did the narrative issues arise?

The passive approach to watching audiovisual works has always bothered me. The viewer is watching, but his view is that of a third person. I have always wondered who is that person watching the scene. Oh, is that me? If so, then I want in, I want to participate. A paixão segundo Bruce is a narrative story. Afterwards, I did Jardim Rizzo, in which you get the points of view of all involved. It is part of a larger project: the story of a person who is drowning and watches life go by. Whoever watched the video could change the story. I had neither technology nor money, so I recorded a few scenes and went broke. I did nothing for a while, and when I got back I began to get interested neither in the story nor in the narrative itself, but in creating scenes. My latest fiction work, The bodymen lost in heaven, consisted of separate, living, independent scenes of a couple; scenes that resulted from an emotion of mine, over which I had no control. But when I filmed it, I knew: “This is what I want. I am no longer interested in the story, I am interested in this image, which is a picture.” 

So that's how you got into installations?

My first installation project came up when I was recording Bruce: from the street, I saw a three-window apartment. There was a TV set in each window, and all were tuned to the same channel, but whenever the scene would change, one TV set would take a micro longer to change than the others. I saw the changing tones of light, and that image got me thinking about the possibility of distending time, of an installation within a different kind of space, one I would be able to walk into. The Internet didn't even exist back then. Soon thereafter, I read an article about the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), about elastic media, that whole thing. But my installations were never based on theoretical concepts, they were based on images. In INSPIREme, in 1999, for the first time ever, I treated the image as a painting. I used a Plasma 98 in vertical position and an image of a girl breathing. It looks like a painting by Caravaggio. 

When did the sound become important in your work?

In 1998, I made an installation about a poem by Lorca for SESC, and I wanted to work with the smashing of the image. Not the physical smashing of the medium, but the smashing of the image itself. I studied, I made drawings, I wanted a holographic image, a tube beam for people to stand underneath, but it didn't work. In order to maintain the original concept, I ended up choosing a cheap stage design solution. People would lie down in a gurney on the floor and look up, and we had a huge tube TV set that two technicians would move up and down. But we also had the sound, and it was through sound that I managed to accomplish the conceptual part of the work: to give the person lying there the sensation of being smashed by the image. That was the first time I did a soundtrack. 

How did you go from installations to performances, and then on to the dance floors?

When I did INSPIREme, I had just gotten into nonlinear editing, and it changed my life. I became interested in the graphic frame thing. In the timeline, I was finally able to see the image no longer attached to the medium, but free from it, in a way. Nonlinear editing confronts you with chance all the time, and it gives you the possibility of playing the image like an instrument. It enables you to manipulate, to improvise, and that opened up an entirely new realm for me. By then, I was no longer interested in the construction of a scene or an image; I was interested in deconstructing motion. If I have a still image and I hit Play, the image gets diluted into twenty, thirty frames, it loses the power of the still image. I asked myself: “How can I get that back?” That was where my whole performance work began. And when I went to the dance floor, my whole take on life changed. The first time I went to a rave party, in 1999, I was like: “This here is a sensorial installation like no other, I will never be able to put together something like this. I want to come in here with images and try to match them spatially with the sounds, which are spatial as well.”

How did your VJ work give way to live image?

Once you are really capable of having control over the construction of image and the creation of ambiences, which is a situation quite similar to an installation, then you also gain control over another power: the power of sound and image combined. For me, the dance floor was like a laboratory. It was real cool working with live improvisation, with the possibility of placing the image inside an ambience, of working with the image within the space, of creating a narrative that is no longer placed inside the medium, of proposing for people to experience audiovisuals in a new way. But there came a time when I was no longer interested in being in a situation over which I did not have full control. That's the reason I got into closed projects, audiovisual compositions in which I could control the sound as well, as in Vermelho sangue and Desconstruindo Letícia Parente. 

How did you come up with the concept of moving cells?

In Imagem não Imagem, from 2003, an exhibition curated by Christine Mello at Galeria Vermelho, eight artists worked using a documentary film by Arlindo Machado, Complemento nacional, that had been made using leftovers from journalistic films from the 1970s, as their starting point. Each artist was supposed to think about the film, create a piece of work, and feed it into a database. I had never worked with documentary images before. Around that time, a friend asked me to tape one of his performances. The piece was pretty bad, but the images had some graphic quality to them. I started to mess around with them and that's when I discovered the moving cells: through live manipulation, I seek an image behind that footage, something that wasn't there to begin with. That opened up a whole universe for me. Then, in Grotesco Sublime MIX (2005), I recorded a workshop of Teatro da Vertigem, and when I tried to edit it in a documental style, nothing came up. The sensations I had while watching the workshop, of feeling horny, scared, or disgusted, none of them showed up in the images. At that time, I was working with a software that didn't run properly in my computer, and maybe because I had to deal with that limitation, it opened up a brand new realm of manipulation for me. Grotesco Sublime MIX is the resut of an unique 16-minute session of improvising with this tool. From it I learnt about the power of performance, of live manipulation, and also that the important thing for me is not technology, but the thought flow that's behind it. In the end, I hadn't used 100% of the software possibilities, but still I had managed to recover the power of the original image that was there, pulsating, striving to jump out of the screen.

Is the idea of recovering the original feeling still a key issue in your work?

Retratos in motion: o beijo was my first project to start off from a medium and not an image. One day, I was with Patrícia, my girlfriend, we were kissing, I was real happy, and, as I had my cell phone in my pocket, I started taking pictures. I didn't know what the pictures looked like, I couldn't see them. I fed the pictures into a computer and, using a panoramic image software, which puts images together, I made a series of short videos. Then, using a manipulation software, I began processing the image, as if I were trying to go to other areas of it, trying to set them in motion. The moment of the kiss had been lost, and the entire work was an attempt to recover it. I have a new project, Landscape of My Dreams, in which I propose exercises designed to investigate the relationship between the initial moment of creation of an image/action and its result, mediated by the camera. In one of these exercises, I would thrust my body against a wall. As I jumped onto the wall, I stumbled upon the limit of the physical body, my untrained body which creates the image and the action, but that action was not the one I had imagined, neither did the captured image match my feelings before the action. And then, through manipulation, I managed to seek it, to recover it, and bring it to the surface of the image. That's what moves me.

How did you come up with the concept for Tríptico: estudo para auto-retrato 1, awarded at the 15th Videobrasil?

The body has always been the essence of my work, but it took me a long time to be able to put my own body into my work. The moment I record the image on my body, it no longer has the Duva identity, it becomes a shape. The day I recorded the image for that work, I was pissed off, had no ideas, so I started toying with the computer and caught a glimpse of what was there behind the picture. It became an installation at Paço das Artes, and halfway through I sent it to Videobrasil. I had no expectations, because the piece was a triptich. After doing performances at the Festival in 2001, and live image presentations with Letícia Parente in 2003, it was really cool to return for the Competitive Exhibition, not with something I no longer believe in, which is showing a video in single channel, shown as a triptich at the Play Gallery. Because Auto-retrato is a performance, since I have manipulated that image, and also due to the dialogue among the three of them, barking at each other.

You intend to develop audiovisual scores for your plays. Where does that need come from?

The first time I wrote a little score, in order to know what to do during a play, was in Desconstruindo Letícia Parente. The audiovisual play must not only be rehearsed, as if you were a musician, but you also have moments of solo, ad-lib video. How can I divide a play into moments that are more narrative, others that are freely improvised, and others yet in which I might be part of a quartet? The visual score is very important in works of art, of technology, of new media, because these types of work get lost, they are made using platforms and software that will no longer exist five years down the road. But, if you have a score and you have the images, you can load it into any software, and fifty years from now somebody can do it again. Well, maybe not that long. That would be too much pretension. But, at the same time, I would like to do something much bigger. I would like to do a performance at Upper Xingu, up there in the borderline between soy plantations and deforestation, and I would like to do another one down at Chuí, I would like to use satellites.

Your work has frequently led you to engage in fights with the available technologies. How do you relate to these limitations?

I use whatever tool is accessible. I have never been interested in developing technologies. My background has always been creation-oriented. In the twenty installations I have done, I've struggled with that issue all the time: in order to do what I wanted, I had to develop new technologies. And, having no access to technology, I would just hold on to the original concept, and then I would adapt it to whatever was available. I could leave, dedicate myself to studying software for a year, but damn, in one year I can do two installations, and to me that means one thousand thoughts, much more important thoughts. There are people abroad working with a different approach, such as Daito Manabe or Golan Levin, both artists who develop their own softwares. Their work is so sophisticated, and yet so simple, that you just don't see the technology anymore. That has always interested me. Recently, I found out that my work is no longer created in order to be an installation or a live image presentation. It is an image. Maybe I have managed, lately, to do exactly what I had been trying to do since the beginning: an image in itself.