Associação Cultural Videobrasil

How did you become interested in the audiovisual? Did this interest come from the Anthropology through documentaries?

If I think about the beginning, my interest in the audiovisual began through my interest in cinema, long before I came to know what was Anthropology or even documentaries. Probably, fictional cinema comes before everything else, and it is the basis of my interest in images, even today. In other hand, I was graduated in Anthropology, but it is present rather as a door to a very important issue to the documentary: the recognition of alterity. In the movement of recognizing the exotic in the familiar, and the familiar in the exotic, the anthropologist approaches the good documentarian. Thus, it was the texts by Malinowski and Clifford Geertz, much more than the ethnographic films, that encouraged me to make documentaries, recognizing the anthropological concept of alterity as a primordial issue in the realization of documentaries. So, after college, I was impelled to try to make documentaries. I had the luck to begin in a video producer company that produced documentaries but had also a foot in videoart. It was working for PaleoTV, together with Kiko Goifman and Jurandir Müller, that I realized how a documentary could be a sufficiently hybrid language to even stop being called “documentary”, and hover over the classifications. From then on, I began to make documentaries, fiction, experimental videos, video installations, installations, performances, and sculptures without distinctions between then. It's all art. The only difference is that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

In your work, we perceive formal aspects linked to the documentary in works of clear experimental character. How do you relate experimentation to documentary in your works?

Experimentation and documentary are “brothers”. Maybe the documentary is a genre more open to experimentations in terms of cinematographic and television language. It is the television, the vehicle that exhibits the documentaries, that is against experimentations, not the genre itself. The documentaries we watch on TV are institutional and dreadful, but we need only to take an uncommitted walk around some specialized festivals, or even visit some websites, to realize that this genre is a rich terrain for experimentation. This is because, as I have just mentioned, the documentary is hybrid: it can be verité cinema, direct cinema, docudrama, short, long, institutional, authorial, didactic, journalistic, it can be about any subject, it can have a narrator, concealed or not, it can incorporate its own making-off; to summarize, it can be a lot of things, what makes it difficult to define it. Therefore, I think it's a perfect test tube for those who make authorial, experimental, artistic or whatever kind of films. However, I don't think the experimental work is beyond the documentary, something free of its formal chains; it's quite the opposite. Nowadays, video experimentalism suffers from many clichés, becoming almost a specific genre as comedy, western or war films. The experimentalism lacks the romantic, unattainable objectivity of the documentaries, whose images are just what you see in them. What is seen is what it is, almost nothing more.

There is a certain thematic line that seems to give unity to some of your works as, for instance, the body issues in the documentaries Olhos Opacos [Opaque Eyes] (1998) and Na Lona [On The Ground] (2002), and the solitude issue in the series Não Há Ninguém Aqui [There Is Nobody Here] (2000-2002). How are these themes brought about? Is there any research method to the approach of these themes?

It's funny, but I think these themes are always with us. The difficult thing is not to bring them about, but the opposite. Sometimes I think 'I must get rid of these themes, they are persecuting me for years!' And this is something we can perceive in the works of many contemporary artists, an almost minimalist repetition of the themes. This is not a negative point, but a characteristic of our time: the almost obsessive, schizophrenic reiteration of the same issues. In the mentioned works (Olhos Opacos and Na Lona), the body issue is present almost in the same way, in spite of the different approaches. In these works, I treat the issue of the failure of the body, of the moment the body stops functioning, revealing its fragility and, at the same time, its capacity to overcome it: the blindness in Olhos Opacos, the knockout in Na Lona. The theme of the trilogy Não Há Ninguém Aqui is no doubt the solitude. However, in each video it has a different direction. There is the solitude which is present in the sentimental newspaper classified ads of the great metropolises, and its anonymous character (Não Há Ninguém Aqui #1), the solitude of the artist in his private life (Não Há Ninguém Aqui #2), and the solitude of the confinement, of the immobility (Não Há Ninguém Aqui #3). Currently, I'm treating the theme of the cinema itself. So, there is no research method. There is only the desire to get rid of these damned themes through my work.

We know that you also work as a musician. How do you deal with music in your work? Is there an exchange process between music and your works' images?

I'm a dilettante musician. I play in two rock bands, and I take this dilettantism seriously. We rehearse twice a week. We have recorded CD's, and played for small, not always gentle audiences. Maybe that's the reason why music is often a starting point to my works. To be more precise, it's not always music, but sounds in a general way. The sounds of the answerphone in the trilogy Não Há Ninguém Aqui, the sounds of the railway tracks in Cassino, Filme de Estrada (Casino, Road Movie), or the sounds of the dialogues of a Tarkovski's film used in Ficção Científica (Science Fiction), for instance. I'm talking about the din, noises, roughly recorded voices which were the raw materials of my works. Even when there is a song composed specially for the work, it generally comes before the images, as in Cassino, Filme de Estrada, whose soundtrack was recorded before the video, foreseeing what would come. It is as if I was in the place of the characters of the documentary Olhos Opacos, blinded, listening to the sounds to figure images out, but provided with vision.

Some of your video installations also treat the body issue. How was the passage from single-channel to the installation ambience in relation to the thematic approach?

I think I can't answer this question now… Can I think a bit more?

Your video Ficção Científica, almost an essay on the sci-fi films structures through the appropriation of sounds and the alteration of common images, was awarded at the 14th Videobrasil. What was the main motivation for the production of this series about cinema?

Ficção Científica is the second video of this series, which also includes Filme de Horror (Horror Film) and Cassino, Filme de Estrada. The basic idea of this series is to realize videos about some cinematographic genres; that's why its name is Vídeo de Cinema (Cinema Video). Genres like western, musical, comedy, detective films etc. are based on limited narrative and thematic patterns. Each cinematographic genre has a specific format. The audiences know what to expect from “romantic comedies”, “teen horror films”, or “sci-fi films”, for instance. The critic, the audiences and the history of the cinema diffuse and consolidate these labels, building concepts by reiteration which are perpetuated as generic conventions, creating a true paradigm of what may be called the “big Hollywoodian cinema”. The project Video de Cinema aims to make a critical reading of these typical genres of the classical Hollywoodian cinema through experimental video, isolating elements which make up its essence, and which are continuously repeated in the films, standardizing them to the point of defining them as genres. It's interesting to notice how experimental video and videoart are directly related to music, visual arts, performances, dance, and other artistic disciplines since the 60's. However, the dialogue with the classical commercial cinema is still incipient: the Hollywoodian cinema is seldom an object of interest for video productions. Quite the opposite, it's the Hollywoodian cinema that benefits from experimental productions, borrowing many visual resources that, after a time, begin to feature in some blockbusters. This work aims, therefore, to go in the opposite direction, using video's electronic language as an instrument to reinterpret commercial cinema. Given that entertainment cinema's narrative has always been opposed by contemporary electronic art production, this project aims to make a raw material of the commercial narrative for the experimental production: to reiterate commercial cinema through its genres, clichés, and patterns, transforming its nature through its own characteristics, using the power of synthesis of electronic images to talk about cinema through its own means, in other words, its own images.

Videobrasil Festival's prize is a residency for the purpose of developing a project in Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains. What project do you have in mind?

I have not decided yet, but probably I will continue to work on the series Vídeo de Cinema during my residency in France. Given that Le Fresnnoy is situated in the north of France, I'm thinking about realizing a video called Filme de Guerra (War Film), based on the films about the Second World War, specially the D-Day, the invasion of Normandy.