At the 16th Videobrasil Festival, the Project Low Pressure (Revezamento 3x1), by Eder Santos, will be seeing for the first time in a whole new version especially conceived for this edition. The installation, originally produced controlled environments like galleries and museums, will acquire a public character in Sao Paulo. Projected onto three five-square-meter-wide by two-meter-high horizontal strip on the side of the SESC Avenida Paulista building, in full view of the thousands of people who flow up and down the state capital’s emblematic avenue each day. The image shows a man swimming uninterruptedly underwater, as if imprisoned in gigantic aquariums. In direct confrontation with an urban space marked by speed, rationalism, and a will-to-efficiency, the work becomes an ode to hedonism in the middle of the workplace and the productive use of human energy. However, this moment of intimate, seductive, and liberating pleasure comes infiltrated with an opposing sense – represented by the body’s incarceration in the water tanks and the exhaustive repetition of the movements – another contemporary paradox brought to us by images of Eder Santos.
“There’s an aquarium filled with water. Inside the aquarium, there’s a man swimming. Inside the swimmer are all men; inside all men, there is a fish-to-be, and a little of one man, and a lot of many men, of the many who have gone before, and who are not one in the same, because even the swimmer isn’t one in the same. He swims to and for as if he were the same – past he goes, past goes the river. The function of the aquarium is to be the aquarium of a fish that is not a fish. It is the function of the aquarium to be a being-river that cuts this man who has long since lost a self and dispersed himself in fish-being and to being an actor-fish that is not one, but rather is each and every fish or one.
(A river runs through the aquarium, a fish swims round the aquarium, but a fish that is not a fish, a fish that is a man, a fish that is not a man, a fish that is an actor, an actor that is not one, but many, who is not himself).”
