Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Eder Santos

Video is, first and foremost, metamorphosis, as Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell showed when, still in the 1960s they invited video art by distorting and modifying the conventional images generated by television. As an aesthetical of metamorphosis at the highest level, video allows for more transgressive manipulations and more dismantling interferences of images recorded by cameras as raw footage. As work of image editing and manipulation par excellence, the creations of Eder Santos show beyond his profund inspiration how he handles images in an original fashion, creating an electronic cinematography in which reality scenes, effects and colors are used as musical notes in an expositive, cleary non-linear structure. Eder Santos is one of the most renowned and visible proponents of electronic art in Brazil and Latin America. His output is vast and includes single channel videos, as well as videoinstallation, video sculptures and performances; all charged with a strong existentialist sense and a sophisticated stylistic resources. Paradoxically, his work is not among the simplistic. Earmarked by radical experiments and devoid of concessions made by bulk of Braziliam videographic production, it is made up of noise, interferences, defects, equipment disruption and, in some of his pieces, such as Lies and Humiliation, exposure to the outer limits of visualization. Eder construct a visual language with a varied, hybrid, technology that penatrates even digital and film media, especially super 8 home films shot by amateurs, as in the piece Europe in five minutes in which he exercises his full capacity to strip an image of its cognitive modules. Santos creates vibrant and poetic works that meld personal, cultural and technological elements that reinterpret themes related to Brazil’s cultural inheritance and evoke the rhythms ans textures of memory and history creating a reflection on contemporary society. In works such as I’m not going to Africa because I’m on call , That nervous thing and Janaúba, Eder Santos make this attitude clear and also reafirms his commitment to the never ending search for stylistic resources. The almost organic relation established between sound and image in the artist’s work has spawned strong collaboration with high caliber musicians such as American Stephen Vitello and Paulo Santos, member of the celebrated contemporary group Uakti from the Braziliam state os Minas Gerais, and generated a series of multimidia performances involving dance, music and poetry that almost draws bedazzlement from the audience because of the quality of stimuli brought out during the performances. After working with projections in urban surfaces, architectonic fragments and rough material such as soil and sand, Eder Santos went on to explore intimate elements in his installations. Furniture and household objects are taken in his works as a framework of metaphores of memory and consciousness. In the works here presented, the upper bunk bed and cups and jugs in a china cabinet become a screen of dream images in phantasmagoric projection of oppresive thoughts. Disembodied nigthmares become luminous scrawls. These pieces highlight the immaterial and hallucinatory character of the electronic image, while simultaneosly reiteraiting the humanistic tone that characterizesthe artist’s contribution. Fonte: catálogo do 'Nam June Paik Award 2002

FARKAS, Solange. "Eder Santos". Nam June Paik Award 2002. Setembro de 2002.