Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Resposta às perguntas formuladas pelos organizadores do 14º Videobrasil 1. During the Festival we will discuss issues such as displacement and nomad processes as images and emblematic actions of the contemporary cultural and political situation. How do you reflect this in the electronic art panel? Is it a theme of interest in your work? 1. This theme is pivotal in my later work. My last project, called “Bon Dieu Bon”, is a multimedia vantage point for illegal migration, particularly residents of Haiti to the USA. It include essays, installation, net art, video, and public art. At times the only remnant proof of an immigrant journey are the objects left behind by immigrants or their images captured by a surveillance camera. My project is based on a series of objects left behind by illegal immigrants on the beaches of an American territory in the Caribbean. The material culture provides clues about who came to a place, from where, and how. These objects expose the immigrants’ camouflage and provide evocative clues about their identities and the process of their journeys. Through that material culture I am returning the gaze to the origin of the immigrants’ travel and its complex cultural history, which shapes the politicized present, resulting in necessitated migration. 2. The relation between art and politics is at the same time rich and conflictive. How do you perceive this relation in the specific case of your work? 5. Today local cultures face the challenge to reinvent personal and collective memories, without letting them become empty before the global communication flows. In your view, how does this challenge translates into art media experiences? 2 & 5. /together/ In my work, resistance is defined by a conscious gesture with symbolic and/or personal repercussion(s), rather than as a source for dramatic changes of the oppressive situation. I explore an additional type of resistance that is unconscious, and implies a non-dominant, local community or a group of peoples that establish some type of exchange, that assure the extension of the ensemble in face of the dominant group. For example, in the video “The Lure of Gestures” the continuity of traditional barter exchange, based on terms already established, maintains a cohesive group. Here the microeconomic trade isolated this group creating a form of resistance to the capitalistic monetary exchange that occurs outside the doors of the bar. Both types of resistance, conscious and unconscious, use the gesture as the externalized expression of resistance, wherein a gesture that is symbolic becomes equally poetic. In my perspective there is a type of poetic-symbolic resistance in Latino America, characterized by the gesture--a gesture that is invasive of daily life. The resistance that I am referring to is the result of the duality of acceptance and denial, the constant flows of repressive process or external dominant structures that layer this continent from the colonial era to modernity. The places and histories that I collect with my video camera bring resistance to the surface. By resurfacing stories of the anonymous civil disobedience of my father against Pinochet’s regime, in my video “The memory of the snails”, or by letting the sound of the ethnic radio invade the economically changing landscape in the tape about the Wayuu community in Colombia in the video “Communicating communitas”. Each of these examples are speaking about a mundane existence inside a hierarchical structure, but here the gesture resists not only that, the gestures also resist the homogenization of the local culture that is slowly surrendering to globalization

Associação Cultural Videobrasil