Associação Cultural Videobrasil

conception - Alvaro Hardy, Eder Santos, Evandro Rogers Barbosa, Mariza Machado Coelho and Paulo Santos

direction assistant and editing - Marcelo Reis and Pedro Vilela

camera operator - Paulo Vilela and Pedro Vilela

soundtrack - Paulo Santos 

musicians - Claudia Simbleriz, Decio Ramos, Josefina Cerqueira and Paulo Carvalho

dancers - Ana Paula Cançado, Jacqueline Gimenez and Peter Lavrate

audio technician - Alexandre Martins and Peron

stage manager - João Carlos Leite

Concert for pyramid, orchestra and sacrifice

One of the best known (and renowned) Brazilian video artists, Eder Santos has also been making a series of incursions into the universe of performance, always marked by an intense dialogue between filmic image and music. As well as in his work with video, radical and never obvious, Eder Santos uses in his performances of variety of references and experimental procedures that are helping him to build a language of his own. The performances, therefore, should be understood as an original format, started in 1994 at 10^th Videbrasil with the work Postcatidevenum, a spectacle developed for video musical scores and music made with letters and frames.

From pre-built bases, Paulinho Santos, of the group Uatki, created music at the editing table. This way, the author, in collaboration with other artists, has developed narratives, synchronising music and video, creating the performance’s own time. In his interventions, Eder Santos can play simultaneously the roles of conductor and editor, occasionally using images of the pubic watching the performance, who, in this way, also becomes part of the work. 

At 13^th Videobrasil, Eder Santos will present an original project, the fourth to use this new language strongly linked to music. Called Concert for pyramid, orchestra and sacrifice, the performance makes reference to pre-Columbian cultures, and results from his stint in Mexico, where he exhibited at the Museu de Arte Moderna. Fascinated with the pyramidal constructions he saw there and making use as reference the way death is seen and is present in that country’s daily life (as the festivities linked to the dead in different parts of the country show), Eder Santos has created a performance in which the ambience, the music, images and movement combine, having Mexico as inspiration: the music, traditions, architecture, a time gone by, and the imaginary. In the performance, which uses a layered structure, as in a Mexican pyramid, a dancer representing Death moves about on stage, while musicians play what goes beyond a mere soundtrack – we are dealing with after all, with an active part of the work. Real images combine with others, virtual, and the music becomes a hybrid component, linked in a more than complementary way to the images.

Concert for pyramid, orchestra and sacrifice is indeed a firm step towards the crystallisation of this performatic language that is being exhaustively researched by Eder Santos in his presentation at Videobrasil.

Having won awards in Brazil and abroad, Eder Santos started his career as video makes in the 80’s, with works in which noises and apparent technical hitches can be an integral part of the idea. In his videos, the author’s investigation includes the banalisation of the image and the impression that it is it that built s and preserves reality – as in Europe in 5 minutes, with a succession of monuments and tourist spots –, the use of a classic of Brazilian cinema (Limite by Mário Peixoto) to talk about the meaning of images (as in the video Janaúba of 1993, which won a prize at Videobrasil).

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, " 13º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil" [13th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival]:19 to 23 September 2001, pp. 203-204, São Paulo, SP, 2001.