Associação Cultural Videobrasil

I have never considered myself a visual artist. I actually find this name strange (in Portuguese, artista plástico literally translates into ‘plastic artist’), as it seems to point at once to the remodelling of the outlines of our body (plastic surgery) and to this by-product of oil that packages and/or constitutes most of the things we consume.

I see myself first and foremost as a poet, who eventually borrows processes and materials from the so-called visual arts to add other layers of significance to the words.

However, I am not too fond of the term poet either, because it is at times used witha strictly emotional meaning, very different from that of a verbal language worker.

I guess I would like it best to be regarded as a doer of things who does not restrict himself to any specific language.

My relation with visual arts takes place through the word. I believe that dealing with verbal expression is the territory with which I am the most intimate, my safe haven.From it, testing its limits, I venture toward other languages, as if moved by a need tochant.

Thus I started writing songs, changing the words by means of melodic inflection, of splitting the syllables into the musical cadence, of the instrumental context that involves them. On the other hand, I have always felt attracted to another form of intonation, expressed by their placement on the page. By the types, sizes, lines, colors, the spatial arrangement of words and their contaminations in drawing, collage, and photography.

My first book (OU E, 1983) was entirely calligraphic, exploring the expressive possibilities of handwritten words. The traces, lines, scribbles, and stains attempted to magnetize them with sensitive possibilities that they would be unable to attain by themselves. It was a folder containing loose poems in various formats, foldings, colors, and types of paper.

These attritions between the word (which already carries with it sound, image, and idea) and other languages offered me new expressive possibilities, which accentuated itsmaterial aspect. The challenge was always in conquering an adequate modulation, one that would integrate different languages into an indissoluble amalgam.

Dealing with the materiality of verbal language was to me one of the important lessons taught by concrete poets, who pioneered the exploration of interfaces between poetry and other codes.

And the presence of the body gradually imposed itself. The throat includes singing, just like the line includes the arm. Then came concerts, performances, installations.

The computer brought a new repertoire of graphic resources, and of editing and sound-processing possibilities. The ‘copy/paste’ function seemed very appropriate to the collage work that I was already developing, in other ways, in text, music, and the visual arts.

In the Nome video, my first work as soon as I quit the Titãs, in 1992, I was able tojoin together what I had been doing in the fields of song and visual poetry. These languages conjugated themselves on the video screen, by inserting motion into written word (leading it to tend to music, as it takes place not only in space, but also in time), thanks to animation software programs (and to teamwork, with Kiko Mistrorigo, Celia Catunda, and Zaba Moreau). At the same time, I was able to explore the simultaneous occurrence of what is heard and what is seen/read.

And then came new media for the poetry—posters, the stage, the Web site, clothing, music, dancing, laser projections on buildings, murals of typographic posters glued ontowalls and torn into various layers (such as the ones I exhibited in the Arte Cidade project, São Paulo, 1994, and at the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, 1998), the calligraphic monotypes using stamp ink on engraving paper (Escrita à mão exhibition, at the Centro Maria Antonia, in São Paulo, and at the Laura Marsiaj gallery, in Rio de Janeiro), installations featuring painted metal letters (Mercosul Biennial, 1997), and object-poems, madefrom many different materials (Ler Vendo Movendo exhibition, at Paço da Liberdade, in Curitiba, 2009), some of which were to be moved by the viewer.

And also the book, why not?

And also the song.

As a matter of fact, I am not very pleased with a name that has become commonplace when referring to what I do—multimedia artist. I believe that moving from one language to another is a common aspect of the times that we live in. Digital media have already disrupted the boundaries of specialization. Any artist nowadays ends up being somewhat multimedia.

Perhaps this is the resumption of a tribal aspect; of a time in which there were no separate modalities of art, nor was there art separate from life. This may be one of the meanings that we may apprehend from the expression “global village,” coined by Marshall McLuhan—the village-like spirit that is present in the current technological world.

I believe that we are getting closer to Oswald de Andrade’s utopia, as expressed in his dialectic equation: “1st term: thesis—the natural man; 2nd term: antithesis—the civilized man; 3rd term: synthesis—the natural technicized man.”