Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Regarding your background as an architect, how did your artistic production and the building of the optical equipment come about? 

I went to Architecture School at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. I believe that my entire artistic training has come from that source. There, I learned to see the world in three dimensions, to have a creative work process, and especially to develop techniques in drawing, projects, and detailing. It was also in college that I began conducting my first photographic experiments: I worked at the photo lab, I was a teacher’s assistant in descriptive geometry, and I was particularly dedicated to the matters of urbanism and scale model. What always interested me, however, was the very procedure for a given project, rather than its purpose. I was never able to complete a single project for a commercial building. Thus, I came up with several conceptual scale models, lots of schematic drawings, lots of new proposals and questionings about space and its relations. In 1998, while still attending architecture school, I made my first short film, in Super 8, entitledHá alguém no vento (There is someone in the wind). This single-copy film, shot on celluloid, edited using scissors and adhesive tape in my living room, triggered a realization that my architectural work was not commercial, and that my involvement with architecture was actually in the structural aspect of my thinking, in the use and knowledge of the triad: SPACE – TIME – TRAJECTORY.
In 2002 I moved to São Paulo to work in commercial film production and to attend the School of Cinema at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation. My professional career in audiovisual was already geared towards film editing and postproduction. I already had a good technical background doing that, therefore during the course I focused all my work on experimenting artistically to the maximum and using all the tools that the university environment of the time could offer me. Within this context I did what I consider to be my first individual artistic project, entitled ERBF, which later became my course conclusion work. That was the piece that truly led me to realize that the limit between art, cinema, and architecture is very tenuous and that my research was actually closer to contemporary art procedures than to architecture or cinema, stricto sensu. The building of optical paraphernalia was a need to produce some sort of equipment that would also relate conceptually, in its technical practice of image formation, with the subject that I wanted to approach.

What is it that truly moves you today, after some of your work has already been successfully exhibited, to go on developing devices meant for photography-film-video?

Being an explorer/inventor and coming up with new landscapes.

What is the artifact that bridges the gap between cinema and architecture in your work?

Project-oriented structuring of thought results in a “functional” object, as do the mechanisms for deconstructing and reconstructing space. If I were to name a practical “artifact,” I would say the propelling pencil.

What is the difference between the labor involved in creating the project and carrying it out in a workshop? What is it like to go from editor to artisan-inventor?

A project on the clipboard is based on an ideal world, in a way that is precise, calculated, yet vague with regard to its pragmatic use. The drawing per se is a practice that pertains to abstract thinking. For those reasons, the coming and going from project to prototype is what materializes the object and broadens the possibilities of research. My choices are interfered with by the scale of the real, the materials available on the market, in the studio, in antique stores, the adaptations, and recycling. The project is not untouchable, but rather it interacts with these different spheres and adapts itself all the time before reaching its final form. As it is carried out by me, it is just a way of recording and quantifying the thinking of the machine. It is a way of conveying to other people the notion of organizing the creation of certain items in the workshop. But the project only becomes real in its construction, in between the screw and the screwdriver, in the hits and misses.
A conceptual effort can be made to arrive at many different analogies between working in a workshop and working in front of a computer as a film editor. Both are preceded by creative processes and the big difference lies in the use of tools, which requires craftsmanship to a greater or lesser extent.
Film editing can be a craft as well, such as when one relinquishes the use of plug-ins to obtain effects digitally, and does it manually instead. Or else when we use tricks and edit films in Moviolas, putting the parts of the negative together one by one. The montage of the Cronópios films is one example. And just as the editing can also be done by hand, woodworking can also be mechanical, if we think of a furniture factory. The big different to me lies in the absorption of chance, in the purpose of the work that one aims to develop. I get the feeling that this is my technique: combining tools with different technologies. That is why my computer is always so dirty and I even have a software program to calculate each exact pinhole.

Revisiting the theme of the architecture and design exhibition Brasilien baut Brasilia (Brazil builds Brasília), organized by Mary Vieira in Zurich and Berlin between 1957 and 1959: Does a city of the future also mean a city of the present?

Brasília has always been an issue, especially when it comes to envisioning the city of the future. We are aware of the modern failure of functional sectorization and its evolvement of thinking it as a relational space and a space for learning, as we have seen in Jane Jacobs’ theories. I believe that Brasília has achieved its goal as a plan for a modern city, but modern man has not headed in the direction that was planned for him. However, at the same time, when we see projects such as Lina Bo Bardi’s for SESC Pompeia functioning in the reality of its maximum utopia, we must ask ourselves whether some of these spaces have been planned for utopian people instead. I recently gave an address at a symposium in Porto Alegre on the theme: “Expanding the present, contracting the future.” The temporal layers of a city, the speed with which it takes place, lead the perception of the present time to be the future. The question could be a multiple one: What do we have as a serious reflection about the city of today? Why wait for tomorrow to take the actions we know for a fact will be necessary? If we already possess hard data, why know where it all is going to lead us? In my work, the city of the future is based on genre, in imagery and fiction. Perhaps even in the very stereotype of future. Most of all, what I try is to create a major temporal confusion. I produce films that seem out of the 18th century, however address current themes and futuristic imagery from a recent past. These multiple layers mingle and give rise to this big fiction, this time machine.