Associação Cultural Videobrasil

How did you get started in audiovisual production? What interests and/or possibilities for artistic development led you to the field of audiovisual, and more specifically of video?

My initial vocation is cinema. I migrated to video because, to me, the impurity of the medium, its malleability and its “lonely” character seemed to favor the invention of a brand of cinema that is personal, experimental, and similar to the conditions of writing. In more concrete terms, to me video seemed capable of producing more cinema than some films do. The way I use video, it becomes a sort of return to the roots: a capturing of reality in its heterogeneity, free from the need for romantic, linear narratives. Another aspect I like about video is the fact that it instantly establishes a paradoxical relation with reality: it is both present and absent, and its time of duration is one that only moving images are able to reveal. In that sense, I remain true to what renowned French film critic André Bazin called “change mummified,” i.e., “the conservation of the features of what image records, and the motion of the motionless.” This is undoubtedly a melancholy definition of image, but it has the merit of believing its own power: the unique ability of fixating and revealing something about the world and time in their own impurity. And an experience of the world that we can convey and share.

The urban space is almost the protagonist in narratives such as Vue Panoramique (2005), Vue Aérienne (2006), and Napoli Centrale (2002). Also, in your work, space is clearly regarded as a possibility for tackling political or identity-related issues. How did you develop this approach throughout your career? What is your main concern?

My nature spontaneously compels me to a contemplative gaze of things, especially of the urban space. This may seem paradoxical, since the modern city, with its permanent agitation, tends to make this kind of gaze impossible. Nevertheless, what I am interested in when I record cities is precisely that which does not allow itself to be seen immediately, but rather that which emerges from simple recording and alters perception. Urban space is also an echo chamber, and it becomes a mental space in my work. In all of my videos, the outdoors are transformed into a place without topography, a labyrinthic space, sometimes on the verge of invisibility, and seen based on a time that is not the present, but rather a time in which events are permanent. This, without a doubt, is my way of making images nomadic, in the places that I turn into spaces of passing and displacement.

The dialogues in Vue Aérienne (2006) were taken from Die Dritte Generation (The Third Generation), a 1979 Fassbinder film that tackles, among other issues, the relationship between cinema and video, and political and terrorist organizations. What is the main idea behind that appropriation?

The shadow of cinema is often hovering over my images. To me, making images also means reactivating the filmed images that marked me and formed me, such as those of Fassbinber, but also of Pasolini, Buñuel, Rossellini, Glauber Rocha. In other words, a certain type of modern cinema, sometimes disenchanted, but which definitely believes in the power of the image. What I was interested in when I did a “remake” of soundtrack fragments of Fassbinder's film was being able to revisit the modern confusion he staged. With the difference that, in Vue Aérienne, it is impossible to know who is talking, and what exactly does that talk represent. Confusion is at its peak. The voices become ghosts that haunt a city of which we do not even know the name. It is also a way of reformulating the question about the statute of images in the contemporary world, this permanent, ambiguous flow. I conceived this video as a sort of mental exploration that weaves, but also “unweaves” the signals that are sent out to the world. And it is also a probe into the difficulty in understanding these signals and, most of all, in comprehending them.

The convergence of space and identities, migratory flows, and political issues is very intensely present in Straight Stories (2006), your work in progress. Is it a synthesis of concerns featured in previous works of yours, or does it represent a new, more documentary-oriented approach?

Straight Stories is not exactly a documentary film. The basic difference between this work and the previous ones is the fact that the voices we hear in it are identified, they belong to singular persons, even though I am not telling the story of the people who agreed to talk to me, neither do I show their faces. It is more of a fragmented trip to different nomadic experiences. In this work I am interested in dealing with an experience that is individual and singular, but which has no value as an example or reference. Nomadism is a major contemporary issue, and at the same time, it is a totally archaic experience. Man has always moved around. Men are nomads, it is part of the human condition. But now, nomadism has become harder than ever, because everything makes it difficult to move around. This is the reason why I never make films to discuss borders per se, in the physical sense of the term. To record the sea is to record a space that has no borders, a landscape that represents infinity, endless motion. By the same token, not recording faces makes it possible for the word to echo throughout this endless space, so it travels. That which I present highlights an imaginary geography, circular and permanently moving.

In some of your works, sound and image go along different directions, and the processes of resignification seem to become viable due to that tension-estrangement. Do you agree? How do you work to create this relationship?

In my work, sound really is disconnected from image. It seems to tell another story, to speak of things that are absent from the image, as if they belonged to another story, another time. This is the reason why, in my videos, many different languages and accents are heard-surely because I also live with many languages that coexist in me. These convergences of languages, of sounds, of potential and fragmented narratives are my way of opening up and extending the space of the video. In this sense, I create a sort of ambiguity: places are unrecognizable, voices are unidentified. That extends the possibilities of the image. Is it reality? Is it an imaginary projection? Is it a mental concoction? To me, that disconnectedness, which sometimes verges on discordance, becomes a mental dimension of image, one that opens image up to a broader horizon.

What are your upcoming projects?

It is difficult to discuss my upcoming projects because, in order for the desire to make images to arise, I must have a nomadic experience, I must move around in a space that is not familiar to me, one which I will discover as I record it. Right now, I am still working on Straight Stories. Two new parts will follow.