Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Exhibition sites are always an issue in your artwork. You either arrange the works in order to take up the space or to provide the graphic images with three-dimensionality. How did that come about?

My background is in engraving, and I have always thought that the mold and its register would limit the finishing that I wanted my work to have. I didn't want to make collections of my pieces, so I would finish each of them in a different way, combining different molds in different colors and paper positions. Furthermore, the appropriation of advertising material, especially billboards, would inspire me to work in another scale, with large proportions. I guess the issue of three-dimensionality came about when I started using images from paintings, of which I would cull the female figures and enlarge them up to life-size, and then I'd glue them on walls, corners, and baseboards, thus adapting them to the saliences in the space. The first work in this line of research was called dobra [fold] and, as the title suggests, it's about a three-dimensionality that is always born out of a meeting between two planes. It's a three-dimensionality that is unfulfilled, nonsculptural, I would say, but one that dialogues with the exhibition site. In that sense, widening the “characters” into human scale and molding them onto the architecture is an invitation for viewers to integrate themselves into the artwork, I suppose.

The appropriation of images from the art world characterizes some of your work. Is it an attempt to discuss the notion of authorship, or rather an ironic take on the art system?

It's both. I think this discussion regarding authorship is still interesting nowadays; it's not fully exhausted. In my research, I've worked on this issue by appropriating myself of everything: texts, images, speech, songs, and even the work titles, at times. I enjoy this bricolage. It's fun to recontextualize things in such an image-overloaded, novelty-hungry world. The ironic element is present throughout the entire work, not just as a reference to the art system. I try to talk about this quest for personal and professional accomplishment in our times, when solitude and exposure of one's personality (as in reality shows) are so often combined, when there is a crisis in self-esteem due to the lack of work, and there is an emotional crisis due to an ever-growing social demand for success, in a context where artists, too, enter an “egoic” battle for recognition. 

When and why did you become interested in audiovisual production?

The image in motion has given an interesting new direction to my research, allowing me closer contact with the territories and experiences of the real, through images culled from the media (TV and radio), the capturing of scenes, or the appropriation of recordings of domestic and private life, as I have been doing with old VHS tapes. The first video was Alugo-me, which was also my first experience in image capturing outside the realm of appropriation (which, in this work, happens in the audio). There is less concern with form (no seductive technical and aesthetic pyrotechnics), giving off a Blair Witch Project feel, with unprocessed images (like the wedding scenes in Quem escuta o meu sim) that interest me, too, for their closeness to the domestic realm.

What do you bring from the plastic and visual art realms into your video experiments?

The thematics and the conceptual research have remained the same, visual fields and choice of language notwithstanding. I believe that every idea in a given research demands a language, and I enjoy combining languages, as in the first screening of Alugo-me (the video was screened in a five-inch TV, built into a structure over which a photograph was placed). I guess one of the elements from plastic arts in my work is the concern with inserting audiovisual images in a spatial context. The TV, as a frame, does not fully respond to my formal disquietudes. In a complementary way, my plastic research grew and gained a lot with video, it took up this index-like quality, this spark of reality that wound up making an interesting counterpoint with the images taken from paintings. The presence of the videographic image in dance, music, and the visual arts is growing steadily, thus I believe the contributions are reciprocal, and the realms of plastic arts and video merge with each other.

In Quem escuta o meu sim (2005) there is an image taken from TV, more precisely from the Big Brother Brasil reality show. Is there any relationship between this appropriation and the images taken from advertising billboards in Nada que você não queira (2002)? Do these images pertain in the same category to you?

Yes, for sure. The advertising aspect is there in Big Brother. Advertising is what everyone wants there, since only one person will get the money, whereas all the others will be graced with the dissemination of their own image. When I pick those images, I like to play with clichés, with the absence of the male figure, and I like to check out how the presence of both genders takes place in imagetic representations. In this image from Big Brother, the man has no arms or legs (as in a painting by surrealist Paul Delvaux, which I used in my work (In)verso). There is a correspondence, not only regarding the place these images come from, but also regarding the thematics they allude to. These two elements (context and support) are inseparable in my work.

What is the relationship between Alugo-me (2004) and Quem escuta o meu sim (2005)? Does one amplify the other, is there a continuation, or is there no dialogue whatsoever?

Both have this precarious feature of nonprofessional image, and that itself is an embryo of my current research, which discusses the aesthetic potential in ordinary life, a potential that extends beyond form and beyond the realization of the artwork. In both cases, I work with the space in houses, and a “presence through absence” is created. In Alugo-me, voices inhabit empty houses, and in Quem escuta, a dining room is hinted at by the pictures on the walls (which move and tell stories), and is inhabited by the soundtrack. The Big Brother scenes in the latter convey, as does the radio show in the former, the notion of public space (the media) entering the private space (the house). Quem escuta is an unpretentious, quasi-complacent work, it does not possess the disturbing quality of Alugo-me, that notion of a matrix-like solitude that causes pain. But I do believe that it builds upon the previous work, as it works with space in a more elaborate fashion, and promotes a dialogue between images bearing different natures and textures. Furthermore, each loop has a duration, thus multiplying different combinations of image and sound. 

How did you come to link houses for rent and people available for relationships, in your work Alugo-me? How would you describe the spaces that the camera travels (and what symbolism do they evoke)?

I spent some time looking for houses for rent, and I looked at many, always noticing the traces left behind by those who lived there, things you can only get rid of when you move away, actually. I realized a house is a space of presence, even in the context of absence. And I felt weird there, as if entering a space that wasn't mine. Women looking for a new love had also been “present through absence” in the texts that appeared in my previous works, culled from psychic ads and self-help books. In Alugo-me, that which used to be the “peopling” of an empty space (the exhibition site) by a near-voiceless speech became the fulfillment of this apparent emptiness through the voice, which becomes a body. The editing of several houses into a sequence and the looped video evoke the infinity of our quest for something which, like an emptiness to be fulfilled, is always to come.