Associação Cultural Videobrasil

FERDINAND: Why do you look sad?
MARIANNE: Because you tell me words, and I look at you with feelings.
FERDINAND: Then we can't have a conversation! You never have ideas, only feelings
MARIANNE: That's not true. There are ideas in feelings. 

Dialogue between the characters of Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou, 1965.

The first image appears on the video: a hand opens a door; the image is a point of view, the subjective view of someone who holds the camera with one hand and opens the door with the other, entering the living room of an empty house where, from behind the window glass, one can read a yellow “for rent” sign, its letters inverted. Almost simultaneously, a sound echoes a female voice through space, announcing the beginning of a love counseling radio show.

In Alugo-me, a video shown in the New Vectors exhibition during the 2005 Videobrasil Festival, Fernanda Goulart visits the rooms of empty houses for rent, using counterpoints between image and sound to build a narrative that gradually fills the empty spaces and abandoned rooms in each of the visited houses with songs and statements; stories of everyday experiences of loneliness, desire, and disillusion told by the listeners of an afternoon radio show. 

The video is the artist's first foray into the audiovisual field, and yet it manages to find its own voice, in addition to revealing a lot about the procedures used by Goulart in her previous works. Her interest in the critical appropriation of images culled from both the classic art world and the advertising and mass media fields, along with ever-present references to private life, is designed to create an interface between the elements that comprise everyday life, and an aesthetic experience in which the viewer recognizes himself/herself through clichés and an alluring sentimental rhetoric. 

Her discourse is constructed in a subtle, ambiguous fashion, so as to not fulfill the obvious expectations created by the signs that the author gives. What does occur is the verification of the extreme ambiguity that governs social relationships in contemporary society, based on the intimate, personal accounts of radio listeners.

After our first contact with the opening lines of the radio show, the voice is interrupted by a familiar melody, probably the theme to some prime time TV soap opera. A song that one would hear, even unwillingly, while walking the streets past downtown stores, or maybe on the radio playing in the apartment next door.

The camera continues its stroll, measuring each empty space without haste. Next, a female voice is heard, superimposed onto the initial audio, quietly humming the background song excerpt as the camera travels through the rooms. 

By proceeding in this way, Fernanda Goulart provokes a sense of weirdness in viewers, one that emerges and then quickly disappears, causing a slight change in the perception of the work. The camera speaks out, combining the humming voice with the voice singing on the radio. The camera, which, when silent had a certain impartiality with regard to both the portrayed object and the background songs and stories, ends up getting even closer to the different female voices that populate the video, their accounts multiplied through looping. The presence of the camera is confirmed through the illusion created by the juxtaposition of ambient sounds that echo through space, and the voice that sings in an almost whispering tone, as if close to the viewer's ears*. Thus, the voice that accompanies the background melody, combined with the images we see, inevitably reaffirms the strolling gaze.

The choice of songs in Alugo-me is peculiar; a familiar, almost déjà vu atmosphere is created, maybe due to the fact that nearly all songs belong in the realm of soap operas. These are songs that describe passion, love, and disillusion with sugary intensity, laying bare the fugacity and frailty of affective relationships, discreetly leading us to relive our own personal melodramas, soothed by the universal cliché of love pains. 

Throughout the video, listeners' stories describe individual expectations towards love and the meeting with the other, most of them optimistic about living a happier, more harmonious relationship than the previous ones. There is an evident concern from the artist with regard to gender issues established in domestic, private environments. At the same time, there is the counterpoint between the concept of private space and the exposure of intimacy in a public vehicle, namely, a radio show.

This opposition between public and private comes across as a concern in other works as well, such as Nada que você não queira, in which the author manipulates images of Vermeer paintings that depict women doing domestic chores. Huge images are counterposed to those scenes, one of them depicting a female body in a bikini (one of the billboards), as well as texts taken from self-help books that teach people how to adapt to social norms and conventions without “losing personality.” **

The subject presented in Alugo-me is standing on a border area; it stands in between innocence and complacence, irony and verification. The place where intimate stories intersect with the emptied landscape of architecture that was once inhabited, occupied, lived in. If we take the house as a metaphor for the body, both the house and the accounts reveal traces and tastes left behind by previous inhabitants, as well as the transformations and interferences suffered during renovations and arrangements. In that sense, one can say that, in Alugo-me, Goulart returned to the confinement gaze*** described by César Guimarães in the catalogue for Nada que você não queira.

The author bases herself on the realization of a gender difference, of the alterity, as a way to observe and attempt to transfigure the circumstances of limitation and conflict that multiply themselves through the ongoing difficulty of living together and communicating with the other. 

A divergency between expectation and realization is also present in the video installation Quem escuta o meu sim, 2005. In this work, too, private space is the central theme that guides the author. Once again, Goulart tackles the domestic, the familiar, in order to discuss interdictions and disagreement. As in Alugo-me, the notion of “home” is outlined by the voice of women who, in almost all cases, set the boundaries for the space in which daily family life and routine are structured. 

Several doors are opened and closed, leading us to regard as a central issue the shared spaces and the need to transform these spaces as a survival strategy. It's about seeking agreements through the evidences of disagreement and through possible, accidental meetings. Fernanda Goulart constructs an infinite, inconclusive dialogue, but one that is persistent in the inevitability of the eternal need for the other.

* In the first staging of the work, in the En: Doze exhibition, carried out in the gallery of the Cemig Cultural Center in Belo Horizonte, 2003, the artist placed the video on a wooden totem pole with a small built-in TV set, thus forcing viewers to keep their ears close to the pole so they could listen to the soundtrack.
** It is important to note, here, the market aspect that drives the creation and maintenance of increasingly expensive personal consumer profiles (as opposed to the materials used by Goulart to formalize her work-materials that become disposable at the end of the exhibition), leading us to regard individuality as a matter of success or failure in the contemporary world. This, by the way, is the central concept in her work Para entender a arte (...), which was anonymously submitted to an art exhibition, and tackles the same issues in order to discuss dissension and legitimization experiences in the art world.
*** César Guimarães, in Quem nos interpela?. Text from the catalogue on the work of Fernanda Goulart for the exhibition Nada que você não queira. Art gallery of the Espaço Cultural Cemig, Belo Horizonte, April 2002.