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.

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.

Throughout her career, Fernanda Goulart seems to delve ever deeper into the themes and practices most often featured in her work: the body, intimacy, the female universe, ways of occupying space, the appropriation of artistic images, the three-dimensionalization of graphic images. Holder of a degree in visual arts from the School of Fine Arts, and of a master's degree in social communication from the School of Philosophy, Sciences, and Letters, both at UFMG, Goulart investigates modes of occupying space and of giving new dimensions to graphic elements ever since her first exhibition, Carne de segunda (2000), at Centro Cultural UFMG. In the (In)verso installation, plots of images taken from the art realm are superimposed onto words scattered on the floor and walls of the exhibition site. 

Two years later she had her first solo exhibition, Nada que você não queira (2002), at the gallery of Espaço Cultural Cemig, Belo Horizonte. It consisted of a labyrinth of billboards, bright stickers, paper plots (with life-size images culled from Vermeer's classic paintings), phrases in vynil stickers, and a wooden silhouette with hinges. The exhibition made advances in the research on the expansion of graphics in space. Inside, visitors were confronted with both their own images and Vermeer's pictures. The occupation of the exhibition site and the signification modes derived from the confrontation between visitors and the images they pass along the way widen the meanings of the artwork and deepen the artist's research.

In that same year, Goulart won the first prize at the 8th Salão Victor Meirelles, Florianópolis, for her action artwork Para entender a arte (os mais importantes quadros do mundo analisados e minuciosamente explicados). It consisted of a digital plot of a Renaissance painting, juxtaposed with sticker phrases ironizing the art circuit and the usual forms of sponsorship and cultural support. The work was submitted under the “Anonymous” pseudonym; in the “curriculum” field of the entry form, the author wrote: “Anonymous has been in a few exhibitions, but doesn't think this should interfere with the judgment of the work presented.” The nonperformance was taken to extreme consequences: the author abstained from manifesting herself even after her work was selected by the jury to receive the first prize at the Salão. 

After the declaration of political principles, there came the discovery of audiovisual and the plasticity of electronic image. Derived from the installation of the same name, Alugo-me (2004) continues, already within this new field, with the artist's formal and conceptual research. Her inquiries on the appropriation of space and the three-dimensionalization of images gained motion. Selected for the New Vectors exhibition at the 15th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival (2005), the work goes through empty houses for rent, to the sound of popular radio shows for lonely people seeking love relationships. 

The installation that contained the original artwork consisted of a small video monitor and a photograph. The deliberately low audio was only audible to those who came close to the monitor-making people feel as if they were using a small, battery-operated radio, of the type that one had to press to one's ear in order to listen to. Either shown in a loop, as was the case with the installation, or as a single channel presentation, the effect of the video is the same: it bares the uncomfortable metaphor that relates the emptiness of houses for rent to the emptiness of hearts putting themselves up as candidates to the next tenant.

The emptiness and loneliness in Alugo-me were potentialized in the following work, Quem escuta o meu sim (2005). The artist returned to the audiovisual realm to recreate intimacy once again, this time using images of memories to build up a chronology of sorts comprised of childhood, marriage, and separation. The work is a video installation consisting of three monitors, framed and built into a fake, wallpaper-covered wall. The first monitor features old Super-8 images of children playing, on and on. The second one shows a wedding scene as the bride utters a strange vow, its letters superimposed over the image: “Perhaps I already lived in some borrowed body, waiting just for you to put my pieces together.” On the third monitor, images culled from an edition of the Big Brother Brasil reality show feature a contestant who, in a desperate moment of loneliness, embraces an armless, man-shaped doll. 

The work speaks of love, memory, family relationships-and attests to the poignancy typical of the phase in Goulart's work that Alugo-me inaugurated.

Portfolio
Chronology, synopses, and technical specification of the projects carried out by Fernanda Goulart as an artist and graphic designer. 

Database
The Web page of the Minas Gerais-based artist in the Videobrasil On-line Website features a short biography, a record of festival participations, and a link to the official Website of the 15th Videobrasil, which included the Alugo-me video in the New Vectors exhibition.