Associação Cultural Videobrasil

With a background in visual arts and drawing, Roberto Bellini (Juiz de Fora, 1979) makes videos in which the feeling of strangeness that the camera produces-in others as well as in himself-becomes a provocative element. The holder of a degree in drawing from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais' School of Fine Arts (2002), Bellini's artistic education includes workshops such as Roteiro visual para quadrinhos e cinema (Bryan Talbot, UFMG, 1998), Escrita e imagem (grupo A4, UFMG, 1999), Questão de espaço II (Ana Maria Tavares and Martin Grossman, UFMG, 1999), Realidades inventadas (Eustáquio Neves, UFMG Winter Festival, 2000), and Videodança (Laura Taler, Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, 2003).

His extensive artistic background has led him to switch between different media, an increasingly prominent feature of his work, after an initial period that consisted basically of drawings, “big ones with a lot of black in them.” Bellini's first exhibition, created in collaboration with artist Rodrigo Borges, was entitled Ponto, Linha e Plano (2000). Only a year later, his Resposta exhibition was already a mix of audio and photography, in a visual and audio reading of the artist's parents' house, in the city of Juiz de Fora, in collaboration with local electroacoustic musician in-cubus. The piece inaugurated an important line of work for the artist, involving sound and memory. 

Preceded by a series of seven or eight experiments with digital image in motion, Bellini's first video, How Things Work (2002), shows an ingenious mix of textures including metal, meat, and rubber in a sort of surgery that is reminiscent of the classic Ballet Mechanic (1934), by Fernand Léger, perhaps mostly due to the noises. The video causes uneasiness through its intensive use of detail shots, due to which one can't tell what is being cut, what is being injected, and how the process occurs. This mix of weirdness and irony was selected for the competitive exhibition of the 14th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival, 2003, and was awarded second place at the 2nd Inter-American Biennial of Video Art the following year.

Also in 2004, the artist went on to pursue a master's degree in Transmedia at the University of Texas, Austin, which enabled him to have a constant output in the fields of video and installation. The animation Eu desisto (2004), a return to drawings, marked this transition. The shades of black and white and the combination of dream, reality, and fiction make this video a touching, upbeat portrait of the artist and his uneasiness. The work was featured in an exhibition entitled Liquid Days: Navigating the Mutable Tides of Memory, held at the Dougherty Arts Center, Austin, last July. 

The year of 2005 was particularly intense. Exploring the surroundings of the University of Texas at Austin, Bellini lived a situation that he transferred with almost no interference to his Landscape Theory video. As he tried to capture images of birds flying across the city's blood-red sunset, Bellini was approached by a security guard who asked him why he was using a camera in private property, and then proceeded to try and persuade him to stop recording. The author defined this short treatise on the power of camera and the terror it inspires as a poetic documentary, rather than a performance.

Landscape Theory quickly made a career for itself: the video was featured in the Contemporary Investigations axis of the Southern Panoramas competitive exhibition, at the 15th Videobrasil (2005), and in the Focus on South America exhibition, curated by Solange Farkas for the KunstFilmBiennale, Germany. It appeared in an exhibition curated by researcher André Brasil for celebrating the Year of Brazil in France, won the Mostra do Filme Livre, Rio de Janeiro, and was part of the Ways of looking at: Places and landscapes exhibition, curated by Juliana Mundim and held at Centro Fundación Telefónica in Lima, Peru. Landscape Theory was also one of the videos selected for the Videobrasil on Tour 2006-2007 Special Selection programme, and will travel through Brazil and abroad from August onwards.

Also in 2005, in the Transmedia program at the University of Texas at Austin, Bellini exhibited his Outlines installation, in which he uses three projectors to draw, on the floor, the lines of an ever-changing map, along with outlines of bodies, which at times resemble the police procedure of drawing chalk outlines of dead bodies, and at other times are just reminiscent of people sleeping. In the same year, the artist created a fragmented travel log entitled Tamandaré; the odd Over There, in which he pits excerpts from old war movies against each other, creating “a battle of fiction versus fiction”; and Interval, which gives glimpses of streets, bars, rooms full of friends, and other urban scenes, all viewed from behind cups and glasses of coffee drunk in several places in Brazil. Interval was part of the Shade exhibition, which brought twelve artists together in the Creative Reserch Lab of the University of Texas at Austin. 

Opaque, a study on the presence of the camera and the artist in the landscape, was Bellini's following work. In April 2006, the film was featured at the 2nd Athens Video Art Festival and, more recently, in the Digital Showcase 37, held at the Austin Museum of Digital Art. In the same year, along with artists Mario Ramiro and Skyler McGlothlin, Bellini participated in the Austin's Soundtrack. He did live video image manipulation during Ramiro and Skyler's presentation, as part of the Sin Título, 2006 event, organized by the Creative Research Laboratory and the Austin Museum of Digital Art, in partnership with the Blanton Museum of Art.