Associação Cultural Videobrasil

About the Work of Gustavo Galuppo: History(ies) of Digital Video

Gustavo Galuppo is one of the most original video artists of his generation in Argentina. Galuppo has produced a versatile work in search of his own style through a process of thought that is located between cinema, video, and digital art, questioning the expressive patterns of short and feature works. This video maker from Rosario, a video and cinema lover, has also begun to work in the field of installations and performances with his group Vera Baxter.

I would like also to mention this series, the Dossier, which is already an important organ within the international audiovisual panorama, enriching Videobrasil's memorable history. These chronicles are helping to preserve the Brazilian and international video-graphic heritage. The energy and continuity of the Festival, this Dossier, and the ambitious project of constructing an on-line database are some of the reasons why Videobrasil is so important as an organization within the world of video art. Videobrasil's vitality during this time of crisis correlates to the work and attitude of Gustavo Galuppo, who has been producing a solid audiovisual work without interruptions.

I have considered some aspects of Galuppo's last work, which may be useful for an analysis of his work as a whole. Thus, I have found short and long videos which establish a dialogue with many contemporary aesthetic trends.

The use of the concept of short subject movies in video is an interesting idea. This is not only an issue of duration, but also a semiotic contamination within the framework of electronic and digital technologies which reaffirm certain hybrid relations between cinema, video, and multimedia arts. The creative manipulation of these transfers between different supports and languages has produced a great turn in Galuppo's last works: El ticket que explotó, 5´, 2002; La disección de una mujer ahogada, 60´, 2002; Días enteros bajo las piedras, 65´, 2004; La progresión de las catástrofes, 8´50´´, 2004. These works alone constitute an interesting corpus.

In his long videos, there are some narrative devices forming a complex experimental narrative that we could maybe relate to the elegiac, anthological cinematic attempt in Intriguing People (1995), first feature by Eder Santos. In Galuppo's first long video, Disección de una mujer ahogada, Timoka, an undefined location, functions as an audiovisual panoptic terrain which is kept under rigid regime of control and isolation, where stories of disaffection and isolation take place. The protagonist's notes are part of a more extended enunciation in which his non-linear visual memory constructs a story of losses. In Días enteros bajo las piedras, an electronic, hybrid space with chromatic textures is constructed, a location where Clara Vogler and Nataniel are kept prisoners, wandering around and waiting for the inevitable death. This electronic, digital space is a fictitious location where the characters have tactile experiences that function as fragments of a complex narrative which is constructed of intertextual interferences through the manipulation of appropriated movie images and fragments of personal archives.

Disección de una mujer ahogada is a work which delineates the most complex plot, for it, at the same time, presents and breaks with the logics of traditional fiction, recycling certain mythical themes which are the same that crush the female character in its relation to love, death and incommunicability. This amorous, narrative search exposes an apparently hopeful romantic discourse, which results in a utopia, even for its creator. The images in this video were taken from domestic, home videos and fragments of silent films, and carefully joined during the fundamental process of post-production. Disección de una mujer ahogada and La progresión de las catástrofes were freely based on texts by J.L. Godard and Marguerite Duras. They propose complex intertexts between cinema and video, in which, through digital manipulation, the cinematic mythology is absorbed and recycled, resulting in something that could be called History(ies) of Cinema Through Digital Video.

The complex, interesting issue of video digitalization marks a work (Galuppo's) which is structured around the hybridism of technological supports and languages, through an original semiotic manipulation of cinema and video, emphasizing expressive constructions that relate to the history of these audiovisual devices and its mythologies.

Thus, Gustavo Galuppo, one of the most assiduous Argentine video makers, produces extraordinary expressive works which establish dialogues between themselves through the manipulation of images. On the one hand, there are “the brief poetics, conceptual, reflective works”, says Galuppo, “on the other, there are the long ones, in which the narrative tries hard to make way through solid structures. I don't know where they come from (and I do not want to know, I'd rather explore them and find their ways), but now I'm trying to take and explore both directions. Maybe that is just like this, two independent forms. Or maybe they join somewhere, generating a third form. We will see.” (G.G).

"If that is the question, to explore one or both directions, you are doing fine. Anyway, you are in the middle of a long, hard, painful trip. It is through this persistent search that you become an author. You are doing fine, but there is always a need to get deeper into this. I believe that the narrative elements of your long works are something new, of great importance to the genre, and that your conceptual re-reading of cinema and memory is being very well conducted. You still need to sweat more blood. Something that is difficult in Argentina, because of the lack of support and patronage. But do not worry, you have already made yourself useful.

Best wishes,

JLF"