Interview 09/2004
How did you get involved with image production? What encouraged you to do it?
What encouraged me to get involved with image production was my lack of verbal skills. The television also helped, being a kind of maternal friend. I could say that I have had an incestuous relationship with TV.
Some of your works make references to cinema, manipulating, comparing or establishing relations between significant scenes of cinema history. What is the relation between your work, cinema and those scenes? Is there a desire to change their meaning, placing them within the context of video art?
The main relation between my work and cinema is the appropriation of cinema as a starting point to the production of new meanings, not necessarily nullifying the former meaning, as, for instance, the video Schizo, which takes the post-modernity theory as a starting point to appropriate an appropriation, copying the famous scene of the shower from the film Psycho to the sound of Sinatra's I Love You, with an ironical tone. That is why this kind of image works; those images are cinematic icons with defined concepts which I do not try to change, but to use them to say something more.
In Rashomon Dance Experience (2003), a video produced with the Brazilian video artist Pedro Vilela in a workshop at the World Wide Videofest in Amsterdam, you made use of cinematic images again. Given the specificities of collective work, was it an approximation of your previous work or a new experience?
It was a very good experience for me, for the project I developed with Pedro was very similar to what I used to do until then. Moreover, I had never worked together with another video artist, and I took it naturally.
In an article on your work, Max Hernandez Calvo states that there is an oscillation between pessimism and pleasure. What do you think about it?
All my life I have been guided by this dichotomy. I do not think I could have one without the other. I was born pessimist. Pleasure comes to break my expectations.
Is there any relation between your work and your country's political and social contexts?
I believe that every work of art is a 'son' of the context in which it was created. However, I have tried to nullify all elements related to the moment of creation in my last works. A work of art can live longer this way.