Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The Expanded Documentary Film of Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg

Meetings, conversations, tensions, conflicts, confrontations, negotiations with real people: such is the “raw material” from which Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg extract their various works since the early 1990s, through the construction of “relational devices” that are closely attached to the context in which they will function. In their artistic output, interaction with the other does not take place only during exhibitions in museums and galleries, in propositions to the audience at art premises. Rather it is the starting point, the “active” principle, the provoking element, that without which their works would simply not have the necessary conditions to exist. This is not about isolated artists at their workplace, with their tools, reflections and inspiration, but rather about installations, urban interventions, and public art projects that arise, from the very beginning, shared, coproduced, be it with more clearly defined social groups—street kids, inmates, delinquent adolescents, male prostitutes, policemen, immigrants, political refugees, street vendors, doormen who came from Northeastern Brazil to the Southeast, Egyptians, blind people—, be it with randomly-chosen individuals, anonymous persons, passers-by.

The very partnership between the Brazilian and the Swiss came to being little by little, in the production of a work, in the relationship with other people, in the elaboration of a situation. Dias graduated in fine arts, Riedweg in music, theater, performance. An unstable, yet powerful subjectivity came out of that partnership, overflowing from all sides with individual identities, liberating creative forces unattached to the notion of “author,” and to the effects of control that such a notion entails. Which is not to say that there is no auteurship, but rather that Dias and Riedweg invent, with every work, their own way of being authors, setting personal idiosyncrasies aside—theirs or their characters’—to favor a capacity for creation that is molded and invented every time it gets in touch with other universes.

The duo’s projects develop in different stages, involving several people, and are liable to take months or even years; they use varied strategies and materials, and may yield varied formal results. They often acquire aesthetic and political unfoldings that include museums, art galleries, and public spaces, as well as non-governmental organizations and public institutions in Brazil, Europe, Africa, Mexico, Argentina, the United States. To describe their work properly is a very difficult task, a challenge to critics, a lost battle, which only attests to the vitality of their artistic career. The very notion of an oeuvre seems insufficient to assess the creation procedures of Dias and Riedweg. Therefore, what concerns us in this article are the key elements of the devices used by the artists to establish relationships with the other, and to produce their work—on the one hand, it seems to me that those devices are in keeping with a certain documentary practice and, on the other hand, they expand upon the possibilities of contemporary documentary film.(*1) 

Let us take Devotionalia, the duo’s oldest project, made with street kids in Rio de Janeiro, as our initial example. How do Dias and Riedweg establish contact with such a socially stigmatized group? A stigma often renders a group impossible to approach effectively, since many kids incorporate, in their gestures and speech, the social clichés about themselves, and may react to an interview in a programmed manner. The proposal was to organize workshops for the children and adolescents to interact through a common action: to make white wax votive offerings based on the molds of their own hands and feet; each of these small “sculptures” was accompanied by a video recording of a desire for the child or adolescent who made it. Hundreds of copies of hands and feet, combined with the videos, comprised a large installation, presented for the first time in 1996 at the Modern Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro, a “large collective votive offering” which, according to Dias and Riedweg, was aimed at society, and not at God.

Thus, the project was not limited to interviewing the kids, in an attempt to find the “truth” about their situation, but rather it proposed, prior to conversation, a joint activity, related to their universe, capable of removing them from a location predefined by the media, by the discourse of power, and by the daily relationships they have in the streets. The idea for the votive offerings did not come out of nowhere, it came from the fact that many street kids wear amulets for protection and luck. The experience served to establish a relationship of trust, providing greater density to the interaction of all those involved; to scramble up preconceived identities, while indirectly disclosing the social tragedy in which they live. This is what stands out in the device used in Devotionalia, as well as in the devices featured in other works by the duo: a sort of “contract” with the participants, which forecasts not the reproduction of something real, but rather the sharing of an experience that surprises, and thus displaces behaviors, elicits words, expressions, attitudes that are unexpected. Something out of the program, out of the script, out of social control. 

In the two projects executed in São Paulo, the documental approach was more direct. In Os Raimundos, os Severinos e os Franciscos, Dias and Riedweg made a documentary film about doormen from Northeastern Brazil who work in the Southeast, and in Mera Vista Point, they made short, one-minute long videos about thirty-three street vendors who work in the Largo da Concórdia square, in the Brás neighborhood, in the city of São Paulo. In both cases, though, the participation of the characters was not limited to telling the stories of their lives. For the installation presented at the Bienal de São Paulo (1998), the doormen staged a short sequence, in a space reproducing a “standard” bedroom, perhaps in the building garage, painted with colors chosen by the doormen themselves, and equipped with their own furniture and objects. They simulate coming home after a day’s work, entering the bedroom one by one, acting as if they were not seeing one another, and when they are all set, they look straight at the camera, making clear their complicity with the act of filming. This is the video’s final scene, which, in the installation, was projected onto a screen in front of the setting, which became illuminated at the end of the documentary film. 

Mera Vista Point was a public art project and a video installation carried out in Largo da Concórdia square, for the Arte/Cidade event (2002). The idea came up during the work with the doormen—this is where they go shopping. Each street vendor makes short, one-minute long product announcements, which are very revealing of the Brazilian popular imagery. For the duration of Arte/Cidade, this work caused changes in the functioning of local trade, involving vendors in the elaboration and exhibition of the videos. A video bar was built on a six-meter-high tower over the stands, and from there one could watch, over the tents, large portraits of the participants in the project. Each vendor received a television set and a video player, to screen the final video edit during the event, and gave copies of the video as a gift to customers who made purchases worth over 30 reais (approximately US$ 15) at their stands in Largo da Concórdia. 

Three Times Documentary Film

If Devotionalia, Os Raimundos, os Severinos e os Franciscos, and Mera Vista Point deal with important issues related to contemporary documentary filmmaking, neither of the two artists elaborate projects based on documentary, and they do not claim to do so. Their work does not participate in the documentary film production and screening circuit either—at least not until now. Why, then, should their work be labeled as documentary film? First of all, because theirs is an art form that would not exist without the meeting with the other. Amidst the multiplicity of forms invented by cinema over the course of more than a century of history, documentary film bears the particularity of being born out of the interaction between at least two people, in specific contexts: the filmmaker on one side of the camera, real people on the other side, individuals who accept to become part of a film project, thus becoming “characters” in the documentary film.(*2) 

The second reason for the association with the documentary film genre is concerned with the convergence of the duo’s work with the guidelines of what has become known as “modern documentary” and, more specifically, with the films of Jean Rouch, from France. If on the one hand the relational dimension is the basis for this type of cinema, on the other hand it remained hidden until the mid-1950s. It was as if there had been no meeting: the documentary film would reproduce, onto image, preestablished realities, identities, and worldviews, without combinations or contaminations between filmmakers and characters. Rouch departs from that stance and affirms the intervention of filmmaker in documentary films, because he knows that any other reality is altered from the moment a camera is placed in front of it, and that the effort of recording it as such is useless. In films made in Africa (I, a Negro /1958, Jaguar/1954-1967, among others) or in Paris (Chronicle of a Summer /1961), the interaction between filmmaker and characters is taken on, accepted, and the film arises out of it. Travels, hunts, rituals, luncheons, dinners, intimate or group conversations, the search for a job, these are some of the situations created by Rouch and his partners to be filmed. And what the camera records, in the words of Jean Rouch, is a “singular metamorphosis,” a “cine-trance,”(*3) when, “thanks to this small crystal and steel monster, no one is the same anymore.”(*4) 

The third reason concerns the central position that the notion of device holds in the works of Dias and Riedweg, as well as in some of the contemporary documentary production, especially in the work of Eduardo Coutinho. The device, in these two contexts, is a productive, active procedure which creates situations, images, worlds, sensations, perceptions that did not exist before it. It is not at all something that takes place similarly in every work, but rather something that is created with each work, immanent, contingent to the circumstances of the present, and submitted to the pressures of what is real. In Eduardo Coutinho (Santo Forte, Babilônia 2000, Edifício Master, O fim e o princípio) the device is, first and foremost, a machine that provokes meetings, and allows for them to be recorded. Relationships that take place inside spatial lines (a favela, a building, a village), temporal lines (the recording time for each documentary film), technological lines (the equipment used), activated by him every time he approaches a social universe. How to discuss religion in Brazil? Traveling the entire country? How to discuss the favela? Recording several ones? Coutinho’s approach is clear cut: to record in a demarcated space and, from there, to extract a vision, which evokes a sense of “generality,” not by representing or exemplifying, but telling us a whole lot about Brazil. 

Context and Interterritoriality

In most of Dias and Riedweg’s devices, context is a key element. From it they extract strategies to relate to the participants in their work, building what we can also call relational machines. At the same time, context, for the duo, is always associated with an interterritorial element that prevents the closing of a situation over itself, thus favoring intersections, passages, exchanges, contaminations between different territories. It is an element that allows them to “make the process in one place and then take it to another place,”(*5) but also to produce combinations in the process. In their installation with the doormen, the duo placed in interaction architectural elements (the spaces destined for doormen in buildings), technological elements (the video, but also the electronic gadgets in the entrance of a building), discursive elements (the conversations with the doormen, but also the “gossip” of inhabitants about the doormen), and also historical, social, and individual elements related to the coming from the Northeast, to civil construction in São Paulo, to the consequences of immigration in their lives and to the city. The “interterritorial” element consisted in taking the doormen to an institutional art space, not as spectators, but as actors, creating conditions for them to have a truly aesthetical experience. 

What effects does that machine produce? There are many, but perhaps the most important one is showing that beings and things only exist through relationship, that no one can live without changes effected by others and that, depending on the interactions to which we are exposed, we can create new identities, have unusual reactions, live different roles and not those that the social world forced us to live. By the same token, this device makes it clear that there is no such thing as “the doorman,” a psychosocial type with a fixed identity, equal to all other Northeastern doormen, but rather different ways of being a doorman or, quoting the beautiful title of the installation, different ways of being Raimundo, Severino, or Francisco. When we get in touch with the works of the duo, we, the spectators, are granted access both to the state of affairs in different social groups they work with—in the case of doormen, the history of humiliation crystallized in the small spaces they inhabit, and updated in their relationship with the inhabitants of buildings—, and to what resists this state of affairs, the small freedoms, the small movements of creation, “like so many other escapes and clevernesses, coming from ‘immemorial intelligences,’”(*6) which are so well illustrated in the good-tempered last scene of the video. 

Nevertheless, there are important differences between the documental devices and the practices of Dias and Riedweg, which can be approached from at least two perspectives. On the one hand, we can think that they expand and intensify the relational procedures of documentary films through space-time agencings that are different from cinema. On the other hand, we can think that the duo brings, to a moment prior to public exposition, physical, mental, and expressive experiences that were up until then restricted to viewers of many installations, documental field notwithstanding. 

Anyway, the most outstanding difference concerns the propositions made to the individuals that the duo deals with, which do not restrict themselves to the average requirements of documentary film: to speak of oneself, and to let oneself be recorded in everyday situations. Be it by exercising their senses in sensorial laboratories, be it by contributing to the construction of certain situations, or acting per se, the persons involved often end up entering never-before-seen logics, rehearsing other identities, testing expressive capacities they did not know existed; in some cases, they seem to give in more easily to arbitrary requests than to requests with a reason, as if they wanted precisely to be seduced, as Baudrillard would say, “outside their raison d’être.”(*7) 

In Voracidade máxima (2004), the male prostitutes of Barcelona wear masks reproducing the faces of the artists and talk to them for several hours, lying on an apartment bed, all of them wearing robes, surrounded by mirrors, in a situation of extreme intimacy. In Throw (2004), Helsinki citizens gladly accept to throw various objects at a camera protected by glass plates, while that same camera records them in the moment they attack it. Book, cell phone, paint, flour, egg, alarm clock, teddy bear, cream pie, all are thrown at the surveilling and provoking camera, in a reincarnation of a gesture essential to the political demonstrations that took the central streets of the city throughout the 20th century—only now, instead of throwing at the police and the army, the throwing is aimed at a camera, a key technology to the control system of contemporary society. 

Here are some examples of arbitrary, albeit not reasonless, proposals created in close connection with specific contexts, and with great potential for displacing established identities and views. Those examples possess, as we have seen, complex aesthetic and political implications; they elicit change, not in the real situation of the people involved, as political art intended, to no avail, but rather in the participants’ sensibility, the moment they are captured by different flows, thus managing to become free from themselves and from the formulas and preconceived notions that constitute them, fabricated in the daily confrontation with different realities, as well as from the “social brand image” that subjugates and imprisons them, intensifying discriminations, segregations, isolation. This is the primary function of devices: to create mechanisms for displacing or dissolving, even if only provisorily, stiffened ways of perceiving self, the world, and the other, thus opening up possibilities for new ways of seeing and being.

The projects of Dias and Riedweg renew the dialogue between documentary film and contemporary art, and the strategies used for activating the real can be regarded as a possible horizon for the current impasses in documentary film production. There is a series of other aspects of the duo’s work that could be elaborated on, within the perspective of connections with documentary film. I would like to point to at least two such aspects. First off there are the ways for interacting with the public in art institutions and urban spaces, produced in this final stage of works by relational devices for exposition, and no longer for creation of artistic processes per se. Secondly, attention must be called to the importance of having, as a backdrop for this analysis, a reflection about the relations between media and art, because we are surrounded with and formed by spectacularized images of poverty and of the social groups Dias and Riedweg work with. And it is against those images, or in an attempt to shatter them, that the works of the duo find their production conditions. 

Consuelo Lins is a documentary filmmaker and a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She earned a doctorate from the University of Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle) with a thesis on documentary films, focusing on the work of North American filmmaker Robert Kramer. Lins made Chapéu Mangueira e Babilônia: histórias do morro (1999), and Jullius Bar (2001). She worked as a researcher and director of film crews in the documentary films Babilônia 2000 and Edifício Master, by Eduardo Coutinho. Lins directed Leituras (2005), a short film made using a portable telephone camera, awarded at the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (2006). She earned a postdoctoral degree from the University of Paris 3 (2005) with work dealing with the more markedly subjective side of documentary production. Lins writes articles about contemporary audiovisual creation on a regular basis, and published a book entitled O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho: televisão, cinema e vídeo (Jorge Zahar Editor, 2004), which is currently in its second edition. 

*1 For other possible avenues of analysis, see the excellent texts by Catherine David, Guy Brett, and Suely Rolnik, among others, which include the duo’s projects in the tradition of fine arts, pointing to the 1960s, and especially to the work of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, as the source of inspiration to many of Dias and Riedweg’s artistic strategies.

*2 There are also, of course, other forms of documentary film, such as archival films, for instance. But the relational sphere prevails in the tradition of this form of cinema, from Nanook of the North (1922), by R. Flaherty, considered the first documentary film in the history of cinema.

*3 Jean Rouch, “Le vrai et le faux”. Traverses, n. 47 (Ni vrai ni faux). Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989, p. 181.

*4 Rouch, J. and E. Morin. Chronique d´un Été. Paris: Domaine Cinéma, 1962, p. 28.

*5 Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg in Encontros com o outro, interview to Glória Ferreira in: Concinnitas Revista do Instituto de Arte da UERJ, year IV, No. 4, March 2003, pp. 104–120.

*6Luce Giard, in Introduction to the book by Michel Certeau, A invenção do cotidiano. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, p. 19.

*7 J. Baudrillard. A arte da desaparição. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 1997, p. 52.

Researcher and documentary filmmaker Consuelo Lins, the author of a book on Eduardo Coutinho—and of the essay on your work featured in this FF>> Dossier—claims that “for Coutinho, cinema means interaction with the world.” This seems to apply to you. Does art mean interaction with the world to you? 

M: In 2002, we made a small anthology of ten works, and we wrote a book, O Outro começa onde nossos sentidos se encontram com o mundo [The other begins where our senses meet the world], in which we attempted to discuss the alterity that drives our work. The question is: where does the alterity begin? I would say it begins when one abandons oneself. It begins when you abandon your own desire, your own direction, when you pause to aspire for something that comes from the outside. Like Oswald de Andrade, I am interested in that which is not mine. 

W: It is the desire to fulfill oneself. To make sense, I must connect myself to others. I believe I am a fragment, not a whole identity. No one exists as an island, only when connected. I become myself in this constant exercise of completing myself. 

I noticed that in many of your works, the other is the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, he who is stranded from his place. Is the other that you seek always distant?

W: If I search too close to myself, I might fall into a behavior that is structured after my own blind spots. But what does close mean? That is another question, because I may feel out of place, even though I am in place. This is not a geographic issue. This is about human condition: to be in one’s place or to seek one’s place.

M: Desire is what points to the other. It is subjective, and may point to something that is very strange to you. For example, the work that we are doing for Documenta is about desire. It is about the European fantasy of tropical culture. Hans Staden, who wrote the first ethnographic and literary texts about Brazil, in 1557, comes from the suburbs of Kassel. He wrote about the tupinambás and canibalism; he described his experience and called the book The True History. This part of his life, fantasized or not, lived or not, is told within another context, namely Europe circa 1557. No matter how precise his account was, it was still an account. The book was illustrated by someone who never came to Brazil, based on Staden’s account. Those illustrations of cannibalism became a visual archetype, which for three hundred years dominated the European imagery of the tropics, permeated all ethnographic literature about the tropics, and, naturally, determined the tropical political history within the universal context. 

Was the traveler always a narrator who preserved himself, much more than he preserved the other? Does an account reveal more about the narrator than the fact being told? 

W: It is important to realize that, when we look, we do not view what is there, but rather what we see. When I listen, I hear what I am hearing, and not what is being said. This is a relatively new awareness, which stems from psychoanalysis and other methods of analysis. The thing in itself exists outside the instrument of sight. This fragility is beautiful, it is complex, and it interests me. 

M: We start to become aware of a parallel story, which is the story of the perception of things. It is another story, one that is totally permeated, or driven, by the issue of alterity. Doing something, that is one thing. Now, to be seen doing something, that is a whole other thing altogether. And the other will tell a story parallel to the story you are telling. In the work of Hans Staden there is a whole intelligent notion of what the tropic is, but it is not the history of the tropic. One starts becoming aware of this problem that exists in narrative, be it ethnographic or journalistic. One cannot be so innocent as to think that a documentary film tells the truth. The documentary film delivers an account. We work with video. Video is not an image you create, it is not a line drawn on a white sheet of paper. When we turn on the camera, we are working with an image that exists, in principle. Is that making a documentary film? We must think about what defines a documentary film, because, in essence, image is neither documental nor fictitious. An image is an image. The literature that you relate to it will build the meaning of this image. I can put the camera in front of an acted-out reality, or in front of reality itself. Anyway, upon editing, I create a representation of what I recorded, no matter how real. Thus, the notions of documentary film must be reexamined, as the notions of recording are being reexamined. 

Your work aims precisely at exploring those instruments of peception. Each work sharpens new senses. But it is also possible to understand documentary films not only as representations of reality, but also as the creation of meetings and filmic happenings, in which all of the involved are aware that they are living a made-up situation. Given that the contemporary documentary film entails the awareness of a meeting between maker and reality, do you recognize yourselves as documentary filmmakers?

W: I don’t recognize myself as that yet. I would like to set an even broader scale. I hope our work leads viewers to feel that this meeting with reality is a flow, in which reality is permanently under construction. It is almost a performatic device for living the moment. I want to keep on encouraging meetings and conflicts with my material, and not to act like Hans Staden, who claimed to know the truth. That is misleading. 

M: I would categorically say I do not recognize myself as a documentary filmmaker. What interests us, regarding the issue of documentary film, is precisely questioning the existence of a material so clean that we might call documentary. You can make art using real material. Art is related to the issue of representation and of interpreting things. This is the difference between art and journalism, which does not have that concern. Maybe documentary films in the classic sense do not have it either, but documentary filmmaking has evolved into an art. The connection with aesthetic practices gave birth to a new genre, perhaps, but this new genre is art, it no longer has anything to do with information. Jean Rouch’s films, for instance...

Are those not documentary films?

M: They might be, but I don’t think so. Those are perfect works of art, like a work by Picasso. In an artist’s body of work, some works have all these qualities, and they are nearly sublime. You have it in painting, and you have it in documentary films. There is some sublime work by Jean Rouch and Eduardo Coutinho.

There is a nomenclature issue then, and certain works should not be regarded as documentary films?

M: There is a nomenclature issue. In the text O Outro começa onde nossos sentidos se encontram com o mundo, we ask ourselves what the other is. And then we discuss this need we have of giving names to things. We have a need to classify and organize things so we can function in relation to them.

Is the word documentary a trap?

M: Every word is restrictive. The creation of a word is a decoding of something, and a word will never contain the complexity of that something. This is the problem with documentary films. They have the pretension of translating something, but they will never convey the complexity of that something. 

But isn’t thinking of your work strictly as art restricting too? Isn’t your work open to fields other than the artistic one?

M: Yes, just as every work of art is. I think every work of art is also open to the field of thought. Any good painting does that. 

This is, no doubt, an achievement of the last thirty years: speaking of art entails speaking of things that are beyond art. But has not the documentary film also attained this “expanded” status?

M: I think documentary film attained it in execution and in form. There are some wonderful documentary films, but it is not reality that touches you. It is the narrative. It is the way in which the story being told touches you or not.

W: Here we have an issue of testimony and truth. Speaking of things of the world involves very big problems. Suffering, for instance. Documentary films take on a burden that they cannot bear. This is a trap of the camera, which produces this illusion of reality.

M: A trap into which the media was the first one to fall. 

W: Yes, there is an expectation with regard to documentary film, which it cannot meet.

I would say many documentary films do not have a pretension of stating truths about the world. The career of Eduardo Coutinho, one of our most active documentary filmmakers, who worked in television, etc., is an example of that. Take O fim e o princípio, in which the film is a path seeking a subject.

M: To me, that is the virtue of documentary film. In journalistic documentaries, a given content is deemed more important than the way in which it is told. True documentary films, as art, never fall into that trap, because their makers know full well that the narrative determines everything. In this sense, when you ask whether our work consists of documentary films or not, I still say no, because they show great interest in the narrative, in telling stories. An artist has three roles of which he will never rid himself: the first one is to tell stories. Secondly, an artist also must entertain. The distance between things and ideas is nearly unbearable, and the artist works inside that gap, relieving people, making them entertain themselves. The third role of the artist is to make people think, to make room for reflection. In strictly documental journalism, if there really is such a thing, those three roles are lost. Even war reporters, being as close to the facts as they are, provide but an account of war. As Walter Benjamin put it, a ceramic vase will always be molded by the hand of the ceramist, the handwriting of its sculptor. 

When I first interviewed the two of you, Maurício told me about the Benjaminian narrator. In Devotionalia, the stories are told during modeling sessions. And the opening sequence for the documentary film is a telephone game, which translates the way in which oral knowledge is passed on, always bearing the marks of the places through which it passed. Is Devotionalia a tribute to the Benjaminian narrator?

M: No, we became acquainted with Walter Benjamin after we made Devotionalia, through critical observations about the work. We almost always do things in a very intuitive way. Only when we put ten works together and wrote O Outro começa... did we find that the entire work was about the other, the other as a complement of our own selves. It has everything to do with desire, because we worked with specific groups—street kids, male prostitutes, policemen, doormen, human beings like ourselves—, who had identity labels that we did not have. But, and maybe because we are not like them, we had a need to reflect about them. 

How do you create the devices for these encounters, which are very different in each case? 

W: In order to reach a level of interesting conversation, we need different devices in order to become close with the subject. There always is an exchange between the inner and outer worlds. For us, it is key to get to that place, when we speak to others. These works using audio, tactile, and olfactory aspects were very productive ways of creating a totally different context for conversation, of creating other words. A constant concern of ours is that somebody should disrupt the choreography of everyday life, because we are almost always self-portraying. People often talk about everything they learned, but they will not say what they think. I really like moments when a person searches for a word, finds it, and then speaks. 

In the work you are developing with funk carioca (from Rio de Janeiro), which ways of breaking these conditionings did you find? What relationship devices did you create?

M: The work is not about funk carioca, but rather about the perception of the exotic. In fact, exoticness may be generated by empathy or fear, or by a certain disliking. In either case, it results in a problem of interpretation. When something is turned into a myth, it becomes difficult to understand. Becoming close with it brings understanding. This is how we work, we need to grab things. Therefore, the visual universe of our work will be that of funk carioca, but the script for it will be chapter twenty-eight in Hans Staden’s book. He begins that chapter by telling how women would capture, decorate, have sex, and then eat their male enemies. He gives an account of how, in the act of eating their enemies, they would increase their own powers. The script is about the tupinambás, who in principle have nothing to do with funk carioca. We are taking this script from 1557, transposing it into this subversive visual realm, and doing what the canibals did. We are acting out those illustrations with them. Funk carioca balls in favelas are subversive to the State, to culture, to trade, just as canibalism was subversive back in 1557. Therefore, the decision of bringing those two things together provides the work with shape and content. Our work is not about funk carioca or about Hans Staden; it is about this bringing together. We are working with an instrument called ibirapema, which was used by those women to strike the fatal blow. We built an ibirapema using three simultaneously recording cameras. We do not know what is being recorded, because we are participating in the man-eating party.

You are subverting Hans Staden. He did not eat flesh, but when you go out in the funk dance floor, you are symbolically eating the flesh. Or not?

M: I guess so. The idea is not to be like Hans Staden, but he is a link to Kassel, because this work is for the Documenta. When we found out he was from Kassel, we said, it’s him. It will all come together. Funk carioca, which is a deeply local reality... we always seek local realities that translate universal issues. No work of ours is about its context. Voracidade máxima is not about prostitution. It was made in collaboration with male prostitutes, but it is a work investigating similarities between subjectivity, sex, and economy. The only possible encounter in which all those things will mix is in bed. Nothing links the customer or ‘trick’ to that illegal immigrant who became a gay prostitute, but in a given moment he is going to pay to go to bed with the guy. Just as this improbable meeting takes place in bed and in prostitution, it also takes place in art. We go out and seek, in what is strange to us, to understand what is very close and essential for us. This can happen where you least expect. For example: I don’t even like eating meat that much, but I find it very interesting to know the universe of Hans Staden, who is allowing me to understand a whole story of perception about life and culture in the tropics, according to the European mentality, which still drives our culture. Until this day, everything that we sell bears the label of exoticness. 

W: The very Brazilianness is a construction made using those myths. The imagery of funk carioca, of the bodies, is hallucinating. You take the most sensationalist tabloid in Rio, O Povo, and you see pictures everyday, of the meeting between policemen and this world of people from favelas. What you have is very close to the illustrations in Hans Staden’s book: arms cut off, mutilated bodies ready to be publically devoured at every corner newsstand. People buy human flesh and eat it visually. And how is the story of this similarity being told? The funk itself discusses it, as it is a translation in the form of music and art. The text by Hans Staden is an account, and sometimes the time lapse between the two events is nearly imploded. 

By staging canibalism in a funk dance floor, are you using drama to express some truth? 

M: We must replace the word truth with the word precision. There is a quest for precision, a nearly technical perfection in what we do. We are not concerned with truth, but rather with concept, we are concerned with conveying a concept using the most precise language possible. When we start a work, we have more questions than we have ideas. Our work is much more investigative than it is affirmative. It is always born out of some interest, some curiosity. We have very few things to affirm. But we do have a passion for precision. 

Do you include yourselves in your work whenever you can? 
 

M: It is impossible not to include myself. I am the one who turns on the camera. 

W: We do include ourselves, because we do not make a spectacle in order to hypnotize the audience, as cinema often does: a virtuous application of formulas designed to satisfy, to get you out of the real world and make you unaware. In that sense, we are much more Brechtian, we are trying to keep a resistance, which makes you feel as if you are in space, but we also work with seduction, and we try to be entertainers. Brecht was always an entertainer who kept an antidelusional resistance, all the while remembering the audience of the fact that they were in a theater. 

Do you envision your work in movie theaters? 

M: Nothing we ever did to this day could be shown at a movie theater. We work at the edge of visual arts. Why would someone buy our work? At the same time, we do not make the type of cinema that could sell out a theater. Therefore, our work bears issues that we are unable to answer. 

You do not speak only to the art crowd, you speak to a much broader audience, so I would also like to ask what you think about going on television. 

W: It would be nice. I think it would be a challenge, but television would also have to open itself up. Everything would need to change.

Maybe the access is more of an infiltration-through-the-breaches type thing... 

W: I agree, I see a lot of space opening up on the Internet and in television. This whole field of image and content circulation will see a lot of changes over the next five or ten years. The monopoly of TV Globo aesthetics, for instance, here in Rio, is suffocating. But I am very optimistic about the opening of spaces for production.

M: There are breaches and there are gaps. You enter a breach because you want to, and you enter a gap because you fall into it. We fell into visual arts through a gap. It was like falling in a hole, because we never really decided to do it. Walter never had anything to do with it, and when we started working together, I was sick of the visual arts system. We joined forces out of being fed up. And we started working precisely with those methodologies and investigative actions. 

W: The field in which our work is being presented is the visual arts field, where we were welcome, where there was receptiveness. In the world of theater it did not happen, and in the world of cinema there was a weird feeling. But that does not bother me, because if you get too used to one place, you become too safe. This permanent trouble in positioning ourselves does not bother me.

Do you struggle to find places other than the establishment?

M: Juksa was one of those attemps of leaving the gap. It was made in an island in the North Pole, we went there to meet three people. The first screening of the work was presented to those three people alone, and we brought in a singer from another country to sing an aria during the screening.

W: One element that has not been mentioned yet, which is very important to us and present in several works, is our use of archival material. Not in the sense of memory, but in the sense of producing contemporary meaning. Memory is always a construction as well.

In Devotionalia, the newspaper texts function almost as a counterpoint to the personal character of statements. What is the role of archive in that work?

M: Our goal in using archival material is precisely to create a counterpoint, because what interests us is the subjective story of what we are telling. In other words, we want to insert subjectivity into contexts in which it has been lost. The last thing a middle-class person thinks, when it comes to policemen, street kids, doormen, or prostitutes, is that these people have a subjectivity. This is what Suely Rolnik very cleverly called “trash subjectivity.” What we attempt to do in our work is to reinsert subjectivity into the stories we tell. This is the case with Devotionalia, because the newspaper text is something that we read everyday, and it makes us numb. We tried to bare the mechanisms through which subjectivity is taken out of context, in order to facilitate our relationship with the world, through media. When a boy says his friend died, and then you read the exact same story on the newspaper, then you see the distance between the two, as if those were two different universes. Which, in fact, they are. 

This creates a revelation, which is maybe the precision you were talking about.

M: Yes, exactly. The possible truth lies there, in that formal play of including counterpoints.

Traveling Artists

The condition of immigrants permeates not only Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg’s choices in life, but also and mostly their artistic and political stance. In the 1980s and 1990s, Maurício Dias lived as an immigrant in Europe. Around that time, disappointed with the possibilities of the art system as a space for poetic expression, he put a spin on his position as a visual artist, setting aside his painting and drawing production to favor actions that were then outside the scope of the art field. From his meeting with Walter Riedweg, who worked in the spheres of theater, music, and performance, there emerged a collective, hybrid practice based on a project that was at once aesthetic, cultural, and political. An oeuvre which, as French critic and curator Catherine David put it in her essay Do próximo e do distante: algumas notas sobre o trabalho de Dias & Riedweg [Of near and far: some notes on the work of Dias & Riedweg], “invites us to rethink the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and to question artistic practices from a political perspective.” In fact, with each new work, new devices seek a new perception of reality, similar to the freshness of our first gaze at the world.

Eight years ago, Maurício Dias went back to live in his hometown, Rio de Janeiro, and currently Walter Riedweg, born in Lucerne, Switzerland, lives as an immigrant in Brazil. Even with that momentary exchange of roles, both still possess—as shown in their projects—the same experimental verve that leads all immigrants to travel unusual paths. 

The first work by the duo Dias & Riedweg, Serviços internos (1995), as well as the majority of their projects deals with the issue of immigration. “The immigrant is he who moves not only in geographical space, but in time as well. This provides him with a unique perception of the world,” said Maurício Dias. To restore complexity to life, and to increase the degree of perception that people have of their reality. This is where the activism lies in the proposals of Dias & Riedweg, which are executed by means of interactive sensory experiences—staged encounters, orchestrated situations, sensitization workshops, improvisation exercises, and other strategies for relating and communicating with the groups with whom they work. 

The first work of Dias & Riedweg was made for the Shedhalle, a contemporary art institution in Zurich, Switzerland, dedicated to proposing questions and reflections, rather than setting up exhibitions per se. Serviços internos featured 280 foreign children that attended integration classes at public schools in Zurich, and was based on exercises of association between smell and memory. Multilingual, coming from various African and Asiatic countries, the children had, as their common language, a sensory game proposed by Dias & Riedweg. “Communication was established through smells, and they understood that we wanted a representation of their home countries, and of this new place they had just arrived at,” said Maurício Dias. 

The video recorded the statements of students, who associated smells with past events and initial impressions of their new reality. As a symptom of the methodology that would develop over the next twelve years of the duo’s works, the statements were always uttered with closed eyes, emphasizing senses other than sight. After working with smell in Serviços internos, there came touch in Devotionalia (1994-2003), then touch, smell, and the body in Question Marks (1996); smell, hearing, and sight in Inside & Outside the Tube (1998); and taste in Sugar Seekers (2004). In all those works, sensitization workshops were used in order to awaken the memory of the setbacks and paths in each person’s travels. In addition to sensory work, the duo’s strategies involve a series of other activities, including drawing workshops, sculpture, and theatrical dynamics. But travel is always the driving force in their projects. 

Travel is not only present in the contents of conversations established with others. Travel is present in the very dynamics of the duo’s life and work, since most of their projects are made far from home. Sometimes they travel by invitation of Biennials and artistic institutions, at other times they don’t, but the duo is always interested in developing specific dynamics aimed at conjuring regional issues. In Rio, Zurich, Atlanta, São Paulo, Cairo, Alexandria, Venice, Tijuana, San Diego, Johannesburg, Munich, Barcelona, or the Nordic Islands, they seek local realities that translate universal issues. The meetings staged with male prostitutes from Barcelona in Voracidade máxima (2003), for example, represent the connections between issues such as economic domination and immigration. In Os Raimundos, os Severinos e os Franciscos (1998), by focusing on the poverty of the architectural space destined to doormen in wealthy buildings in the city of São Paulo, they call attention to the despise of Brazilian elites toward the working class. 

In Dias & Riedweg, even though the experience of the world is a traveling experience, it is not measured in terms of geographical distance. “What is nearness?,” Walter Riedweg asks in the interview for FF>>Dossier. “I can feel out of place even though I am in my place.” Their last project, Funk Staden (2007), which is still under production for the Documenta 12, in Kassel, Germany, explores two types of distance, temporal and spatial, and establishes a bridge between the city of Kassel in the 16th century, and the city of Rio de Janeiro in the 21st century. For the extent of their intervention in reality, for their work with intangible issues, and with invisible things (which remain hidden underneath inflexible social conventions), Dias & Riedweg cannot be acknowledged as plastic or visual artists, plain and simple. As travelers, they move through terrains that have not yet been plainly incorporated by the art system, and this warrants them some freedom of expression and motion. Even though they might come close to social action and assistance (although they never really engage in such actions), and although some of their work might be labeled as public art, the oeuvre of Dias & Riedweg features a constant not-fitting in with models and categories. Thus, they inhabit the unknown state of life in exile.

Galeria Vermelho
Galeria Vermelho Web site features a comprehensive database of the artists, including images, videos, texts, and bibliography. The site includes a Portuguese version of the essay Do próximo e do distante: algumas notas sobre o trabalho de Dias & Riedweg [Of near and far: some notes on the work of Dias & Riedweg], in which French critic and curator Catherine David comments on the exhibition O Outro começa onde nossos sentidos se encontram com o mundo, held at CCBB-RJ in 2002, and at the MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) in 2003. 

Arte/Cidade
The Arte/Cidade project Web site includes extensive records—maps, plans, drawings, photographs, and texts—of the public video installation Mera Vista Point, presented during the Arte/Cidade Zona Leste event, in São Paulo, 2002.

Multitudes
The Web site of the French politics, art, and culture quarterly magazine includes a French version of the essay Lê laboratoire poético-politique de Maurício Dias & Walter Riedweg, by Suely Rolnik. The essay was also published in Spanish in the exhibition catalogue for O Outro começa onde nossos sentidos se encontram com o mundo (2002-2003).

Kiasma 1
The site of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma/Finnish National Gallery, an important center for visual culture located in Helsinki, Finland, features synopses and information about many of the duo’s works, including Devotionalia, This Is Not Egypt, Mustaffa’s Feast, Tutti Veneziani, My Name in Your Lips, and Throw. 

Kiasma 2
An article published in the Kiasma magazine approaches the narrative structures and the methodology of the “staged encounters,” by Dias & Riedweg. 

MACBA
The Web site of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona features excerpts from Voracidade máxima, as well as texts and information about the work, which is part of the museum’s collection.

Mau Wal: Encontros traduzidos
Images, information, and texts related to the documentary film of the Videobrasil Authors Collection series, focusing on the work of the Mau Wal duo. The film was produced in 2002 by Associação Cultural Videobrasil