Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Most of your videos take place in the outskirts of the city of Salvador. Why do you prefer that region?

I come from the interior of the state of Bahia, where the living conditions are very bad. I used to see all of that adversity really up close. In the trips I used to take with my father or uncles, I would see people living in extreme poverty and could not help but feel affected by all of that reality, which I would compare to my own. The reality of people that I used to see living in the limit of life in the interior of my state left a deep impression on me. 
I guess I have become a voyeur of the state of things, and I believe that it ended up reflecting on my poetics. I do not consider putting together a work on the periphery or poverty, but somehow I always end up resorting, directly or indirectly, to those issues. The main focus of my work is not poverty or the periphery, but rather the man and his issues: identity, sexuality, body, religiosity. I had a very playful childhood, therefore, despite my keen critical sense, I would always view things with a certain enchantment, even if they were very cruel. And, of course, what I have seen and lived is inevitably present in what I think and do. 

The body, religiosity, blackness, and sweetness—symbolized by sugar—are constant presences in your creation. What is it that is special about these elements to you, and how do they connect to your artistic concerns, disquiets, and ambitions?

As I said before, what I experienced in the cities that I lived in marked me, even the more abstract stuff. I remember the sight of huge warehouses in Lapão, where the maize crops used to be stored. I would climb up to the highest bale to look down at that yellow sea of maize, or the sea of cotton, in which I would dive head first. The diving in the silos, lakes, and rivers of my childhood were very pleasant, and I always bring those memories with me. Perhaps that is where the body and the idea of immersion in my current work come from.
SI have always been a circumspect, shy person; I have always enjoyed listening, seeing, observing people, as someone who collects images, sounds, and smells, inebriating myself with the similarities and the differences between human situations and types, behaviors, habits, the different worlds that comprise our diversity in Bahia and in Brazil. My view has always been critical. I have always questioned our social structure, and I continue seeking to see the human reality of blacks, women, gay people, street children, the minorities that are so often cast aside to the margins of society. My family’s Catholic background was a strong one, but I have always had a very critical view of the religious universe, especially the Christian concept of the body; I have always deemed it very strange, opposite to real life. The ideal of a forbidden body presented by religion clashed against my own bodily experience, which was playful and replete with immersions in nature.
In my work, the body is taken to the limit, as in the pornographic images that are transposed into the dimension of the sacred, promoting a crossing, a contamination between God’s and man’s things, in an attempt at giving the creator’s creation back to man, in which we produce an entire symbolic universe in order to justify our existence. The boundaries between the body and the individual, the borders that separate and/or bring people together, are able to broaden or restrict the possibility of existing, of being in the world, and are strong enough to determine how each individual may project his horizon in life.
In that case, the people or situations featured in my work attempt to discuss how to be in such an adverse world, but I try and depict all of that with some sweetness. O mundo de Janiele or Canto doce pequeno labirinto are works that tackle that peripheral living, life as it is, to quote Nelson Rodrigues. Janiele is a nine-year-old girl who draws and discovers her horizon as she plays sweetly with a hula hoop on the rooftop of her house. In Canto doce pequeno labirinto, I placed along the path of passengers at a suburban railway station a construction made of sugar that might be reminiscent of the world of fables, as in the stories of the Grimm brothers, or even of the history of sugar in Brazil, which has left a spot that is still felt in present days. Bahia has the largest black population outside of Africa, and blacks in Bahia still feel the heavy shadow of exclusion.

Your work also features lyricism and the retrieving of innocent aspects of human nature: in Canto doce, people have fun around sugar walls; in Zilomag, adults play like children watching an object of wood and cement roll downhill. Is this one of the goals of your work, reminding the human being of his sensitive condition, connecting him to the other, enabling him to marvel?

Absolutely! I am interested in matters that pertain to the body, identity, and social aspects as well. Of course, something tender always ends up taking place, even when I tackle difficult issues, as in the loneliness of the woman helpless under the scorching sun of a summer day. But then there is a whole playful environment surrounding her: the seawater and the sun shining, the children having fun, the couples dating; it is a Sunday afternoon, it is life, the sweet and bitter in life. In my work, I am always seeking something that is not only poetic, but also has the possibility of touching, causing enchantment, and problematizing, be it by way of overcoming or transcendence.
Problematizing life through artistic action is something that has been occurring more often in my work. In Zilomag, the idea was to draw a parallel between the collective story of the people who live in the slums and the myth of Sisyphus. The people in the slums almost always build their houses using scraps discarded by the city. These houses often fall down during the winter storms, are rebuilt, dragged away again by the summer rains, and then redone once again; in between desperation and good humor, these people rebuild their lives without losing their cool. This reminds me of the myth of Sisyphus, who pushes his fate up the hill every day of his life. Thus, I created an object that lies in between Sisyphus’ rock and the reality of those people. The function of that object, which was built using demolition debris too, was having the people play with their own reality, their historical reality, which includes a tradition of collective work in which they sing cheerfully — as in xaréu fishing, in which they drag the net rhythmically in the early morning along the coastline of Bahia, or in sugarcane cutting, or stomping clay for building houses, or when they build their roofs in the weekends these days. 
In Zilomag, people push an object up the hill, let it roll down the hill, and then start all over. In Canto doce pequeno labirinto, I have built desire and tenderness into the path of the people, a sweet detour, a labyrinth for the public to get lost in candy, a wall that could join everyone around their personal and collective fables, a poetical madness for living and some fantasy into urban life.

In Uma, you recorded a couple making out in the sea, unbeknownst to them. How did that footage take place?

In 2005, I was giving a replacement class for the Contemporary Processes course at MAM Bahia, after having returned from an exhibition at the Ludwig Museum, in Germany. It was Sunday and the MAM workshops did not open. We chose to have the class in Guarajuba and I had a camera with me that I had just bought. As I taught the class, I was manipulating the camera. Suddenly, I stumbled upon a boy playing with a kite. On the background, a couple was making out in the water; the boy went out of scene and I went on recording the couple, distractedly, as I spoke to the students. Little by little, I realized I had a very interesting sequence shot. I followed the couple as they moved around in the water, and then as they left toward the sand. And she stayed alone in the sand. Her utter helplessness, her subjection to the other and to herself, her seeming falling apart. The camera was in total zoom, hence the unsteadiness. There was a long distance between me and the couple, and the beach was crowded. I was lucky to pick up that recording in the middle of so many people.

I am usually very careful when it comes to screening my work. In this case, I was even more careful: I only show it in museums or galleries, which have a more restricted audience. Even though the couple had sex on a public place for all to see, hear, and record in a completely crowded beach, I still had every possible ethical dilemma. I thought of giving up the project, but I could not do it, the work was too strong, it was about passion, about meetings that turn into helplessness, about pleasure and pain, about the solitude that persists within all of us, no matter where we are or who we are with, no matter how deep the ocean is, the incompleteness of depth is out there, it is in Uma [a, an]. An afternoon, a situation, an intercourse, a betrayal, a love fable, a hope. 

What projects are you working on now, and when—and where—will they be screened?

At the moment I have many projects, some of them already concluded, others about to be concluded, in addition to the ones I am getting started with. The video Tempo shows a landscape and the passing of a cold afternoon in São Paulo, as in a naturalistic painting.
Istmo, a short film shot in Salvador, presents three characters that pass by the same places and only meet in the end, which is a tragic one. In Istmo, I try to approach the male universe by means of a derelict, a man who orders a murder and is in love, and a butcher. The setting is a bus terminal.
Lago is an interactive video installation, created using footage of Lago das Carpas, a lake in the Cantareira Mountain Range State Park, in the city of São Paulo. The image is very close to a photograph of a paradisiacal lake, the only motions are those of nature itself, such as the action of the wind, the flight of birds, or some fish that come up to the surface of the water. On top of all of those natural actions, there will be the action of the audience, which will be able to interact with the work. It will be like a place for contemplating nature, in which the audience will be able to draw shapes on the surface of the lake.
In Mar de dentro, I work with a spatiality that generates a dive or a desire to almost touch, or even taste, this tiny little world in suspension, as something that brings us timeless memories/images. 
Duna is an interactive work set against the backdrop of the dunes in the northern coast of Bahia, where the body of a woman occasionally appears on the sand, in a sort of marking of space/time that reminds us of life passing constantly and vertiginously.
Erro is a video dance project that works solely with mistakes made with the camera or by the dancers, who perform naked in the dunes of Diogo beach, in Bahia.
In 503 – Diário de viagem features a simulated daily life in which relations take place between a self and solitude. In a supposed dive into the virtual meetings of relationship Web sites, where that solitude is mediated by the presence of characters from films and TV series recorded during the hours of rest in the intimacy of apartment 503 in a hotel room in São Paulo. 
Some of these works were done, and others concluded, during the residency that I undertook at the Lab of the Museum of Image and Sound (MIS) in São Paulo, between August and December last year. I also have some exhibitions confirmed for this year: a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Centro Dragão do Mar, in Fortaleza, one at MIS-SP, and another one at Paulo Darzé Galeria de Arte, in Salvador. For 2010, I have a solo exhibition confirmed at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia. During that period, I am also going to undertake two residencies: one by Videobrasil, in France, and the other in Barcelona, by MIS-São Paulo.