Associação Cultural Videobrasil

How did you enter the world of artistic production and what were your early experiences like?

From a very young age I was influenced by my father, José Mário Barata, a self-taught painter who used to work hard with his easel and oil paints. Our conversations about art made me increasingly interested in artistic processes. In 1997 I entered the licensing course in drawing and plastic arts at the Federal University of Bahia. The School of Fine Arts became the reference point for my studies as an art educator, because there I would be able to develop work that would reflect the artist’s role as an interlocutor in society. Education became a strategy to be used by me in this enterprise. 
From 1998 until 2000, I worked at the stage design department of the Castro Alves theater, always incorporating my professional activities and research developed at the School of Fine Arts into the stage design process.
After I started studying photography, in the second year of the course, I became fascinated with image. Professor Ailton Sampaio led me to start making the transition from static photography to moving photography. Thus, my first short film, Barbearia ideal, shot in 16 mm, was born. 
In 2000, as part of the Board of Directors for Image and Sound of the Cultural Foundation of the State of Bahia, I developed a series of videos and the project Videoclipes de apoio aos novos talentos da música baiana. The articulation of image and sound, from the perspective of the music video, made the work very interesting in terms of my professional background. During this process of audiovisual investigation, I established a study group on visual poetics along with colleagues at the School of Fine Arts. In order to provide our meetings with a foundation, we used to go to the libraries of the School of Fine Arts and of the Facom (School of Communication) all the time; our readings and “audiovisual essays” helped us develop a poetic approach to the audiovisual process. 
In the sixth semester of the course, I was invited by the director of ICBA (Brazil-Germany Cultural Institute/Goethe Institut) to participate in theTerrenos, collective exhibition, featuring artists who had in common their language, strong creative and contemporary features, such as Zuarte, Marepe, Zau Pimentel, Ayrson Heráclito, as well as other contemporary, brand-new generation artists. It was my first exhibition.

In the Narciso video, you say: “My name is Danillo Barata, and my work is my truth.” Is the body an integral part of that truth?

I am going after what is true to me. I believe that this work is not only about the author’s vanity, but also about what it means to be an artist these days. The narcissistic relation with the consumption society and the need for mirroring were key to the concept of the work. Confrontation with the body and the relation with the mirror determined the approach for the conceptual dialogue involved in the work.
Narciso was my first formal experience with video. The interest in expressing the disruption and appropriation of my own image was a determining factor for starting my research work with the body. Despite photography and film, there are other ways of capturing image. The mirror is the main way for us to inspect our own body; when the camera and the video replace the mirror, then we have body art. The image in the mirror was myself and someone else. I was interested, most of all, in how to experience my desire of tackling a Greek myth that had much of the contemporary universe and that related to current concepts such as mirroring and reflection.
É importante relatar que eu experimentei uma forte relação com o meu corpo por estar posando e misturei isso a uma tradição do autorretrato.

Also in Narciso, your left shoulder bears a tattoo reproducing the bar code seen in commercial products. Is the industrialized, mass-produced body in tune with the demands of the contemporary world?

The aesthetic standards dictated by the fashion world extend beyond the recipe for what to wear, and they interfere with the social construction of the body. Such patterns, which become reference points, send men out in a frantic search for “outer mirrors,” fetishes of a consumption society that enable the construction of an ideal image. Thus, the Western man gives in to styles that are often imposed, and is seduced by the media to “buy into” physical models far removed from his reality. We are living in times of extreme nonconformity with one’s own body, to the point in which the modification of the physique by means of surgical interventions, implants, and mutilations is commonplace, trite.
In an attempt at self-validation, the world of appearances that the fashion and advertising systems create appropriates itself of the permanence of the artistic object, making constant reference and drawing inspiration from acclaimed works of art. Such efforts, however, are unable to survive the immediacy of a society that gives in to media phenomena. Oddly enough, the need for exposing oneself in conformity with the current bodily standards seeks its validation in representations of utterly ephemeral television myths and images, thus characterizing the obsoleteness of the body, which is then in constant need of updating. This race for increasingly far-away, out-of-reach standards creates a huge emptiness that potentializes the eternal dissatisfaction of modern man.

Man and his relation to the pleasures of the world and in the light of the understanding that religion has of the body—be it Catholicism or Candomblé [Brazilian Afro-descendent religion]—is another highlight of your poetics. Is the body the key to complementariness or to conflict between man and divinity?

I believe that the historical body, the body in which events take place, i.e., the body that results from cultural, social, economic, and aesthetic changes, lies at the foundation of complementariness between man and the divine. My religion integrates nature and the body in order to make way for or to communicate with the sacred. To that extent, I believe in the contemporary dynamics that include syncretism.

In addition to the body, Candomblé is a manifestation that draws your interest. Why?

I am a member of terreiro [Candomblé center] Gun Cevi, of the Jeje Mahim nation, and I am a [spiritual] son of Rombono José Carlos. This is a nation that was all but extinct in Bahia. Resistance was the foundation for us to maintain ourselves. I became enchanted with the nobility of Gaiakú Luiza da Rocha (Fomo Oyássi), who was head of the Jeje Mahim nation at the Rumpami Rum Maú in Pedras do Macaco – Cachoeira. In many aspects, my production makes mention of people who have fought and still fight to retain their identity and for their policies of belonging.

Some of your works, such as the Panorama 360º , series, show images of a Candomblé initiation rite that are not easily obtainable, as the recording of these moments is seldom allowed. How was the footage done and what did it take to convince those involved to let you use these images?

In 2008 I had two works commissioned by the Museum der Weltkulturen in Frankfurt: the documentaries Leben mit den Goettern: der Afrobrasilianische Candomblé in Salvador da Bahia e Yemanjá, Goettin des Meeres: das Fest. I was invited because the producer knew of my involvement in religion, my respect for it, and knowledge of it. She is also a person who has many links to religion. Anyway, the process of convincing takes place with lots of talking and implicit ethical limitations. Finally, I have a fairly generous image bank of some ceremonies.

What project are you working on now?

At the moment, I am developing a project for the Werkplaats voor Beeldende Kunsten Vrije Academie, in the Netherlands, that counts on the research of historians João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, and Marcus J. M. de Carvalho. It is about the life story of an African Muslim named Rufino. He was brought to Bahia as a slave in the 19th century and sold to the state of Rio Grande do Sul, where he bought his freedom. Then, in Rio de Janeiro, he boarded a slave ship as the cook. In 1841, another ship that he worked in was seized by the British and taken to Sierra Leone, where he remained and studied the Arabic language. Back in Brazil, this character settled in the city of Recife, where he was arrested in 1853 for alleged slave conspiracy, and he told the story of his life under questioning. My work aims to create an audiovisual narrative discussing the experiences, contexts, and directions of this African’s movement across the Atlantic world, using an immersive, multiscreen format.
In 2007, at the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil, I was awarded an artistic residency prize, the Videobrasil WBK Vrije Academie Prize. The Vrije Academie offers postproduction and rehearsal studios for installation formats and performances that involve media. There, I started working on Panorama 360º, which uses ten projectors to create an immersive environment with 360 degrees of image moving in sync. It is an interesting framework for thinking about the concept of expanded video.
In May and June 2008, I finished the first phase of the project, which I intend to conclude in a future trip. I had to go back to Bahia to record additional footage. With the trained gaze and the experience acquired in the first trip, I will have the opportunity to finish the project. I will return in July 2009 to conclude the project, and I hope that it can be potentialized, through screenings scheduled by the World Wide Visual Factory, which is headed by Tom van Vliet, creator of the World Wide Video Festival.