Associação Cultural Videobrasil

A full professor with the Center of Arts, Humanities, and Languages of the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, Danillo Barata is the author of a body of work centered in the relation between body and vanity, body and art system, body and the world, understood primarily in its social strata. He is interested in contemporary production that articulates performance, image, and electronic art. 

The motivation to create precedes his entering the drawing and plastic arts course at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), in 1997. From way before, his father’s house already provided him the first and fundamental meeting with the world of arts: a day-to-day marked by artistic labor and the works of his father, José Mário Barata, a self-taught painter. “Our conversations about art made me increasingly interested in artistic processes, most of all in the creative process,” says Danillo. 

While attending the university, the artist worked as an assistant stage designer and was a member of the stage design department at the Castro Alves Theater, in the city of Salvador, for two years, where he was responsible for stage designs such as that of the play Lábaro estrelado, directed by José Possi Neto. The research that he would develop at the school of fine arts was incorporated into the scenic processes. 

In his second year in college, the marking contact with photography caused what the artist defines as a “fascination with image.” Driven by it, he wrote his first screenplay and directed a short film, Barbearia ideal (1998). 

From the theater in Salvador, the artist moved on to the Board of Directors for Image and Sound of the Cultural Foundation of the State of Bahia, where he developed a series of video works and devised the project Videoclipes de apoio aos novos talentos da música baiana [Music videos for supporting new talents in Bahian music]. Music videos Cidade de São Camaleão (for O Cumbuca), Garotas boas vão pro céu, garotas más vão pra qualquer lugar (for Rebeca Matta), and Alucinação (for the Dois Sapos e Meio band), which he directed, worked as an important introduction to the marriage of sound and image. 

On the sidelines of his intense audiovisual production, the creator reflected on his creative process in a study group that brought him closer to other students in the School of Fine Arts at the UFBA who were interested in investigating visual poetics. 

In 2000, he was invited to participate in the Terrenos collective exhibition, alongside brand-new generation artists from Bahia: Zuarte, Marepe, Zau Pimentel, Ayrson Heráclito, Marco Aurélio, Gaio, Iêda Oliveira, and Eneida Sanches. He showed his video installation O inferno de Narciso, conceived based on the “narcissistic relation with the consumption society and the need for mirroring” and based on the Greek myth described in the Metamorphoses, by Ovid. 

Featuring the artist, the project made Barata interested in exploring his own body as a source of reflection and raw material for later work. “I experienced a strong relation with my body as I posed, and then I mixed all of it with a tradition of self-portrait,” he explains. 

Another determining factor to that decision was the production of his second short film, Capitália (2002). Inspired by another classic, the Divine Comedyby Dante Alighieri, the film flies over the nightlife in downtown Salvador and captures its characters in the light of the capital sins. 

In the following year, he went on to explore the language of installation in O corpo como inscrição de acontecimentos, in which he relates faces and torsos with words/concepts such as “vigor” and “youth.” Next came the Barruecovideo, made together with Ayrson Heráclito in 2004, featuring symbolic elements of manhood and blackness. 

In 2007, he used his own image once again in the Soco na imagem video, in which he boxes with the camera—and, consequently, with the viewer and the screen—as if it were an opponent or a mirror. Shown in a loop at the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil, the work drew attention to the author’s oeuvre. 

It earned him an artistic residency that he undertook in 2008 at the Werkplaats voor Beeldende Kunsten Vrije Academie, in The Hague. Thus was born the Panorama 360º series, which he should develop further in a new trip to the Netherlands in 2009. 

In this first batch of videos, the author carries out a sort of “explicit decoupage” of footage recorded in Bahia; what changes with each new episode is the angles, the speed, the editing, the characters, and the sound, in distinct takes on the same facts. 

In the second phase of the series, Barata works with historians João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, and Marcus J. M. de Carvalho to portray the life of an African slave who bought up his freedom in Brazil, studied Arabic in Sierra Leone, and was arrested for alleged conspiracy. 

“I started a complex work, 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.” 

The general secretary at the new board of directors of the National Association of Visual Arts Researchers (2009/2010 tenure), the artist is also the regional representative of the association in the state of Bahia—in addition to being a researcher with the Grupo de Ensino, Pesquisa e Extensão em Arte e Patrimônio [group for teaching, research, and extension work on art and heritage].