Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Danillo Barata: the technological boundaries of the body-image

It is no overstatement to claim that technological innovations are no longer predominantly found in the laboratories. They are increasingly becoming a part of everyday life and are present in the bodies of thousands of people who follow the trends of biotechnology in these times of cyberculture. Among the many charms and perplexities of modern living, resulting from the progressive dissolution of the multiple technological boundaries that involve the body and the images of the body, Danillo Barata is an artist of the connectivities of biological and artificial systems, of sensoriality, and of other modes of subjectivation in the face of the close-knit creative and technical interfaces between the body, the mind, and the digital world. He is an artist who promotes fertile dialogues amidst the unusual, fascinating contemporary crossroads that recreate new corporal imageries. The perception of body-image by the artist takes place in a paradoxical manner, because the body is at once the subject and the object of his representations. And it is nothing further than that; after all, the body does not exist outside of the representations that we make of it. Such perception expresses the uninterrupted aesthetics of the metamorphic construction and deconstruction of sideralized corporalities. This analysis may be observed in the video installations and videos selected for this Essay.

VIDEO INSTALLATIONS

Passarela

To the Western man, the body has become the place of his identity and his way of being. Our time surrenders to the various cults that celebrate and praise corporality. From sports to the widespread use of silicone implants and plastic surgery, many techniques and therapies aim to overvalue and showboat the body in the streets, beaches, clubs, magazine pages, television shows, advertising films, various images on the Internet, in the catwalks, in the art galleries.

With each new instant we are invited to manage our own appearance, to overcome and redesign physical shapes. It has become a must to have a chameleonic body, constantly subject to change. The promotional images of the mutant body, everywhere, evoke the many ways through which this object can undergo manipulation and agencing, in the name of an ever-distant, and perhaps precisely for that reason, increasingly desired perfection.

This fashionista universe of seductive appearances exalts an aesthetic of fleeting bodies converted into models to be pursued. But not all is fascinating when one is faced with the real possibility of building and modifying appearance, and acquiring the body that one plans and aims to. The obsession with perfection is also fed by a continual dissatisfaction with its results, which are provisionally obtained and as of then overcome. Maybe this dissatisfaction reveals another aesthetic, one of obsoleteness, of bodies that never manage to be sufficiently updated, and thus are always on the margin of classic catwalks. These are interdicted bodies.

In Passarela, Danillo Barata denounces this emptiness. The artist used six gurneys, on top of which are several television sets showing footage of fashion shows, in which supposedly perfect bodies occupy the catwalks and impose themselves on people. Oddly enough, in these very videos, other catwalks, far removed from any glamour, expose the evidence of a daily routine in which several bodies parade their interdictions, mutilations, and various imperfections. These depreciated anatomies, these marginalized, hidden bodies translate other facets of corporality.

To the artist, the gurneys represent a place for adjustment, where people mutilate themselves and undergo transformation processes so as to cater to the demands of the first images, those of dominant corporal representations. A hospital, an operating room, an infirmary. These places are emblems of the discomforts experienced by those who chase an ideal type, but must live with their bodies in need of new interventions and updating.

With his work, Danillo Barata says that corporal models coexist with their countermodels. It is a thin line between authorized definitions and representations of the body, and those considered scandalous. Maybe they all occupy one single catwalk where we parade our bodies marked by interdictions and incompleteness.

O corpo como inscrição de acontecimentos

Everywhere, the discourses and techniques for liberating the body from old religious, philosophical, geographic, temporal, moral, pedagogical ties proliferate. In the last decades, by means of the genome project, science has attempted to free each person’s body from its cultural and genetic heritage. It has become a pressing need to eliminate each and every physical and mental dissatisfaction, put an end to a real or assumed imperfection, correct each detail, build up the shape considered most adequate, prevent any embryonic possibility of disease, alter features that displease us, retain the vigor of youth, boast the healthiest appearance, celebrate the beauty conquered with the aid of technological and scientific progress: diets, therapies, cosmetics, surgery, prosthetics, genetic manipulation. Amidst so many remodeling resources, the ugly, out of shape, flaccid, wrinkled, and aged are only those who want to be so, those who do not love themselves, do not care for themselves, or do not show off. The cult of the body has become a lifestyle. The fascinating promise of an additional gain in health, youth, and beauty has conquered a never-before-seen space in scientific and artistic circles, in the media, in every sphere of our everyday lives.

This unfinished body, regarded as an object that is always ready to be reformed, needs to boost its levels of performance. In order to beat the growing dangers of turning obsolete, the body needs to be constantly boosted so as to keep up with the sophistication of machines, and cater to the new demands for pleasure and freedom that are typical of modern days.

But the obsession for the body considered to be perfect, the slender, smooth shape, inevitably coexists more and more with the leftovers deemed inadequate and depreciated. Our time values the slender, but the population is growing more and more obese. It celebrates youth, however our bodies are increasingly flaccid and wrinkled, often precociously. It praises health, but the ghosts of disease surround us. The hectic life and constant stress of the big cities seem to always deplete people’s vigor.

The installation entitled O corpo como inscrição de acontecimentos reveals that paradox. While many wish to eliminate the marks of time and experience, the artist tells us that events are inscribed on the body. The imbalanced dieting is there in accumulated fat, the strength of the years is there in the flaccidness of flesh, the experiences are there in the persistent wrinkles that torment us so. The background sound is one of things being dragged around, bodies being fixed up. The images display fat and skinny bodies, young and not so young, in gestures that translate efforts to breathe and maintain good shape. Initially shown facing the camera, the bodies soon move and turn their backs on us. With their heads down, each model is turned to itself. To the artist, we might even disguise the inscriptions of events on the surface of our skin. However, behind that which is apparent, inside of us, there lie all of the marks, lost suffering and joys, imperfections and incompletion that translate what we are.

Corpos interditados

Beauty, vigor, youth. These vectors provide the foundation for the elaboration of the discourses and models of the body that is considered perfect. In order to attain the standards of perfection, the vital body is increasingly fed stimulant techniques that are capable of building up and enhancing features regarded as graceful, the resistance, and the always young and healthy look. In many ways, there is a need to accelerate the body, derive more motion and pleasure from it. The body needs to be tested, maximum performance must be pursued, obstacles overcome, boundaries crossed, records broken.

The logic of technical excitation postulates that the equipped, ceaselessly reconfigured body has become the valid, efficient model. On the other hand, the notion of handicap has changed. The bearers of anomalies, visible physical shortcomings, the skinny, the skinless, and the morbidly obese are no longer the only ones considered to be grossly obscene. The escalade of obscenity includes all of those whose body is not sufficiently equipped, sculpted, and preserved by prosthetics and other technologies for protecting and promoting new reflexes, and physical and mental stimuli.

In other words, whatever body is believed to be “normal,” pointed out as beautiful, strong, and young, however removed from this obsession with fast-paced change, bearing no ties to the perpetual stimulation, is labeled as obsolete, passé, ugly, old, handicapped, and, therefore, culturally depreciated. Without changing the bodily architecture on a daily basis, be it by adding superficial prosthetics or by the intraorganic intrusion of said prosthetics within our organs, we are no longer able to readjust our awareness of the world. We are no longer able to glorify ourselves.

Equipping the body, building efficiency. This is our paradox. Perfection seems right around the corner, conquerable. But let no one be fooled. The more the body is surgically processed, equipped with prosthetics and products that aim to repeatedly elaborate new designs, the farther it remains from the ideal of perfection. People become more dissatisfied, they suffer. With each passing moment the elaborated shapes are left behind, models become aged and are cast aside. This means that somehow all of us, who obsessively chase maximum efficiency, regardless of the level of corporal elaboration, have become physically impaired, handicaps, bearers of interdicted bodies, carrying the burden of a progressively depreciated physical structure.

Today’s latest-generation equipment becomes the technical oddity early tomorrow. By the same token, the physical shape conquered through effort, work, and heavy financial and emotional investment is immediately defeated and abandoned. At every moment, it is imperative to set out for new conquests. This urgency leads one to believe that, in fact, there is not a model of perfection, but rather an illusion of perfection. The beautiful, strong, and young, efficient and appreciated body is not the one that acquired certain shapes and adapted to certain standards. The beautiful, strong, and young, efficient and appreciated body is the one that does not cease to be updated, no matter what provisional shape it acquires, and immediately intends to rid itself of.

In Corpos interditados, such is the condition and destiny of the body on display. Several screens show images of several bodies, men’s and women’s, young and not so young, black, dark skinned, white. The technique for showing the bodies is anthropometrics, “side, front, back,” routinely used by the police. Each subject, with its lightness and grace, moves while chasing these angles. Apparently, the images projected on the screen have nothing grotesque, no physical shape bears any abnormality. The bodies shown by the artist can all be considered “normal,” of the type regularly supplied everywhere by the human market. In fact, however, it is precisely this supposed “normality” that contains the perversion, odd, the ugly, the despicable, that which must not be appreciated and adored. These bodies do not visibly represent the dynamics of physical and mental mutability provided by the technologies that revolutionize the architecture of the body in cyberculture. Not all is lost, though, as it is always possible to eliminate some of the shortcomings to build up more valued, appreciated shapes. In this work of art, not by chance, as the bodies display their anatomical obsoleteness, one can hear the sound of flesh and bone being chopped, manipulated, grafted, glued together, and sewn. This is the music that is supposedly able to mobilize and lure people into the cult of the cyberbody, which rocks the silicone gel-, prosthetics-, liposuction-filled bodies, and has them dancing.

VIDEOS

Soco na imagem

In a way, for a long time, the idealization of corporal beauty matched the representation of the motionless body, in sculpture, painting, and even in photography. The idea was that the aesthetic apprehension of the body at rest was more intense than when in motion. However, studies on the motion of a walking or running body are surprising, as they reveal it in the succession of images. With these studies, more than ever, the eye must be trained in order to notice the details of the limbs, the torso, the face, in the same instant as they are displaced. Fragmentation is the scene. It is the body itself. The aesthetic perception of the moving body entails a gaze that is able to join the image in its rhythm, in which the ambiguousness of displacements comprises the representations themselves.

In Soco na imagem it is Danillo Barata’s own body that fights, punches, and caresses his image in the mirror. Now, the body is the image itself, reflected on the surface of a mirror or a screen, wrapped in digital imagery. It is the motion manipulated by the camera that makes it slower or faster, brighter or shady, visible or invisible, self-affecting and self-portraying. The image is no longer a mere copy of the object that is said to be real. It expresses the rupture and the simultaneous appropriation of the body that only exists as image. Not by chance, the technique used is the loop, which allows the artist to get out of the front of the camera and then return, in an endless confrontation.

This dialogue with the camera and against it is, in fact, a struggle with oneself, and often a struggle against the tyranny of the mirror, which punches the person with their own incomplete body, out of sync with the physical shapes celebrated by the media and updated in the model images that surround us. It is as if the person, by punching the image and by punching themselves, were able to see and become aware of their weaknesses and angst, which go in and out of scene, making themselves present and absent in the reflective surfaces of the body-image.

Soco na imagem may also be viewed as an allegory of the discomfort caused by the intense flow of images to which we are submitted on a daily basis. This is why the performer keeps up his guard and throws punches ceaselessly at his own image, but maybe also at the viewer watching him. The same tension between body and image, rest and motion, the appreciated or depreciated physical model, is present between the viewer, the artist, and the work.

Capitália

Inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine comedy and by the capital sins dealt with by the Italian writer, the video focuses on the nightlife of downtown Salvador and its multiple, haunted characters. It may be seen as a depiction of an abandoned city, marked by its own ruin and that of its inhabitants. If all is engulfed in the deep darkness of night, it is only to highlight the nightmarish state in which the tensioned, complex urban life takes by storm the passing bodies that wander around. On one side, cars pass through on the avenues to seemingly uncertain destinations and disappear in the distant curves, in the pitch black night. On the other side, the characters, with their nightly sins and virtues, stumble like those sleepwalking aimlessly on the hole-filled sidewalks in dilacerated places with their chaotic urbanization and devastated nature. This imponderable needs to be taken into consideration: the inscription of objects, people, and places into the flow of the urban dynamic. Because it is there, in the experience of the abyss, that each must find their own sense of belonging in these territories de/configured by precarious transportation and communication systems.

To the artist, it is amidst the disorder of the big city, surrounded by threats and fleeting pleasures, that boundaries are suspended or crossed. Old social, political, economic, cultural, and educational boundaries lose their meaning in these disaggregation-ridden locations. Old bridges, ruined warehouses, junkyards, dirty, stinky staircases on which people roll by in all their misery, comprise the Capitálialandscape. Vices and virtues are condemned by the hurrying and the crumbling down of sensations. In between the sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that torments and kills, promises of hope and freedom fade away, and are also renewed. It is in this endless spinning of places and bodies abandoned by the sides of the roads, overpasses, and sidewalks that the Capitália recreates the plots of life in permanent displacements and mutations.

* * *

Danillo Barata’s production, both the installations and the videos—which complement each other—are permeated by the vertigo of the destructuring bodies-images of contemporary times. His approaches are multiple, disquieting, and fertile. Inscribed in this complexity is the poetics of the artist, avid and critical of this magical world generated and fed by optical illusions, which questions and invests in the subjectivities progressively characterized by the dissolving and renewal of boundaries between organic and inorganic, between body and images.

In the context of electronic networks, the basis for artistic creation is metamorphosis; the synesthetic appeals of the body are redone through multiple connections between meanings and possibilities. In cyberculture, our cognitive processes increasingly develop in partnership with electronic and digital systems. The technologized body inserts itself into new digital boundaries, continually dissolved and renewed. In these interfaces, Danillo Barata finds the poetic foundations for his work.

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.

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].