We began by holding screenings at a few art galleries, media art centers
and museums in Brazil; after the first event, we thought it would be important
to have international videos to establish a dialogue with our own national
production. Our situation
here in Rio de Janeiro was uncomfortable, and we were not happy with the discourse
of nativism that was emerging from some quarters of the national art and cinema
community. International
collaborators, like Microcinema (USA) and Video Art Channel (Japan), sent us a
lot of material.
We encouraged videos that were political, polemical and experimental in
format; and decided from the start not to exhibit traditional narratives,
except for a few rare exceptions. The DVD laisle speciale
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’> came out
of an exhibition of ours; it represents a part of the program, and a synthesis
of what our screenings have meant to us.
On the DVD, the Turkish artist Genco Gulan has a piece called Tele-Rugby
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’>, which is
about a dispute between two female teams who push a T.V. inside a swimming pool from one side to the
other. The presence and activities
of the girls suggests the media’s deceptive glamour, and the war it constantly
wages to communicate. In a rather different vein, New York based video artist
Matthew Gebhart has a strange and claustrophobic piece called Totem
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’>, which
evokes the schizophrenic relationship of new and ancient societies, a zone
where the raw and the cooked get mixed up. Pascal Lievre’s work Lacan Dalida
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’> is a
strange and improbable encounter between pop music and the texts of Jacques
Lacan, in which two shadows sing a text that speaks to the impossibility of a
real encounter. Another of Pascal’s videos, Axis of Evil
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’>, is again
an improbable encounter: the couple, in love at Niagara Falls, mimic and sing
the words to Bush’s "Axis of Evil" discourse as if it were a poppy
love song. Erika Fraenkel’s work Taxi
Aereo, is a video where a girl in bikini recites a long text which splices
together a discussion of globalization, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico
Philosophicus, and much else. By the same artist, F�rias
For�adas, which means, "forced vacations," is a video about
kidnapping, domestic violence, terrorism, and life imitating the TV news: it’s
based on the true story of a businessman who was videotaped being spanked by
his kidnappers, but was released after his captors realized that he owed more
money than he could pay.
Many of the videos we feature are both politically engaged and
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’> poetically
experimental, concerned with interrogating the place of video as an art form.
Katsuyuki Hattori’s Study on Media “education before education”
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’>
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’>and
Masayuki Kawai’s
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’>A not=A
or For Devatas Who Keep on Dancing would, for me, fall into this
category. Kazumi Kanemaki’s President
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’>is about a
girl who tapes herself in her flat and studies night and day with the aim of
becoming president.
This dvd project is a non
commercial enterprise; soon, we will be showing it in Istanbul and Napoli, and
look forward to other venues; and we look forward to receiving more work from
video artists. Organizing such chaotic production into a coherent
discourse is something that we have been very much trying to avoid.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> It’s difficult to make a history of the
present, but we do feel very grateful to be contributing in many ways to this
work in progress.
Carlos Sansolo can be contacted at
href="mailto:csaslo@hotmail.com">csansolo@hotmail.com
name="_Hlt56944646"> |
