Curatorial Statement
"This program is a selection of experimental video and cinema productions from Brazil, in a compilation of works that’s stands out in the artistic context of the early 21st century. The option, chosen carefully so as not to make early approaches or associations, was that of distinguishing the selection of what represents the contemporary Brazilian production of experimental video in a single program. More precisely and very specifically, this selection shows a partial clipping with six videos produced in the last seven years.
The audiovisual culture of the people living in Brazil is diverse and the borders are broadened by historical and geographic differences, making this program rather heterogeneous. There is no predominant trend and choices have not been made to favor a uniform arrangement of styles. Several characteristics, comprehensive ways of seeing and interpreting, artists of different esthetic forms and narrative ways prevail. Even though this is a partial overview, some questions and findings are gathered in order to define the characteristics and outline approaches in this arrangement. Hence, characteristics like those of the theatrical performances, the emphasis on technology, the subjectivities, the interest in the observation of reality and the artist collectives can be measured and they work as a basis to understand a little some aspects of these works.
By watching the first generation of videomakers, one can easily see that the most basic device of the first Brazilian videos consisted almost exclusively of the confrontation between the camera and the artist by recording a gesture or any theatrical exercise. It is precisely this notion of a continuous time through the video that does not stop and wants to recover the present instant of the image discourse construction, observed in the production of the video artists in Brazil in their pioneering stage. Those are the same esthetic elements that can be found when that production is compared with a series of videos of the contemporary generation, in which the same direct relationship between the camera and the artist is revisited.
The digital technology set off a large-scale proliferation of manners to produce and consume moving images. More than an “image culture”, today we live in a cultural hybrid environment where the languages are mixed, contaminated, recycled. Appropriation, reprocessing, recombination are the words now in this multifaceted territory of the language with no clear-cut boundaries.
In the Brazilian selection for Over view, it is possible to distinguish some artists who, in their works, have as marked characteristics the issue of the digital technology and its direct and indirect effects in their creation processes. The real dimension is opposed to the poetic dimension in the process of developing the narration, questioning the common sense about what is characterized as the language in the documentary, in the most orthodox sense of this genre.
Collaborative processes, collective authorship, and hybrid creative experiences are some trends emerging in the Brazilian audiovisual context and are a factor that characterizes the mixing of languages and formats of those works as well. The proposal shifts from the experience with moving image and the search for an intrinsic and individual auteur poetics to a constant transformation of ideas triggered by the change and interchange of interpretation modes and creative collective practices.
Graduated from fine arts, communication, and design schools and working in the digital culture field, a new generation of filmmakers emerges and their works recreate their great skills to work with different media and languages. The proposals have grown into their highest diversity and the consequence is that the collection of projects and works, shown in the latest context of the Brazilian videomaking, is multifaceted. The use of the moving image reveals varied solutions ranging from models that resemble the pioneering video-art projects to the use of more sophisticated technological programs and tools."
- Julia Borges Araña
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