Wagner Morales

Elle (ici non ici)
2’30” | 2010

Brazilian artist and curator who lives and works between Brazil and France. He was an artist in residence at Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing, France) in 2004, Le Pavillon / Palais de Tokyo, in 2005/2006, and at HIAP / Helsinki International Artist Programme, in 2010. He has frequently shown his work in Brazil and has exhibited worldwide. His recent projects include shows in MAM-Bahia, (Salvador, Brazil), Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou and Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard (Paris, France), Cable Factory (Helsinki, Finlande), Galeria Um Zero Três, Paço das Artes (São Paulo), Galeria Anita Schwartz (Rio de Janeiro) and Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil/CCBB (Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo). As a curator, he was in charge of the Video Lounge (28th São Paulo Biennale's video program), Cinema de Corredor (Barco Cultural, São Paulo), Accidents (MNAC / Museun National of Contemporary Art of Bucharest), Film Studies (Benoît Maire films at Blau Projects, Sao Paulo) and many other projects.
He is now pursuing his PhD at the Sorbonne University in Paris/France and since 2013, he runs the art space La Maudite (lamaudite.net).

 
The film evokes the city of Sao Paulo in the form of a declaration of love. Here, a cannibalistic strategy is accomplished in a pendulum camera movement that mirrors the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. In "Ici non ici", the artist produces a double portrait: a woman and a city, and operates a translation of "Deux or trois choses que je sais d'elle" (1967). With this work, Morales keep his re-readings of cinematic genres and languages, which already included a road movie, a war film, science fiction, a horror movie and a porn movie. Perhaps interested in a visually representation of a thought about the balance (or the lack there it) between man and woman, Morales engages, with the camera’s movement, the form of a visual palindrome. The emphasis on mirroring is also reflected in the word that gives title to the work, "ici non ici" the French words uttered by the protagonist of the video.

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