VIDEO-ART
ANA MESQUITA
We are now finally able to assemble the pieces of our Viagem Journey. We are over a hundred people – among authors, guest artists, technicians, colleagues and supporters – aboard this dream to create an artwork encompassing different arts recalling the Story of Mankind.
Various countries, like Portugal, Mozambique, Brazil, Norway and the United States of America have given their contribution to this project.
What led us to link music and poetry to video art? Being certain that an image is worth a thousand words, regardless of culture, language or feelings of the audience.
We were also driven by an outstanding musical score composed by João Gil and arranged by Luís Figueiredo, and connected to the poetry of Mia Couto read by:
*Ana Mesquita
*Carlão
*Diogo Infante
*Fernando Alves
*João Gil
*Manuela Azevedo
*Maria Bethânia
*Natália Luiza
We were driven by the dream of creating an installation. And certain of being able to attract all sorts of audiences and convey the message of Viagem Pelo Esquecimento through different types of media: from both domestic and foreign TVs to public venues (museums, theatres and galleries allowing wider screens, even outdoors), and a PA that lives up to the sound, creating the necessary comfort enabling the audience to profit from this art meeting.
Well aware that I didn’t want to the obvious path of film or documentary, I decided to divide the subjects by various aesthetic viewpoints, guiding the authors with clues, and giving them freedom of expression within the framework of the invisible guideline of the concept of Viagem: to push the audience to reflecting about its footstep on the planet. To awake senses and thoughts. To optimise their spirits, making them dream and – if possible, as João usually says, to “make them rise up to the skies”. It is the paramount intent of art.
Therefore I searched for photographers, filmmakers, and advertisers to create this so-called “weird skeleton” of the video-art installation directed by:
*Ana Mesquita (editing Panavideo Maputo) BEFORE US
*Isabel Nolasco (co-director and editor Maria João Rodrigues and Mariana Katana) – CIDADES
*António Proença de Carvalho – THE PORTRAIT
*Ana Mesquita (edited by Eduardo Ramos) – LOVE
* Henrique Blanc – LIFE
*Ana Mesquita and Vasco Pinhol (in Esqueleto Esquisito) – HIKE
*Pedro Senna Nunes – WOMAN and SLAVES
*Sebastião Albuquerque – WIDE HORIZON and AFTER US.
*Vasco Pinhol – FALCON FLIGHT and MIGRANTS.
Dividing the work process by different creative methods, we have given a true abstraction to the sequence of videos illustrating music and words.
While editing we tried to divert images and poems, illustrating the subjects through different types of audiovisual expressions maintaining however its core documental concern. In short, doing what Mia Couto suggests within his deepest thoughts (a poetry filled with images), while simultaneously calling upon our collective memory, remembering what we were as Humankind for women, slaves, ancestors, the planet we live in, migrants, cities, Life and Love.
In this 55´ installation, all three screens compete for the audience attention and invite the spectator to decide which path to follow in a split second. This open set translates the way we have been living over the last decades – in continuous multitasking. We are offered endless choices to learn and enjoy information and entertainment.
While watching Viagem Pelo Esquecimento we may choose to focus upon only one screen. But the truth is that our plastic brain will have fun assembling and dancing with all the various parts. It will be a sort of game on whether it will manage to grasp all three screens or not.
Will then the spectator have to watch it all over again to better understand the video art message? Or the music or the poem, or the voice intonation?
This ambiguity of choices and subsequent emotions they arise is what catches the spectator’s focus for everything happening all around him. And ideally he should let himself be carried by each chord, each new voice, each image of a poem, and each frame of a video.
This relationship intensified by multiple stimuli is in fact the magic and surprise that grabs the spectator until the very end. It is not a film but its goal is to have a similar amplified and kaleidoscopic environment. It is not a documentary but it explores reality and not fiction, and reveals a creative, humanistic and existential viewpoint.