Shade Essay by Alberto McKelligan Hernández

Catalog Essay by Alberto McKelligan Hernández:

“Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.”
- Jonathan Swift

Discussing his artistic production, Roberto Bellini identifies two distinct strategies or methods he uses when dealing with video. In the first of these categories, he focuses on the formal aspects of his medium, creating pieces that explore the boundaries of his materials. In Out-lines, for instance, he employed projectors to depict a moving, breathing, human silhouette across the gallery floor, transforming the ominous human outlines one associates with police investigations into a multimedia art installation. In his second line of research, he uses video to document particular processes and activities. In Landscape Theory, for instance, he videotaped flocks of birds flying around Austin’s Highland Mall, despite the obsessively persistent criticisms of a security person working in the area.

Interval, included in this show, more closely follows the explorations of Landscape Theory than those of Out-lines. The piece deals with an everyday activity, familiar to most, if not all: drinking a cup of coffee. Visiting a variety of locales in his home country, Brazil, the artist focuses his camera on his hands and an ever-changing array of coffee cups. The resulting videotaped record thus explores repetition and variation, as a transparent glass filled with coffee gives way to a more traditional mug stained with its liquid contents, a seemingly never-ending array of containers.

Viewing his finished piece – noticing the ambient sounds of multiple coffee shops and kitchens – one can easily imagine the artist drinking his coffee as he observed those around him. In fact, one can almost visualize any number of clichéd scenarios: a silent young couple on an awkward first date, a bustling group of businesspeople shuffling papers back and forth, two old friends grinning as they complete each other’s sentences. As with any art work that deliberately highlights process, Interval prompts viewers to reflect on familiar activities in new ways, inspiring the very act of contemplation the artist himself experienced through his creation process.

Interestingly, even though the camera exclusively focuses on the artist himself, audience members may catch fleeting glimpses of other coffee drinkers. When describing Interval, Bellini considers the multiple social meanings a single activity can acquire over time. When discussing his home country, for instance, he states, “you cannot visit someone’s home without being offered a cup of coffee.” Additionally, he contrasts the act of drinking a simple cup of coffee in Brazil with the ultra-stylized experience of ordering a flavored beverage in the ever-expanding coffee branches of the United States. But by showing us those glimpses of different people, Bellini underscores how the shifting meanings of a single activity not only depend on place – whether it is Brazil or the United States – but on the individuals that witness it, their intentions and expectations.

Interval inspires a particular kind of contemplation then, one that very much relates to the connections one makes through sharing particular experiences with others. Rather than prompting an internal psychic examination, audience members will reflect on the ways in which they establish links with those around them, sometimes through observation, at other times through conversation. By using himself as a subject in Interval but only presenting himself in a limited manner, Bellini comments on the tenuous qualities of these connections. Confronted with Interval, audience members will find themselves working through any number of reflections, a pondering exercise that will continue when they go out and get a cup of coffee. It is no surprise that Swift included “philosophical” in his musings on coffee.

Original Link: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~crlab/2005_08_shade/bellini.html

Fluent Collab Interview | issue # 57

Interview II: Roberto Bellini

Roberto Bellini is an MFA student working in the Transmedia group at the University of Texas at Austin Department of Art and Art History. His video Landscape Theory (2005) begins with the dialogue below. You can watch the video in its entirety on Bellini’s website www.rbellini.org (look under video work, it’s third on the list). We talked to Bellini about what it was like making this work and how it has been received by audiences in the United States, Eurpoe and Bellini’s native Brazil.

Can I ask what you’re doin’?
Videotaping the birds…
You know there’s a…
…they come here on the sunset. I just wanted to get…
People are kinda, …kinda edgy about gettin’ their picture taken.
I’m sure the birds won’t mind, will they?
Huh?
The birds won’t mind.
No, but the people in this computer company right here do.
Computer company?
Yeah.
Think if I just…
Do you watch the news or anything or read the paper?
Yeah, I do. I think it’s kinda foolish though.
Well, you know, we only can be wrong one time and you see what happens.
Yeah, I know.

Do you know where I could do this without it being a problem?
Ha. No, I sure don’t.
People are kinda on edge about takin’ pictures.

…might be good: I’m interested in a number of the pieces that you’ve made in the past year, Roberto, but I was hoping to focus on your video Landscape Theory (2005) today. Describe what the conditions were like when you made that piece, if you would.

Roberto Bellini: Well, I was just beginning my work here in the Transmedia program at UT and I was still pretty confused by my new surroundings. I decided that the best way to start was to just go out and shoot some “landscapes.” I remember being amazed by the all these beautiful Texas sunsets! So the first time I put my tripod and camera down to shoot something I was approached by this security guard who then proceeded to try and convince me to stop videotaping. I later used this dialogue as the base for my video, along with the other shots I took during that day and the next.

…mbg: Where have you exhibited this piece and how have people reacted to it?

RB: This piece has been shown at the 15th Video Brasil Festival in São Paulo, the Kunst Film Biennale in Germany, and another Brazilian festival called “Imagem dos Povos” in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais. It’s interesting for me to see how people from different places read this video… they seemed to understand the implications of what was being said-of just how dangerous and limiting that kind of mentality can be. But I am most fulfilled when the audience reads beyond North America’s specific situation and re-assess just how fragile some basic freedoms are.

…mbg: Have you ever starred in one of your video’s before or was this your debut?

RB: I appear in a few of my videos, but it’s usually subtle, like in Interval (2005) where I go around my hometown in Brazil drinking coffee. My hands are always in the frame, but the piece is about everything that’s behind the hands. I usually stay away from turning the camera on myself… it’s just not that interesting.

…mbg: I’ll ask the dreaded question: To what extent do you consider this piece performance and to what extent do you consider it documentary footage?

RB: I don’t consider it performance at all, although I can understand why someone might see it that way. I didn’t set out to provoke the situation, I simply reacted to it. I like to consider this work more along the lines of a poetic documentary, one that is open to a personal perspective.

…mbg: Why do you think the security guard let you keep filming for so long?

RB: Oh, I don’t think he could tell I was already videotaping! It happened really fast.

…mbg: Typically we think of cameras as tools for catching criminals, not as a criminal’s tool. What I really like about this piece is that you “incriminate” yourself with the video content, that is, your tape is evidence of your “criminal act.” At the same time, the audio portion incriminates your interrogator for an even worse “crime.” The irony is beautiful. Do you have thoughts on that?

RB: The idea that I was doing something wrong never crossed my mind. I always thought the whole incident and the video were more about the possibility of contemplation than any sort of crime. This video made me reflect on just how powerful the act of looking really is.

…mbg: There are other ways that I see the video and audio components as working separately. How do you see those components breaking apart and coming together?

RB: I take the audio part of my projects very seriously, to the point that sometimes I start out with an audio track-as was the case with Landscape Theory. Both components have their own logic, but share tangents of meaning and structure.

…mbg: Have you been back to where you shot the video?

RB: No, there’s nothing there except a mall and some car dealerships.

…mbg: What’s next? What are you working on these days?

RB: I just finished a video called Over There where I deal with war movies and fictionalized war images. I wanted to make a video where all this tradition of imagining war would clash and confront itself. Some of this happened in the very literal sense, with soldiers from different movies, from different times engaging in combat with each other, fiction against fiction. At other times I would collage different movies into the same frame, creating improbable and dysfunctional dialogues…. So I’m still looking around for my next project!

Original link: http://www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/archived/issue57.htm

15th Videobrasil Frieze Review

Issue 98 April 2006

15th Videobrasil – SESC, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Given that the 15th ‘Videobrasil’ was housed in São Paulo’s sprawling, Lina Bo Bardi-designed SESC arts complex, and that it featured the work of 200-odd artists, one might have expected it to take up a lot of space. This, though, was not the case. In place of the usual hangars full of humming projectors and haemorrhoidal seating, curator Solange Farkas offered a modest nine-screen exhibition space, an auditorium cum screening-room and (crucially) a video library where visitors could pick any piece from the festival and view it on their own personal monitor. No sonic bleed, no beginning to watch a work when it’s already half-way through (an experience that turns even the most linear of videos into a nightmare of sub-Tarantino splintered narrative), this was an elegant solution to limited space, and one that appropriate to the medium it presented – a sort of iPod biennial.

Visit some large international exhibitions after their vernissage, and you feel a palpable sense of entropy. They seem somehow shabby about the edges, all blown light bulbs and broken AV equipment, as though opening to the public were nothing more than a grudging penance for the fizz of the VIP preview. Cleverly ‘Videobrasil’ avoided this by choosing to present a rolling programme, with fresh works screened every evening, and performances (notably by Coco Fusco, Ingrid Mwangi and Detanico Lain) and symposia staged throughout its three-week run. This may seem like a small detail when rubbed up against the grand stuff of, say, thematic ambition, but it spoke of the festival’s thoroughly democratic intent. Thronging with artists, curators and (hey!) casual visitors, every night at SESC was opening night.

While ‘Videobrasil’s structure was inspired, the quality of the works on show was wildly variable, with nearly equal quantities of diamonds and dross. In a sense the open submissions policy of the festival’s principal strand, ‘Southern Panoramas’, which focused on the work of emerging artists from the southern hemisphere, made this inevitable and led to a programme that made up in anthropological interest for what it lacked in internal coherence. (Fast-forwarding through the hundreds of submitted works, the most common tropes seemed to be a Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster-type emotional geography, screensaver aesthetics and the fetishization of race.)

The festival, then, may have been an electronic jungle, but navigational tools were available in the form of its sociable buzz of recommendation and rumour. With a few nods and winks from other visitors one could create one’s own show-within-a-show in the video library, full of fantastic works such as Federico Lamas’ Roger (2004). Here a single travelling shot follows a couple who storm off in different directions following an argument, their dog running helplessly between them like an avatar of lost loyalty. It could be a scene from a Wes Anderson movie, if Anderson could be relied on to strike the perfect balance between whimsy, humour and heartbreak. Equally romantic, but in a very different way, was Cao Guimariles’ Concerto para Clorofila (Concerto for Chlorophyll, 2004), a film in which we see a rainforest through various colour filters, as though its trees have evolved some souped-up new system of photosynthesis with which they’ll make themselves even more absurdly beautiful, the better to draw our attention to our own brutal ecological vandalism. The politics of landscape also came into play in Roberto Bellini’s Landscape Theory (2005), in which the artist films the fields and skies of the American Midwest. As his lens hovers over the pink clouds, we hear an off-screen voice command him to put down his camera, fearful that he’s a terrorist on a recce gathering footage of the nearby dam. Perhaps such attitudes are what rendered Nesrine Khodr speechless in her excellent Several Inadequate Things to Say and Do (2004), a collaboration with Jeremiah Day in which the artists attempt to teach a class on the history of Israel. Day is loquacious, but when he begins to question the Lebanese Khodr (‘do you want to talk about Palestine [...] do you want to talk about Arab youth?’) she keeps schtum. Sometimes silence, a refusal to turn one’s life into one of a number of competing narratives, is the only form of political resistance there is.

Perhaps the strongest work in ‘Videobrasil’, though, and the one most emblematic of its sometimes brilliant, always unpredictable openness, was Axel Weisz, Laura Taffarel and Thiago Villas’ Operaçáo Cavalo de Tróia (Operation Trojan Horse, 2004), a documentary about kids from Brazil’s favelas attempting to crash a large scale rave. Turned back again and again by an army of bouncers, they eventually inveigle their way in. Asked by the filmmakers why he hasn’t thrown them out, the head bouncer replies simply, ‘Because they are warriors’. The best parties, of course, are open to everyone, whether they’ve bought a ticket or not.

Tom Morton

Original link: http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/15th_videobrasil/