andré parente

André Parente and Pedro Varella
Instalation, 2022

The Ruin as An Embryo
By Guilherme Wisnik

Pieces of timber lie tumbled in right angles or diagonals on the floor, as if they were all that remained of the roof trusses of the Jaqueline Martins Gallery, now collapsed and in fragments, in ruins. André Parente and Pedro Varella`s site specific work on the second floor of the gallery uses these architectural and structural elements to generate sculptural forms, transforming what was a neutral space into the appearance of a ruin, the symbols of soaring heights now grounded on the floor.

There is a formal, constructive logic in the angles, joints, overlaps and ties that form the trusses. The result is a repeated, modular design, where the sequence of elements creates its own visual rhythm, freeing the space from unwanted walls and pillars. Through the intervention of the artists, the fragments on the floor no longer convey the idea of construction, becoming instead independent visual signs. In apparent chaos, the architectural elements are broken down into their separate elements. As if the crystalline order of the transcendent world next to heaven could not sustain itself in the ordinary and telluric world in which we dwell. In other words, all that remains in the diaspora after the fall of the Tower of Babelremains is confusion, noise, incommunicability.

But the fragmentary residues of the timber trusses, made by the artists themselves, can also be seen as as huge and mysterious letters attempting to convey some encrypted message on the scale of our bodies. Architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha was citing the Rio funk musician Deize Tigrona when he says: “For those who do not know how to read, the dot in an i is a letter” ¹ , as he conveyed the idea that everything abstract is founded on something material, something real. When organized in strictly geometrical forms, the trusses rise to form the roof, coming together smoothly to form its peak, while the same sculptural elements, scattered on the floor in different arrangements, can transform the functional into something playful, inclined on tripods which recall playground toys such as a child’s see-saw. In other words, the apparent disorganization of the space can be read as a reorganization of the same formal elements along other principals (codes).

“Here everything looks like it is still under construction but is already in ruins,” sings Caetano Veloso when he speaks of a country that was outside the new world order ². The lyric is a quote from the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss’s book Tristes Trópicos, in which he defines the entropic nature of Brazilian cities – and, in particular, of São Paulo. In dialog with this idea, in “Duas Águas” André Parente and Pedro Varella resonate with the work of poet Paulo Leminski, a self-declared “anarchitect of disengineering” ³. The ruin is an embryo of new construction. And if we can read it, we can also build it.

¹ Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Maquetes de papel. Sao Paulo: COSAC Naify, 2007, p. 18.
² Caetano Veloso, “Fora da ordem (Out of Order)”, Circuladô, 1991.
³ Paulo Leminski, “Ler uma cidade: o alfabeto das ruínas” (Reading a City: the Alphabet of Ruins), in Ensaios e anseios crípticos. Belo Horizonte: Polo Editorial, 1997, p. 176.

Interative installation
2010/2014

The Circuladô is an interactive installation that simulates a giant zoetrope operated by viewers who inside it can regulate the speed and direction of images projected simultaneously on a circular screen. The Circuladô gathers together found footages of characters that live limit-situations: Thelonius Monk (Straight no chase, Charlotte Zwerin,1988) whirls around himself, sometimes on stage, sometimes everywhere, as if he were having a psychotic seizure; each time Oedipus (Edipo Re, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967) arrives at the crossroads, he covers his eyes with his hands, gyrates and continues his journey in the direction in which he stopped spinning, as a way of not choosing the destiny foreseen by the oracle; Corisco (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, Glauber Rocha, 1965) Corisco, before dropping dead, opens his arms and spins); Dervish whirling  (Decasia, Bill Morrison, 2002) is one of the most ancient and vigorous methods of spinning and trance. As in most of my projects, the work can be updated in different versions depending on the conditions of display and projection. In the case of Circuladô, there are three different versions: video, video installation and interactive installation. Here we are showing two different possibilities of interactive installation already realized in 2011 (Museum of Image and Sound, São Paulo) and 2014 (National Foundation of Art, Brasília), whereby the spectator, by way of a crank, can determine the spin velocity of the images projected within it. What interested me from the very beginning was to create a work in which we see the characters whirling around as a result of the way the spectators turn the device’s crank. Summing up, we are talking about blending, in a single work, device and concept, mental loops and physical loops, images of spinning movement and circular devices, and moving images and the spectator’s movement – that is, making this work a bridge that connects pre-cinematographic devices to post-cinematographic devices, having as its content and form the issue of spinning and of the body of the image.

ISMAIL XAVIER:

“André Parente’s installation Circuladô belongs in the constellation of works which emphasises repetition and variation, a structural principle of his plethora of spinning bodies collected from films and brought together based on a standard and formal motion, a visual motif which configures experience as kind of “theme-and-variations” game. In Circuladô, the rotation motif unfolds, from an image projection of spinning bodies on screens, evoking the circular motion of looped images, typical of 19th century devices, a time when the spinning of gears marked the mechanical era of the Industrial Revolution which, in the sphere of public and domestic amusement, were symbolised by numerous devices based on mechanical joints, disk rotations, and windows for intermittent observation, like the zoetrope, the phenakistoscope, the praxinoscope, and other machines which, before the development of cinema, produced different forms of moving image illusion through manual operation. They were called “Philosophical Toys”, for they created such illusion, but at the same time revealed the mechanism that produced it, generating great interest by this combination of entertainment and technological progress that gave rise to a peculiar charm which relied on the complicity with an immediate (and desired) idea of magic, and awareness (in brackets) of the technical-pragmatic mechanism generating the effect. Today, given the new configuration of moving-image technologies, and considering the immense repertoire accumulated over more than a century of experiments with the projection of moving images, the forms of reception in the context of video art, and, more markedly, in art installations, are distinguished by a higher degree of epistemological curiosity, no without a fetishistic side, when compared to the experience provided by the philosophical toys.

Circuladô cites passages from films in which the characters are uniquely immersed in a rotation which introduces different forms of ritual that count as affirmation of the body and gesture in a symbolic sphere. The body rotates in the here and now, but its movement signals an ecstatic state of consciousness (the getting-out-of-oneself) which puts it in contact with another realm whose nature is defined by the specific content of the experience. After all, the images extracted from these films are versions of a Baroque combination of dynamism and obsession, very typical of characters like Saint Francis of Assisi, Oedipus, and Corisco, who impressed us when they were revisited by modern filmmakers – Rossellini, Pasolini, and Glauber – whose creations revolved around the interface between the profane and the sacred, history and myth, commitment with the here and now, and search of transcendence. Here lies an attraction to circular motion which gives rise to ceremonies, an impetus that reaches – in the case of another fragment, the spinning of the Sufi dervish – ad nauseam repetition as a form of prayer leading to a limit experience of trance and unity with the cosmos through a choreography that combines repetition and a sense of elevation. It is something typical of the Sufi ritual – but not exclusive to it – to link the spinning of the human body with the movement of the heavenly bodies, one version among many of the metaphysical postulation of an essential connection between the human body’s rotation, the rotations of the gravitational field, and the nature of the Cosmic Order.

A relentless play of attraction and repulsion thematised in Parente’s installation, marking the articulation between the structure of the device, its visual motif, and the specific content of each scene brought to our attention. This ambivalence unfolds when the rotations’s dynamics is subjected to the modulation controlled by the interactive spectator who, thus, re-experiences the condition of a prestidigitator of the zoetrope or from juggler shows, experiences from the past and present that imply a certain enchantment with tricks of perception in view of this combination of epic progression and repetition, linearity and eternal return, present in our connection with images since the philosophical toys, in a secular and popular record of perception, without a sense of wonder in the pure and harsh sense of religion or modernity studies. Circuladô and its semi-circular screen make us move in-between these two records, now more focused on electronic prestidigitation and our delight with the cinephiles’s repertoire celebrated in it; but given the choice, it never tires to suggest how much the paradigm of rotation resembles other spheres”. (see the complete text on Circuladô catalog) 

SIMONE OSTHOFF: 

“The interactive installation Circuladô [Spiner] (2011) is like a giant zoetrope operated by viewers who inside it can regulate the speed of images projected simultaneously ona circular screen. On each a man spins — Corisco, Oedipus, Sufi dervish, Monk — each spinning in a liminal encounter with destiny, madness, death, and ecstasy. Circuladô further combines new and old media, while suggesting that viewers can harness the powers of incarnation and incantation that speak to the recesses of our psyche. There is a quality of timelessness in these images, of older rites, and oral traditions. These ecstatic experiences are a homage not only to the history of cinema, but also to the body-centered experiences of cannibalism, carnival, and hunger which have been central to the Brazilian Anthropophagic, Neoconcrete, and Cinema Novo movements. In Circuladô, manifestations of the primal, the transitory, and the ephemeral are connected through viewer participation, for instance, to Ferreira Gullar’s “Theory of the não-objeto” [Theory of the non-object], 1959, which was later radicalized by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oititica in the 1960s. Oiticica once embraced the ecstasy of samba dance as a way of turning information into knowledge. Such are some of the circular experiences suggested by Circuladô, a title that further references oral culture by way of Caetano Veloso’s music and poetry, an oeuvre in itself a kind of cinematic spin, as the composer often creates moving images with words, melody and rhythm”. (see the complete text on Circuladô Catalog). 

LUIZ CLAUDIO DA COSTA: 

“In Circuladô some images are documentary, other fictional. Even when we know into which genre they fall, this way of classifying things rapidly loses meaning. The truth about Oedipus, about Antonio das Mortes or the sufi dancer has nothing to do with whether it is fiction or documentary reality. The trance evinced by these characters pushes the perception of objective limits into a deeply-flawed terrain, allowing the meaning of the images to wander around aimlessly without giving them a set point of flight, or the right place for them to become stable. By promoting the trance-like state of the images, Parente contaminates both narrative genres, fiction and documentary. In fact, according to the logic of the classical view of identification based on precise limits, these genres correspond to two different perspectives, one subjective and fictional, and the other objective and documentary.  The logic of contamination, on the contrary, dictates that the trance must lay the ground for a new subjectivity and hence a new model for vision. To see the world as a pattern of references signifies activating the power of a non-mimetic imagination able to build untruthful descriptions of the world. The trance state of these characters, the whirlwind of images, both create an absence of the immediate present and envelop the spectator in virtual images of modern film. Plunged into these absences of the present, his attention perturbed and fractured, the observer-as-subject is transformed. He leaves behind the simple sensory-motor play of interactivity using his body to activate the lever in order to interrupt or substitute the images projected. In this way, as each automatic repetition of the interactive movement takes place, the spectator gradually loses his location, his position and focus. Little by little, his attention becomes unstable, transitory, like that of the characters themselves. The conditions of an untruthful perception have been created. The world is not the external object of an internal vision. There is no room to build a truthful representation. Neither has vision become independent and broken away from the referential reality of the devices, as was the case in the 19th century. Referential reality is present, is now, related to the body of the spectator interacting with the instruments at his disposal, acting like a machine operator. But now, affected by the perturbations of trances and madness, he discovers a world lying between documentary reality and fiction. Between these two generic forms of the image, there is another dynamic and temporal dimension of continuous transformation”. (see the complete text on the catalog)

CREDITS:
Director and Producer: André Parente
Assistant Director: Luisa Fosco
Technical Director: Júlio Parente
Sound Editor: André e Lucas Parente
Architect: Pedro Varela
Graphic Design (for the catalog):
Estúdio Marcia Cabral
Gallery of artist: Jaqueline Martins (São Paulo)

DOWNLOAD THE CATALOG

interactive installation
2010

Figures on the Landscape is an installation where the observer uses an immersive device that simulates binoculars, named Visorama, through which he or she interacts with virtual panoramic environments containing micro-narratives. There are two main narratives series, each of them describes the presence of a reader on the vicinity, shifting between the beautiful, old and round library, and a typical beach from Rio de Janeiro.

EXHIBITIONS:

Figuras na Paisagem, Curadoria de Alberto Saraiva, Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, 2010.

Real no Virutal, MAC, Fortaleza, 2011.

 Infinito Paisaje, Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires, 2011. 

CREDITS:

Concept and Coordination:
André Parente
 
Photography:
Andrea Capella
 
Photography Assistants:
João Paulo Toledo Quintella e Flora Dias
 
Programming and Digital Design:
Claudia Duarte
 
Script:
André Parente e Katia Maciel
 
Production:
Elianne Ivo
 
Production Assitants:
Daniel Fosco, Clarissa San Roman e Júlio Parente
 
Sound Capture:
Valéria Ferro
 
Editing and Sound design: 
Clarissa San Roman e Daniel Fosco
 
Website:
Marlus Araújo
 
Consultants:
Katia Maciel e Júlio Parente
 
Special Thanks:
Antônio Cícero e Fernando Rodrigues

Double-sided fabric flag, embroidered
130 x 190 cm
2017-2023

Bandalha is a flag made of fabric, similar to the Brazilian banner. It denounces the hijacking of the country’s official symbol by taking away its trademark colors and replacing its geometric shapes with the transcript of a conversation between two senators who conspired against the first female president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, elected with more than 54 million votes. “Bandalha” has two versions, one is yellow with the dialogue embroidered in green and the other is black, with the dialogues in yellow. They can be hung on a wall or hoisted in a performance, whilst two performers recite the dialogue. Meanwhile, the instrumental version of the Brazilian national anthem with the scratch sounds of an old vinyl record will be playing on the background.

Silver and gold minted coin
3,3 cm
2016

The coin “1 Irreal” was conceived in May 2016. The author was inspired by a paraphrase from Helio Oiticica: “Of unreality, we live”. The coin is literally an active: it seeks to activate (every coin has a performative character) the complexity of the relationship between arts and politics. The “Irreal” was released in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Fortaleza, Brasília and Curitiba, always during a conversation with two local artists or curators.

Design da moeda: Bruno Senise

Edição e vídeo: Lucas Parente

Stop motion e gif : Raissa Laban

A Bela e a Fera ou
Uma Ferida Grande Demais
Video installation Full HD, 6'
2014

Made in collaboration with the video artist Lucas Parente, The Chronic Wound synthesizes video installation and film essay.
A full size man is projected on a mattress. He sleeps - he appears and disappears as he breathes. At his side we see chaotic images of slums and demonstrations on a TV.

EXHIBITIONS:

Do Valongo a Favela, Curadoria de Clarissa Diniz. MAR, Rio de Janeiro.

CREDITS:

Atuação: Negro Leo 
Vozes: Francine Jallageas e Lucas Parente
Câmera e produção: Helô Duran 
Iluminação: Cláudio Tammela
Figurino e arte: Bruna Lobo
Programação de vídeo: Júlio Parente
Trat. imagem: Rafael Antônio Todeschini
Produção: André Parente

Movie 33´, 2019.
André Parente and Camille Varenne

PEBBLES AND DUST¹
by Lucie Garçon²

It is in Fordlândia, a working-class “ghost” town located in northern Brazil, that Camille Varenne and André Parente filmed Pedras e poeira (Pebbles and Dust), a medium-length film in which we visit locations in the city accompanied by an 11-year-old resident, Kaynã Podsíade. We understand this in the middle of the film: Fordlândia was a project by the American industrialist Henry Ford, who hoped to reduce the cost of producing his tires by exploiting the land and labor of the Tapajós River to cultivate rubber and transform it. “It was the age of the Beetles,” says Kaynã: it was, at least, the age of their prototype. Built in 1928, the factory town of Fordlândia operated until 1945, while at the same time the German automobile industry was busy with the future Volkswagen Type 1. Ford’s failure is often attributed to the advent of synthetic rubber, and to his lack of knowledge of rubber tree cultivation and the local climate, which is the reason why his plantations were subject to parasitic invasions. Upon closer examination, it seems that his denialism of the ecosystem and the local culture within which Fordlândia was built was complete. Fed with hamburgers, forced to work during the hottest hours of the day, many workers died there on the job. They, or their peers, left some traces of their desire for emancipation in the factories of Fordlândia, in the form of the charcoal graffiti that Kaynã deciphers in front of the camera: “The truth sets you free.” The city of Fordlândia is now classified as a heritage site of Brazil. Around three thousand people live there. The Suspended Spaces collective organized an artistic residency there in the autumn of 2018, and it was on this occasion that Camille Varenne and André Parente met Kaynã.

Pedras e poeira cannot be reduced to a documentary about Fordlândia seen through the prism of the life that Kaynã leads there today. It does not include any mandatory daily scenes such as getting up, going to bed, sleeping, meals and family life, school, etc. Furthermore, the only adults with whom Kaynã comes in contact in the film are the members of the filming team (reduced to its authors): André Parente, who asks him some sporadic questions (he also appears at times in the image), and Camille Varenne, who is operating the camera (Kaynã mostly looks at him). Pedras e poeira is nothing more than wandering around this city where one encounters almost no one, except Mike and Rick, two friends of Kaynã, embellished with the child’s comments about himself, his relatives or even the hairdresser, the local flora and fauna (stray dogs obviously worry him), public spaces, the urban furniture of Fordlândia, the customs and beliefs of the inhabitants and (but very belatedly…) the history of the industrial city. André Parente and Camille Varenne made a film with Kaynã, not about him. Kaynã decides the paths that they will follow, he chooses the places that should be visited and what should be shown in them, the gestures that should be made, as well as the words that should be pronounced there. It would be difficult to define the subject of the documentary in these circumstances: it is somewhat lost, among the child’s rhetorical skills. In the end, the particularity of Pedras e poeira is not that it deals with such and such a subject, but that it lets the child have his share of the decision-making, in the dialogue and in the staging.

Kaynã is talkative, energetic, with those moments of playful excitement characteristic of children his age. He likes to dance, “walking randomly while listening to music.” From the outset, we assume that we see, through the red fabric of his shorts, the bulky smartphone that he carries in his right pocket. Passing in front of the cybercafé is an opportunity to talk about his internet connection (his grandmother invested in Wi-Fi) and his activity as a YouTuber. At the time of filming, he was posting on his YouTube channel video game sequences or montages of images collected on the web. He was planning to become a cameraman/video artist. “I’ll do everything. I already do everything in my videos, I record, edit, I do everything.” Kaynã created a character that he named Kasumo Pro, he reproduced the city of Fordlândia in an urban planning simulation game... Pedras e poeira later became part of a video installation in which the film is projected against a wall, above a small screen placed on the floor that transmits another video, made in screen capture, where we navigate between Kaynã’s YouTube channel and the Wikipedia page dedicated to Fordlândia. Thanks to this device, a whole play of echoes and counterpoints — all the more interesting since the two films do not have the same duration — can unfold between the child’s videogame universe and his way of being in his real environment, between what he says about the city of Fordlândia and official knowledge on the subject.

Pedras e poeira can also be presented as an autonomous, strictly cinematic work, as evidenced by its current distribution in the creative documentary circuit of the TËNK platform. Kaynã’s videos are not mentioned there, and we do not see the young YouTuber working either. But his very eclectic audiovisual culture is at work in the film before our eyes. Sometimes, Kaynã imitates gestures or postures that he very likely memorized on the internet – the final musical sequence will highlight them: Kaynã does a dab, for example. He has also mastered the floss (the dance invented in 2017 by Russell Horning, the young Instagrammer nicknamed The Backpack Kid). He is also later heard parodying a local radio host in the film, reciting a commercial for a chocolate drink brand. The spontaneity, the simplicity that is generally attributed to childhood are not enough to explain the ease and enthusiasm that this child demonstrates when he speaks in front of the camera. Kaynã was quite confident about his personal knowledge of media during the filming, sometimes demonstrably, sometimes strangely natural-looking. This is the case, for example, when he enters the abandoned factory with his two young friends. André Parente then asks him why Henry Ford wanted to install his factories here. Kaynã turns around, looking first at the ground as if he were supporting himself. He lifts his head before the camera defiantly, as usual, elegantly places his hand on his hip, and then develops an argument about the region’s natural resources while affirming his point of view in a surprisingly laid-back manner. His gaze shifts back and forth between the face of his interlocutor located next to the camera and the back of an old bus parked on the left, at which he stares intermittently, as if he were focused on constructing his presentation. He accompanies everything with well-chosen left hand gestures, to underscore some key points of his reasoning. His friend Mike teases him... but Kaynã remains serious. It is impossible for us to know whether he has just imitated a news correspondent or whether he has just become one on his own account; it is impossible to measure how much (voluntary) acting is there in this short monologue.

The resumption of these traditional modes of media discourse, such as the speeches of broadcasters or television journalists, and the citation of facial expressions and gestures that the new media have made famous are only part of the impact of Kaynã’s visual culture in Pedras e poeira. Through the art that he employs, this art of perceiving the visible, of pointing out elements of his surroundings and making use of them in front of or for the camera — either through physical investment or through the commentary that he adds to them —, Pedras e poeira maintains an invisible but profound relation with the play-video universe of the internet child. In general, Kaynã is more willing to describe the aesthetic and architectural characteristics of the elements that surround him than to explain what constitutes their heritage value. “I don’t know much about these houses,” he says at the beginning of the film (they are built according to the model of American housing projects); but a few seconds later, he points to one that he finds “very interesting,” not for its story, but because it is “a collage of three houses.” Later, he will comment on the winding path of a staircase: “the paths that lead to God are not straight.” The gaze that the child casts on his immediate surroundings is also of a certain pragmatism, in the sense that he speaks good-heartedly, and pertinently, about the utility of urban furniture and infrastructure in Fordlândia. This pragmatism is not short-sighted, nor devoid of poetry, since for the child, things can combine several functions, whether official or not (like those metal handles nailed to the floor, which are used to clean shoes, and which he and his friends use as goalposts for a mini soccer field where they play marbles). This gaze – which is formal and pragmatic rather than historical and cultural – that Kaynã casts over Fordlândia is the same one that he implements when he plays video games and when he captures animated images from the internet. And it is to him that Pedras e poeira owes its construction, its sequences, its singular phraseology.

Kaynã’s sense of observation, his sensitivity to the forms and uses of things and environments, prevail by far over questions related to the history of the place, such that the viewer will come to know about them only at the end of the film – and it is first Mike, a friend of Kaynã who is probably a little older than him, who puts the matter on the table. But make no mistake: the elision of Fordlândia’s industrial history during the first quarter of an hour of Pedras e poeira is not due to Kaynã’s lack of knowledge (since we will have proof, later, that he knows this history very well along with its stakes), nor even to a childlike simplicity – this great adult myth! A detailed feedback on how the history of Fordlândia and the deadly utopia of Henry Ford are finally addressed in the film (around 16 minutes) is enough to convince. Kaynã describes (in pragmatic terms, always) a statue in the city, which happens to represent a rural worker: “he is extracting latex from the rubber tree to make gum.” Once again, André Parente tries to guide the conversation: “Can you explain the history of rubber here?” Kaynã then makes a reflective pout – evoking the pose of Rodin’s Thinker.

His answer, then, concerns the natural history of rubber and not its industrial history (“Latex is a liquid that is transformed into gum when it dries”). “Shut up,” he yells at Mike, who laughs at him out of frame. He continues: “It was used to make a lot of things, but I’m not an expert on that story.” Kaynã hides his game well: if he is not an “expert” (historian), he knows perfectly well the utility of the rubber manufactured in his city. He even knows when it was exploited. Why does he feign ignorance? Maybe he is embarrassed (and his friend Mike might have something to do with that: he repeats the word “latex” with an amused look...). Perhaps he foresees some danger, in addressing the topic of latex, that can concern sexuality as much as American imperialism... they expect him to be sincere. By avoiding certain themes, the boy would respect what he considered to be a (tacit) contract between himself and the filmmakers. There are many in favor of this hypothesis: off-screen, Mike ventures a timid “it [rubber] is used to make tires…,” to which Kaynã reacts with an exaggeratedly authoritarian “Quiet!” that is immediately followed by a look full of malice, and eloquence, directed at André Parente.

¹ Pebbles and Dust, a film by André Parente and Camille Varenne. Images: Camille Varenne. Editing: Lucas Parente and Lucas Sudart. Production: André Parente and Camille Varenne. 2019. Duration: 33 minutos.
² Originally published in June 2021 in Revue Débordement.
³ Dab emerged on the hip-hop and trap music scene in the city of Atlanta, although there is no general consensus on its origin. It consists of lowering the head to one of the elbows while lifting the opposite arm and elbow to where the head is lowered, as if hiding the face with the arm. Dabbing is only a way to express indignation, a response given to critics of one’s success.

Júlio and André Parente
Urban intervention
2015

Waterfall consists of a set of projections in the A Noite building, the largest skyscraper in Latin America until the 1970s, and in an area that covers half a dozen facades on Sacadura Cabral street, close to the Rio de Janeiro Art Museum. We intend to create a poetic impact capable of raising questions, often antagonistic, that involve the history and culture of Rio de Janeiro, and in particular the opposition between nature and architecture, between illusion and reality, between the new and the tradition, between popular thought (for which cascade is a metaphor for lies) and erudite thought (in particular the utopias of modernist urbanism). We cannot fail to remember the phrase of Humberto Mauro, father of modern Brazilian cinema: “cinema is a waterfall”.

DV, Cor, 18' + Video installation
2003 

In Entre Margens (2004), I incorporate, by means of visual and sound landscapes, the intermediate, virtual, and metaphysical condition from Terceira Margem do Rio [The Third Bank of the River] (João Guimarães Rosa). On one end, the shot shows an image of the river. “The river changes continually: day, evening, afternoon, night. The light and the movement of the water show that time passes and does not pass, stops and does not stop, it circulates”
(Maciel 2008). On the other end, the landscape in reverse shot: “the land remains, the land that, in the slow sway of the grass, looks at the river unhurriedly. Halfway through, in-between, the viewer that watches, as he hears a voice whispering the story. The voice floods everything with the word, where everything is continual, all the time. The word is strong. A drawing of the son that keeps the glance of time is made. Waiting for the father that has gone and does not return. Sadness of an absence that remains. The grandson on the lap of the daughter that comes to show the father that sees nothing. The silence of the mother that says nothing. The emptiness of the world on the edge of life: only landscape. Ultimately, the screens touch each other through a pan movement that turns the river into land and the land into river” (Maciel 2008). The film about the river ends at the beginning of the film about the land and vice versa inasmuch as the river and the land are like the two sides of the same film, just like the picture in the Moebius band. As a matter of fact, the topological relation of the shot/reverse shot in many of my works is seen through the Moebius band geometry. We always have one single sequence shot that travels from status A to status B projected so as to face the same shot but with a reverse synchronicity. We can, therefore, say that the shot film is always a permanent series of transformations of the reverse shot and vice versa. What they show, in each case, changes: a man fleeing from himself within a Kafkanian oppression context, where anything is a reason to feel being chased; a father that went to live nowhere, the third bank of the river; and a paradoxical love dialog (“I want to see what you are seeing of me in you”).

interactive installation
2006 

Estereoscopia is an interactive installation based on two pictures of a couple that look at each other in shot/reverse shot. An infinite zoom that wraps the image of two people photographed in shot/reverse shot (chief device of the audiovisual representation) conceptually reproducing a fractal image (the part contains the whole). The work brings forth a number of major conceptual issues: the “loop” in digital art; the fractal image, in which the parts contain the whole; the separation of the image and the sound; the temporality in the photographic images. In this installation, we sought to achieve what we call fractal poetics. The fractal presents itself as an intermediate dimension capable of making us move back and forth the continuous and the discontinuous, order and disorder, the local and the nonlocal, the part and the whole, the shot and the reverse shot. The—intermediate—fractal dimension in an installation is multiplefold. The installation is barely distinguishable as far as the technique is concerned. We do not “know” whether it is photography, cinema, or infographics. On the other hand, with regard to the picture of the characters, we are always in an intermediate dimension, between one and the other. Another paradox is found with regard to the relation between sound and image, since the dialog mentions a mirroring interiority—“I want to see what you are seeing of me in you”—that is belied by the image, which is pure exteriority, like in the Moebius band. The dialog is a free indirect discourse where “me” is another. Vertigo of the digital mantra that multiplies what is heard in what is seen, always the same that continues the other, which is me, which is you. In the garden of the digital dainties, I am you and you are me, sharing an infinite virtual depth.

 

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:

DOIS, Caixa Cultural, curadoria Paula Alzugaray, Brasilia, 2012.
Tecnô n. 5. Curadoria de Alberto Saraiva, Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, 2007.
Cinema em Transito, SESC Nacional
Video Arte Oi Futuro, Belo Horizonte
Video Arte 2013, Curadoria de Alberto Saraiva, Portugal 2013.

André Parente and Kátia Maciel
Site specific installation
2015

Noche es dia, by Katia Maciel and André Parente, La Tertulia Museum (Cali, Colombia, December 2015/April 2016), curated by Alejandro Martin Maldonado

Noche es dia (Night Is Day) by Katia Maciel and André Parente: A Reflection on Living

This exhibition arose from a very particular challenge: the La Tertulia Museum in Cali, where I work as a curator, received last year an old mansion in the city as a new space: the Casa Obeso Mejía. The couple Antonio Obeso and Luz Mejía lived there throughout their entire 73-year marriage, and there they died within a short time of each other. They never had children and for several years they decided that they wanted to donate the house to the city, for cultural activity.

A year earlier, we had met Katia Maciel and André Parente in Cali, both of whom had come to teach a course on cinema and contemporary art in the Documentary Specialization program at the Universidad del Valle. Common interests soon arose: cinema and its current transformations, literature, philosophy, mathematics, poetry. When I saw their works, the subtle use of technology, the understanding of film grammar and video tools, and the programming to write minimal and powerful poems caught my attention. In particular, I was interested in the different ways of thinking about space (the different notions of distance) and how it is transformed by digital technologies.

I had studied mathematics and arrived at art through philosophy. Since I had always been a cinephile, it was not surprising that I soon found myself on common ground with André and Katia. After meeting a few times to talk, it became clear that we would like to do a project together soon.

The occasion came with the Casa Obeso Mejía. It is one of those big houses, the ones that made passersby ask themselves what they could find inside: due to its wide spaces, the luxurious life of its inhabitants. But it was by no means easy to think of an exhibition for such an architecturally, historically, and emotionally charged space. An initial idea was to open the house as it is, with all of its objects. However, it was a risk that the house would remain, for the common public, linked to the history of its owners. Somehow, the museum had to “take care of” the house, turn it around, open it to the public, and at the same time, show what could happen in it, which made the house come to be part of the museum. So the challenge was to think of the house based on the museum.

2. The Idea: An Exhibition about the Couple

A video by André Parente, Estereoscopia (2006), is what gives me the key to the exhibition. It is a work from 2006, and it is the first in which Katia and André both appear as protagonists in one of their works (they will later appear together in many others of which they will be co-authors). The video begins with a close-up of Katia’s face, which is actually a zoom of a photo of her in the Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro, and when enlarged, it does not lead us to see the pores of her skin, but the elements of the digital image, which in this case is not made of pixels, but of multiple faces of André. Continuing the zoom, at the same pace, this time approaching André’s face, will lead us in the same way to Katia’s face, now creating the loop. We are then faced with a particular fractal in which Katia’s face is made of small images of André’s face, which in turn is made of small images of Katia’s face, which in turn…

And meanwhile both of their voices, taking turns, presented us with:

I want to see / What you see of me / Inside you

I want to see / What you see of me / What I see of you / Inside me

I want to see / What you see of me / What I see of you

Of what you see of me / Inside you...

Parente manages to play a double game with cinematic language. On the one hand, he transforms the most classic cut, the shot/reverse shot, into a continuous movement. And at the same time, he turns a looking game, a key to a meeting of two (the starting point of any relationship), into a series of Russian dolls, in which we have one doll inside another, since now each face has a double role as a face that looks, and a look that is a face. And as a contemplated face, what is presented to us now is a state of awareness of the one who looks.

In this video, what for me is one of the fundamental enigmas of the possibility of love and life for two has been condensed: how does this idea that one has of the other relate to the real other? What is the effect on others of the images that we have of them? How is this mismatch between image and reality, instead of being an impediment, what makes the couple real?

Then I thought about the enigma of the Obeso Mejía couple, a question that inhabited the whole house. I wanted to analyze the experience of those of us who entered there and who, based on the spaces, objects, and photos, tried to imagine something of their lives.

I decided that the exhibition would be precisely about the mystery of the couple. About the ways that the idea of ​​marriage is linked to coexistence, to the space of the house. And I was going to contrast these two couples: Obeso and Mejía, Parente and Maciel. I was going to invite this new couple from Rio de Janeiro, who have such a different relationship, who grew up in other times and who had relations in other places, to intervene in the spaces of the couple from Cali.

3. The Question: Inhabiting Spaces

What would come next would be the process of choosing the works and the places in the house where they would be installed. The idea was to make use of most of the spaces: the hallway, the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the bedrooms, the dressing rooms, the bathrooms. Success would consist in choosing the best work for each space, making a back-and-forth work, which involved carefully reviewing the complete work of both artists, searching for which works should be included and where.

All of this happened in a very rich internet relationship, which included hundreds of emails and a very interesting series of Skype conversations. The first thing would be to share the house plan and photos of each of the rooms, which in the cases of the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the dressing rooms were full of beautiful details and decorations. With a “guided tour” from a distance, explaining the nature of each space, and the conditions to be able to undertake this or that intervention. Something really cool that happened, and that was fundamental for creating a relationship, was that each of us gave a guided tour of our own space. Through Skype, I was able to show them my apartment, and each one did the same with his or hers, and thus, through the digital versions of our houses, we “opened up.”

And there I noticed something unique about the Brazilian couple, which is that they lived separately, building a marriage in different homes, with no common space.

Such a situation was the starting point for Infinito Fim (Infinite End – 2008), by Katia Maciel, an interactive video that builds an endless tunnel in front of the doors of each one`s apartment. The viewer is faced with a projected door and, upon approaching, it opens automatically, revealing a hallway with another door also opening, giving way to another hallway. This relation between the series of doors and the possibility of there being or not being a relation between the two of them echoes very strongly and forcefully with the work Estereoscopia. We could say that in each of these works, the two artists presented, from their point of view, their own theory of the couple.

We decided to install, in the living room, a passage room full of doors, which created an almost surreal atmosphere. There, one of the doors was replaced with a whiteboard on which we would project the video door.

And thus, one by one, we decided on the works for each of the spaces. The list, in a Google Docs file, would be modified with the correspondence. Just as there were easy decisions that never changed, there were others in which we kept going around and around until we agreed.

There were indisputable solutions such as using Maciel’s video Colar (Necklace – 2009), in the lady’s dressing room, projected onto an incredible dressing table made entirely of mirrors. In the video, Katia, in front of the mirror, puts on a whole collection of necklaces, one after the other, until covering her face, in a reflection on vanity and adornments, very much at play with a Luz Mejía who seems to be obsessed with mirrors.

In the list we tried to take stock of the works of each individual artist, also making room for collaborative work. In the couple’s bathroom, we projected onto the bathtub (over the water) a key video for the two of them, +2, in which they take turns lying on a pier that leads to the Lagoa da Conceição, joining each other, until losing themselves in the horizon. And in the dining room, which we turned into a kind of auditorium, we projected in a series the different experiments that the two conducted, playing with the couple idea, in the manner of “holiday videos” (a name that we gave to this set of videos), such as those that are generally designed for friends at night, back from a walk.

4. The Result: A Phantasmagoria

Since we did not want the operation to be one of canceling the house by closing all the windows, we decided that the exhibition would be open from 6pm to 9pm. Thus, the lights from the videos would be accompanied by the lights from the sunset until dusk, and viewers would be able to see the works and at the same time see the outside through the windows. The afternoon twilight would create the best environment for the video projections, on walls, doors, and furniture, to be charged with strength.

This exhibition was unique for the artists, since it was not held in the white cube of the museum as in the exhibitions that they had done until then. Going through the exhibition with Katia and André, once it was ready, conveyed a very special emotion, since they had never seen their works displayed in this way. Although their reflections on expanded cinema in various senses had led them to phantasmagoria, never before could the images be seen as phantoms animating a certain place, or rather, a house full of ghosts.

The exhibition was almost a miracle, in the extent to which it was necessary not only to assemble the works, but also to make the space available for exhibitions. On the day that the artists arrived in Cali, the main room, that of the couple, still had no roof. And they witnessed, with incredible patience, the house being rebuilt while the exhibition was being assembled.

Precisely for this space, Katia and André created, in Cali, throughout the assembly, a new video: Marés (Tides – 2015), which would be projected onto the couple’s bed. In it, we would see the two artists sleeping, and in their dream, they would be covered and uncovered by the tide that rises and falls on the beach. That dream space, neither here nor there, which transposed them to the most private place of the Obeso Mejía couple, constituted the maximum possible transgression. The coming and going of the water and tide made the space breathe, and the light projected on the sheets filled all the air. The house was charged.

Noche es dia

La Tertulia Museum - Cali - Colombia - December 2015 / April 2016
Artists: André Parente and Katia Maciel
Curator: Alejandro Martin Maldonado
Installation Program: Julio Parente
Production: Felipe Tirado and Lina Rizo
Photographs: Juan David Velásquez

Performance + interactive installation
2011 

A man encircles a woman's body with a graphite pencil. Then the woman encircles the man's body, and thus the drawing continues until it reaches the end of the wall. The video record of this performative act display the relationship between different forms that cross the history of art - drawing, painting, theatre, film and video.
 

EXHBITIONS:

High e Low Tech. Curadoria Alfons Hug, Oi Futuro, 2012.
+Dois, Banco do Nordeste, Juazeiro do Norte, 2011.
O Real no Virtual, MAC Fortaleza, Fortaleza, 2011.
DOIS, Caixa Cultural, curadoria Paula Alzugaray, Brasilia, 2012.

CREDITS:

Concept: Andre Parente e Katia Maciel
Code: Julio Parente
Photography: João Paulo Quintella

site-specific installation
2011

Belvedere is a huge installation composed of three parts. The first part, a video projected in large dimensions on the wall of the hexagonal hall of the museum (11 m x 4 m), shows the landscape that is seen from the gallery’s veranda, from a point of view situated exactly behind where the projection is happening, producing the illusion that the spectator is seeing through the wall. The video shows the changes in light in the landscape throughout the day from daybreak to nightfall. Every photomechanical image – whether analog or digital – deals with the relationship with the referent. Ironically, what separates this image from its referent is only the wall on which it is projected.

CREDITS:
Camera operator: Izabela Fernandes
Camera Assistants: Daniel Fosco e Clarissa Appelt
Photograher and image editor: Andre Parente

EXHIBITIONS:
Tempo-Matéria, MAC, Curated by Claudio da Costa, Niteroi, 2010

video installation
2015

NAU is a video made for an exhibition from the group Suspended Spaces at Contemporary Museum of Art of Niterói. The video works with this space in suspension in between the MAC museum and the Sugar Loaf, the architecture and the nature, the two most beautiful "monuments" around the bay of Guanabara (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil).

Multi-media installation including drawings, photographs and videos
with Julio Parente
2014 

I take again as a theme the museum itself. In a panel of 12 meters, drawings are arranged one beside the other. These drawings are done in a light table starting from the cliché images of MAC (Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói) contained in the video. The video, in turn, contains a series of 36 images of the MAC and the Sugar Loaf, taken from the internet. Each photograph expresses the MAC's relationship with the Sugar Loaf, two of the greatest monuments, an artificial and one natural, of the Guanabara Bay.

Beside this video visitors find another, a part of the film E LA NAVE VA (1983), by Frederico Fellini. The fourth section of the work is a large table, which is opposite to the panel and that somehow reproduces the table seen in the film. It turns out that, unlike the movie's table, we see a dirty water with waste from the Guanabara Bay.

Site specific photography
2018

In the Reflexo series, the duplicated image is not that of the spectator who looks, but that of the space in which he is inserted. Everything is meticulously created so that the spectator cannot discern in what he sees what is the image fixed by the photograph from the image of the reflection that is produced at the moment he observes the space. This indiscernibility between the image (from the past) and the real specular reflection (from the present that flows) creates a kind of triggering of time in the experience of observing the work: “time passes and does not pass, it percolates” (Michel Serres). The Reflection series triggers an experience similar to that of paramnesia, a phenomenon that became popular under the name of déjà vu. In paramnesia the past becomes contemporary with the present that it was. At the same time that we perceive the present, memory reintroduces, in real time, the image of the present, transforming it into the past. Not by chance, the phenomenon of déjà vu is responsible for making us experience the past as being simultaneous with the present, and, at the same time, giving concreteness to the idea that the past is the ontological element of time (Henri Bergson). For Bergson, if the past were not contemporary with the present that it was, we would have no way of explaining the passage of time. Through photos that reflect the space of the gallery itself from the point of view of the place where the photos are located – photos that are framed with a reflective glass –, we confuse what is printed in the photo with the reflection of the space that is opposite. her, the very moment we see her.

Sound performances with electronic equipment, pastel drawing with zunidores
2012 and 2018

In this sound performace work, I use eight “zunidores” from the native Brazilian Mehinaku population. Each “zunidor” (or matapu) is a small curvy board shaped like a fish, colored in red and back and, sporadically, white or yellow. In one of its extremities, there is a hole from where a string goes through. In order to spin the “zunidores”, their strings have to be held. In the performance, each “zunidor” is spun and recorded. When the spinning stops, the instrument is hanged on the wall, creating a circle or a mandala. The very grave sound of the “zunidor” is used during huntings (to occasionally scare the jaguar away). It can also be used to create a sound that represents the voice of the spirits, the voice of thunder or a virile and fertilizing strength. The “zunidores” are  also part of rainmaking and fertility rituals. 

interactive installation
2011
 

"Urban Railways" is an interactive installation made ith a specific version of Corisco’ software (created by Pedro Parente) which capture the movement of the viewers in the exhibition space in order to move a window to create an anamorphic image fixed as the resulting of the window’s displacement. The installation is both formed by a still image background and a moving image, a window, the first significant level of their artwork and the second level of the visualisation process of movements that leave traces on the first.

EXHIBITIONS:

Perceptum Mutantis, MIS, curadoria de Daniela Bousso, São Paulo, 2011.

DOIS, Caixa Cultural, curadoria Paula Alzugaray, Brasilia, 2012.

O Real no Virtual, MAC Fortaleza, 2011.

CREDITS:

Concept: André Parente e Pedro Parente

Code: Pedro Parente

Images: Andre Parente e Alexandre Veras

Documentário, Super 8 e Mini-DV, 7' 
Canoa Quebrada, Brasil
1978-2014

Between 1977 and 1979, André Parente filmed Dona Raimunda in Canoa Quebrada. Raimunda was the greatest storyteller of the village, to the point that the book Wanda Figueiredo wrote on Canoa Quebrada has more than a half of the stories told by her. In addition to her confabulations, Dona Raimunda was the principal caracter in one of the most amazing stories in that town, becoming a myth of the region. Her house near the church was being covered by dunes. Raimunda spent the day taking sand with a gourd and ended up blinded by the sun's account. And even without seeing, she did not fail to do its job, like a Sisyphus. This story had a number of developments. Besides the book wrote by Wanda Figueiredo, Dona Raimunda inspired the film "House of Sand" by Andrucha Waddington.

Entre 1977 e 1979, André Parente filmou Dona Raimunda em Canoa Quebrada. Dona Raimunda era a maior contadora de histórias do vilarejo, ao ponto que o livro de Wanda Figueiredo sobre Canoa Quebrada tem mais da metade de histórias contadas por ela. Além de suas fabulações, Dona Raimunda protagonizou uma das histórias mais incríveis daquele povoado, se tornando um mito da região. Sua casa, próxima da igreja, estava sendo coberta pelas dunas. Dona Raimunda passava o dia tirando areia com uma cuia e acabou ficando cega por conta do sol. E mesmo sem enxergar, não deixou de fazer seu trabalho, feita um Sísifo. Esta história teve uma série de desdobramentos. Além do livro de Wanda Figueiredo, Dona Raimunda inspirou o filme “Casa de Areia”, de Andrucha Waddington.

Montagem: Lucas Parente

Single-channel video
2013

Installation made of images depicting the hands from Robert Bresson films, an element very characteristic of the French filmmaker's style. In Bresson's films, the possession of the physical and spiritual world is associated with the action of the hands. 

Through the hands we get to know the world, not only the space and the objects that occupy it, but life and death, violence and love giving. The hand shows that man is not stuck to the bottom of the sky or the earth with which it seems to form one body. It is the action of the hands that leads us to know our spiritual determination, and the choice we have done or failed to do that determines the nature of our destiny.

CREDITS:
concept: Andre Parente
editing: Alice Dalgalarrondo

EXHIBITIONS:
Cine Lage, EAV, Curadoria de Andre Parente, Rio de Janeiro, 2014

single channel movie + video installation
1979-2007

The shot/reverse shot technique appears as a central issue in my installations. In Curto-circuito (1979, 35-millimeter film), a man (Joel Barcelos was a film actor and director who worked with great directors such as Glauber Rocha, Júlio Bressane, Ruy Guerra, and Bernardo Bertolucci) is fleeing and no one knows why. Sometimes he does so on foot, other times by car. There is a mood of oppression in the air (we were living under dictatorship). The film does not have a reverse shot and therefore we cannot see whether there is someone chasing him. In an installation-style version, two images are projected in loop (2007, Modern Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro). On one of the screens, the man is seen running away on foot and on the other, by car. There are, however, two passage shots: he comes running and enters the car; he stops the car and runs off. These shots are used to create a double-face loop installation. While the man runs away on foot on the shot screen, he runs away by car on the left screen, and, at a given time, everything is reversed. Then, on the shot screen he is going into the car and, on the reverse shot screen, he is leaving the car. This alternation enables one to bring about a situation in which the man seems to be fleeing from himself, in a sort of circular Cortázar-style work.

EXHIBITIONS:

Situacão Cinema. Curadoria de Fernando Cocchiarale e Franz Manatta, MAM, Rio de Janeiro, 2007.

Filmes de Artista. Curadoria de Fernando Cocchiarale, Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, 2007.

CREDITS:

Script, Edition, Direction: André Parente
Actor: Joel Barcelos
Photography: Flávio Ferreira
Music: Miles Davis
Production: Corcina Ltda

Na arte nada se cria, nada se perde, tudo se transforma
35mm film, Colour, 18'
1980

This is a film telling the history of art and of its movements, from pre-historic art to contemporary art, through objects (gadgets) reproducing images of works of art. These objects comprise the exhibit carried out by Essilia Paraiso, at the Galeria Espaco ABC, Rio de Janeiro, 1982.

CREDITS:

Script Direction: André Parente
Photography: Walter Carvalho
Text: Fernando Cocchiarale
Narration: Arlênio Lívio
Edition: Aida Marques
Production: Ersila Paraíso and Corcina Lta

DV, Color movie, 9’
2004

This is a documentary – with a version in single-channel and another for installation – on religions, cultural and political problems faced by the denizens of Caridade (Ceara), with the construction of a huge statue honoring the city's patron saint, Santo Antonio.

CREDITS:

Direction: André Parente

Photography: Alexandre Veras

Edition: João Alegria

Assistant of Direction and Production: Fred Benevides

Exectuive Production: Rúbia Mércia

Music: Fernando Moura

Production: Katia Maciel e Alexandre Veras
 

EXHIBITIONS:

Situação Cinema, MAM, Curadoria de Fernando Cocchiarale e Franz Manata, Rio de Janeiro, 2007

O real no virtual, MAC, Fortaleza, 2011

Mais Dois, BNB, Cariri, 2012

O Homem do Braço e o Braço do Homem
Letícia Parente e André Parente
Porta-pack 1/2 polegada, 4'
1978

A neon advertisement of a male body from the waist to the top is shown; he stretches and contracts one of the arms in a symbolic gesture of display of strength. (It is an advertisement for a gym). After some minutes in that scene a man with a naked torso, from the waist to the top, comes along moving his arm in the same way. As the gesture is repeated, the man gets tired and cannot keep up with the pace and slows down.

Model/actor: André Parente

 

video
2008

A man and a woman successively lay down until they reach the end of a pier that extends into the sea.

CREDITS:
project in collaboration with Katia Maciel

EXHIBITIONS:
DOIS, Caixa Cultural, curadoria Paula Alzugaray, Brasilia, 2012.

2019
Silver and gold minted coin
3,3 cm

Dimensions (with acrylic frame) 18 (width) x 13 (height) x 1 cm (thickness).

The 1 Bolsominion coin features two faces: Captain Jair Messias Bolsonaro, president of the Republic, and Colonel Carlos Brilhante Ustra, one of the most notorious torturers of the dictatorship and hero of the Bolsonaro family. Over the head of Bolsonaro screaming, with his mouth open and eyes bulging, like a jellyfish, we place a well-known biblical phrase in Latin IPSA CONTERET CAPUT TUUM ("she will cut off the serpent's head"), as is customary on ancient coins and on some authoritarian government currencies. The word snake symbolized communism for the conservative Christian group TFP, Tradition, Family and Property that fought communism within the church and Brazilian politics. The phrase gained, nowadays, new contours. It's as if Eve said: #elenão.

video
2016

The film capture the sound of a containment work at former quarry, and use the material to perform a composition of images and noises. The iris resource used in editing produced an isolation effect between four realities in the containment work. The four series functions as phrases that add up inside a musical composition. Each sentence is added to the previous one, which in turn continues played in loop, becoming background. It forms a structure similar to certain minimalist compositions. From this edition, Fernando and André realized a composition with the stone crusher noise. The junction of the elements engendered a truly serialist work, composed of different parallel modes, where sound and image are one.

Site specific installation
Júlio, André and Leticia Parente
1975-2015

In Tiled floor, we appropriate the Casa Series (1975) made by Letícia Parente – the artist was one of the pioneers in the use of new media used by artists in the 1970s, xerox art, mail art, audiovisual (slideshow), video – to create an installation where Letícia's work is recreated by André and Júlio Parente with the means of our time. It is a site specific audiovisual installation – in which the actual column of the exhibition space becomes one of the key elements of the work – which contains aspects related to the works of the three artists. The main idea is to explore the space – visual, poetic, topological – of a house as if it were the exhibition space itself. The notions of a poetic space and an archeology of everyday life are fundamental here: how to activate, from the images and questions of the house evoked by Letícia's work - the house in which the tiles, walls and floor are made of poetry and dream, the self that is my closet, the rooms that contain me, the self that is a thing between things, the space of the imaginary city that surrounds the house, the land of my country inscribed on my foot, and finally, the house what is the body making itself a house – the sonorous house and the luminous house that is like the prehistory of all of us? Today's house is neither lighter nor darker than yesterday's house, but a relational, topological house, in which the various layers of space and time that cross it gain other luminous and sonorous contours.Three texts extracted from the Xeroxes of the Casa Series (Leticia Parente, 1975) Poem House Xerox

ROOF

The tiles go to sleep on the roof
The rain will fall on the roofs
Dust will descend on the roofs
The sun will hit the roofs

The wind will sweep across the roofs
The size of this roof is multiple of tiles
And makes up the space through our bodies, a love in sleep.
The roof will make the dream under the night.
Will make life under the sun.
The roof will keep secrets from the gnawing of time.
It will be like a big blanket for the secret
Without day and for rest without night.

FACADE

The facade of the house is not closed as the stones or bad tongues suggest.
Among them was a stone missing.
In the middle of the wall, the void opened up.
And the eyes scraped her plane and her skin.

The mortar consented to lack
consented to fail
For the feet to enter,
For the hands to enter.

with your packages
Your messages and your gestures
all after the eyes
Which itself is already here.

FLOOR

The floor I tread.
I wear the floor with bare feet.
The strength of the bodies make the floor.
The ground I repress and repress.
And push and push and violent and plant
To be stable and shod floor.
It's beaten ground,
It's shabby floor,
It's a suffering floor
It's dead ground.
It is ground loved in silence.

Xerox Topological House 1

Seven Alternatives to Loneliness
Pollution-proof purification rituals
desired dialogues
Sun always available
Ups and downs, turns and revolts
place to look for direction

Xerox Topological House 2

String of cloud tiles
clothesline
telephone wires,
electrical wires,
gas pipes
webs of us
star grains
waves of you
Vibrations
treetops
old darning
Grass
Forest
Moss.

video
2015

We have a photographic image showing a bicycle photographed on the bottom of a river which crosses the city of Bruges (Belgium) in 2001. Although the image is greenish, in part because of the moss contained in the bottom of the river, we see here and there some blue bubbles that had been held between the various layers of ice near the surface. We decided to determine the location of the bubbles and move them by the surface of the image simulating Brownian movements.

Visorama‐Lumière is a work in which we use Visorama to visualize and interact with the 360-degree panoramic photographs created by the Lumière Brothers for Photorama a century ago. The collection of Lumière panoramic views is made up of 307 titles out of a total of 608 presented in the Lumière Society catalog in 1904. These are large photographs (87X628mm), taken with the Périphote device to be presented in the Photorama ‐ system. 360-degree view projection, presented for the first time at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The Photoram consists of a system allowing the projection of panoramic photos on a roundabout 20 meters in diameter by 10 meters in height. What is curious is that, between 1900 and 1906, the Lumière brothers invested more effort in the commercialization of the Photorama than in the Cinematograph. This demonstrates that the Lumière brothers were sensitive not only to technological innovation, but also to the creation of new projection devices.

The objective of the work Visorama‐Lumière is to ensure that Lumières panoramic views can be viewed as if they were virtual environments to be explored. The Visorama program contains two innovations that contribute to making the viewing process more immersive and interactive. On the one hand, it has an authoring system that allows you to specify transitions between the images shown. On the other hand, it has a multi-resolution algorithm that ensures that the image always maintains the same definition level throughout the zoom movement and avoids the image pixelation process.

The work was presented at MEP (Maison Europèenne de la Photographie – Paris in 2005 at the Brasil Digital Exhibition.

35mm b&w film, 11'
1978

The film "Os Sonacirema" (The Niacirema) comprises a fake documentary on "a tribe which stretches from the Aiapoque to the Chui". The Niacirema is a perfect anagram (The americains). 

The film uses the movie screen to literally reflect the spectators, the true object of the film. Actually, the film does not have figurative images, only transparent and veiled points, in addition to transitions (fade-in/fade-out).

CREDITS: 

Direction, Photography, Edition, Sound and Production: André Parente
Voice Over : Sergio Santeiro, Yvonne Maggie, Enrica Bernadelli, Tavinho Paz, Torquato Tasso. Claudia Leitão, Marilac Fiuza,
Text : Horace Minner
Production: Corcina Ltda

Installation
1978

A cage of birds with a suit hanging inside.

EXHIBITIONS:
Multimeios, Galeria Credimus, Fortaleza, 1978

Installation (banner, sand, bricks, garbage bag)
400x300 cm
2017

In Desmonte, the official flag is replaced by an installation made with the Brazilian banner, sand, bricks and a blue garbage bag. The art was inspired by the dismantling of the country during Michel Temer’s government, the most troubled since the military coup d’état in 1964. Instead of repeating the protest words and slogans that are usually a symbol of the tiredness endured by the citizens, “Desmonte” seeks to reactivate the heritage left by modern art. 

Filme-Livro 
André Parente e Katia Maciel
Full HD, 6'45''
2010

Zoom, the unfocusing, the unframing of a book that ceases dislodging between an image and another. In this filme prevails the experimentation of a camera over the object book with the soundtrack of two cinema classics by Jean-Luc Godard - Le Mépris (Contempt) and Alphaville. In both movies Godard deals with literature, respectively Alberto Moravia's prose and Paul Eluard's poetry.

From the relation between the movements over the book and Godard's soundtrack the book-film is yet another composition that highlights the cinematographic variation proposed by the Book of Shadows. By turning the pages it emerges as the edition of sequences and the movement of the
regard grants drama to the rhythm of the artist's book.

Began in Nice, France, Luciano Figueiredo's book demonstrates a deep dialogue with the cinema by building an abstract narrative of surfaces, colors, lights, reflections and shadows. An assiduous spectator of Godard's movies and in particular his history of cinema, the artist don't cease editing his
own painting which is a revealer of impressions from newspapers and films.

Photography: Jacques Cheuiche
Edition: Vinicius Toledo

2011

José Aparecido is part of the series O Transitório Fóssil by Pedro Victor Brandão. Series co-authored with André Parente, Bernardo Mosqueira, Diana de Hollanda, Franz Manata, Lula Rodrigues, Marcelo Neder, Marcos Pereira, OPAVIVARÁ!, Ronaldo Lemos, Ricardo Borrmann, Saulo Laudares and Vivian Caccuri. With each one of them, the artist elaborates an image to be printed using the carbon technique, an ultra-stable photographic process made of carbon and brometo that assimilated to the idea of a ceramic impression. The project was contemplated at the XI Funarte Marc Ferrez Award for Photography and the prints made by Richard McCowan.

2022

Colludium

There was a time when a coin had only one side with two faces, one was called Moro and the other Dallagnol. The former seemed to turn the coin. The latter seemed to stop the coin. The former aimed. The latter schemed. What there was between the aim and the scheme was always foreseen. And the two faces turned together choosing always the same side. The side of whoever gave more. The side without a report. The name of the coin was colludium, commonly known as collusion, from the Latin root colludere, whose meaning, a secret plan, also named the coffers. Many nonetheless affirm that the root was actually the American desert, but many do not know why deserts are deserts. The value of colludium was dubious. But everyone seemed to believe in the dubious value, after all the bets were broadcast live. In the plazas the merchants insisted on the weight of the coin, it had many weights and many measurements. One day the blind scales jammed for good. Then began the rains, later the storms, and finally the volcanoes. In the devastated plazas the extreme temperatures melted all the coins into the statue of a monster that despite being a monster had no value whatsoever.

Katia Maciel