LOOPS.LISBOA 2015

Without the loop, there would be neither film nor video art. Its cyclic and repetition logic, which originally turned inertia into movement, accompanied the most diverse forms of original expression during the last two centuries. From the optical pre-cinematic devices (Phenakistoscope, Zootrope, Kinetoscope) to the work of Duchamp, artists of the Pop Art movement and then Dan Graham, Martin Arnold and Harun Farocki among others, the loop shows an enviable vitality as an essential element of the audiovisual language and is still being reinvented.

For this inaugural edition of Loops.Lisboa we received over a hundred works that together present a rich visual, conceptual, performative, narrative and cinematic diversity. It is with extreme difficulty that three finalists were chosen among the many excellent submissions: 

O Retrato de Ulisses by João Cristóvão Leitão

Travel Shot by Francisca Manuel and Elizabete Francisca

Cascade by João Pedro Fonseca

 

Contemporary examples, representative of artists’ ongoing probe of this essential unit of moving image language.

Presented as part of Festival Temps D’Images 2015 in collaboration with the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea - Museu do Chiado.

Alisson Avila and Irit Batsry



Ulysses’ Portrait - João Cristóvão Leitão

"Ulysses’ Portrait" is a giddy journey through time and through literature. A journey where Ulysses is entrapped by the mechanism that is the loop, which operates at a narrative level, at a spatio-temporal level (given the use of a single sequence shot) and at a visual level (by means of the constant reuse of the same imagery material).
After all, "Ulysses’ Portrait" is nothing more than an act of questioning human identity when confronting it with the possibility of time’s circularity and with its objective and subjective durations. Ulysses is Ulysses. However, that doesn’t mean that he isn’t, simultaneously, Cervantes, Pierre Menard, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Homer, Tchekhov, Nietzsche, Borges and, undoubtedly, myself as well.

Direction, sound, montage, production and voice-over: João Cristóvão Leitão
Texts (based on): Anton Chekhov, Friedrich Nietzsche e Jorge Luis Borges
With: Duarte Amaral Soares
Direction assistance: Marta Ribeiro
Production assistance: Joana Peralta
Image post-production and montage assistance: Miguel Leitão
Voice-over caption and voice-over post-production: Manuel Ramos
Translation: Ana Pessanha.


Travel Shot - Francisca Manuel e Elizabete Francisca

Beyond the enormous possibilities of a space, of what it can convoke or suggest, we are mostly interested in thinking about the potentiality of the action, the potentiality of the acting, the potentiality of what a matter (or someone) can convoke and create. This seems to be the engine for a transformation, for the creation of another reality that can be a reaction to this state of things, which is apparently numb and anesthetized, existing in the form of a sedative to soothe the soul, the general mood and the power of imagining.

So, we thought…. this could work as if a space was originally in a limbo, waiting for a meaning, a meaning that approaches, with the idea of creating states of existence. This state of being can only exist in a continuous flux of information that crosses us. We are made of memories, facts, desires, and impulses and of all that we do not yet know. 

This vital state of being is only possible if we carry with us what was and what will be, in a here and now that is broadly porous and available. Permeability in handling the sense of things is a way of seeing. Space expands, and when Time is manifold anything can happen. Perhaps we can call this choice, in a contradiction will always escape:

 

Concept: Elizabete Francisca e Francisca Manuel
Direction, Image and Editing: Francisca Manuel
Performance: Elizabete Francisca
Audio post production: Paulo Machado
Production: Elizabete Francisca e Francisca Manuel
Thanks:  Duarte Martins, Paula Pereira, Susana Batel


Cascade - João Pedro Fonseca

This work isn’t just a loop but a piece that through repetition surrenders to a changing process. The memory of repetition being linked to the iteration of action in a short time is here counteracted since the piece lives in a long period of questioning. Thus it tends not to mechanize under the exercise of repetition, so when the viewers confronts the loops they faces details that they hadn’t noticed before. The ideal of physical perfection is born from the stone block, in a process of removing that gives place to the form, and with it comes the reflection of our imagination, an idealistic mirror of our flesh. Creation and its absence live in the form of dust that unites this antagonistic parallelism, and is the primary element for the bodies’ birth and the matter from which they are created. The impenetrability of the bodies causes their mutual nullification but they always maintain their soul’s presence. Even when we are unable to see the true bodily forms we know that it is there - where before there had been only a block, we attach to it a face and an identity throughout the piece. In the space, the viewer is only the testimony of a phenomenon.

Directed by: João Pedro Fonseca
Performer Women: Inês Apolinário
Performer Men: Fábio Faustino
Assistant: Maurício Santos