João Bento is the winner of this edition of Loops Lisboa with the work 
 “Aquela velha questão do som e da imagem”.


Loops.Lisboa, presented by Festival Temps D'Images Festival Lisboa 2018 and the National Museum of Contemporary Art - Museu do Chiado (MNAC), exhibits in its fourth edition a set
of three works that, selected from exactly 197 entries, explicitly highlights the "manual", "mechanical", "handmade", "simple" or even "dirty" approaches as links of imagery.
"Aquela velha questão do som e da imagem", by João Bento, plays with audiovisual sync, juxtaposing layers of visual information in front of a fixed plan, to create a window-loop of particular beauty, directly associated with the pre-cinema logic.
“Período Azul”, by Mané, delights us with a combination of paper, blue color and some iconic works of 20th and 21st Century Art to establish a conceptual loop that goes beyond the image
per se, building a cycle of interrelationship and permanence.
And "O Guarani (direita e esquerda)" by Letícia Larín pushes us towards a disconcerting formal and semiotic loop, portraying Brazil's catastrophic social and political momentum through layers of sound, pictorial meaning and Brazilian cultural symbology that pile up on top of each other and prevent indifference.
The most fascinating thing about this set of works, however, lies in its ability to overcome the "analogical" dimension represented by pens, papers, paints, cranks, photographs and musical instruments. What unites them, above all, are broader and timeless concepts such as the desire for materiality, the intelligence of the context and the search for common sense while facing a chaotic zeitgeist.
The three selected works strongly affirm the philosophical essence behind the loop: all things belong to cycles - be they of beauty, fruition, tribute, crisis or ignorance. Life is a loop. And Art
has the essential gift of demonstrating this.
Award Jury: Emília Tavares (president), Isabel Nogueira and Sandra Lischi