(video installation | 5 projections | mini-DV transferred to digital file, 7'15" + 7'15" + 3’15” + 4’32” + 3’07”, colour, no sound)
For an exhibition in Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (Nacional Society of Fine Arts), in Lisbon, Rui Mourão decided to unite two videos that were done one after the other, with a close relation: "Looking For Some Small Marks" and "Waiting For The Right Moment". Both videos have aesthetic and conceptual connections between them. One highlights a need to act, the other one highlights the need to stop.
In "Looking For Some Small Marks", the action takes place in a big bicycle park built over water, at the side of a train and bus interface station in Sweden. In such a place, it is usual to see people looking for their bikes among hundreds and thousands of them.
As is recurrent in his practice, the artist has produced artistic work out of his personal experience. He has himself spent many hours there looking for his bicycle. At some point, he started to record things on video and to interview other users of the bicycle park with a view on investigating their strategies resulting from local know-how. The title comes from one of these interviews. It came out that the users of the bicycle park label or make marks on their bicycles that they can later recognize and remember. In that way, what seems at a first glance to be a large mass of parked vehicles is in reality permeated by many small individual distinctive features. It is such small features that people look for in order to find their bike and leave the place to resume their everyday activities and to get back to their lives.
As the video goes on, the shots focus more and more on the behaviours and movements of people in their quest. The edition of the video turns it to a kind of choreography created out of everyday life. The action in the video – people at times lost, confused, vulnerable, looking for something that really matters in that moment - is a metaphor that works in many different ways.
The artist uses those “small marks” and a simple practical situation as the starting point for a reflection on identities and the relations between the individual and the collective, the private and the public, the self and the Other.
The video called "Waiting For The Right Moment" pursues the conceptual line of “Looking For Some Small Marks”. It has also an everyday, real situation, but set in a different space and in another context. This time, there are people waiting at the traffic lights for their turn to cross the street when the light turns green for them.
"Waiting For The Right Moment" was filmed in Lisbon, in the vicinity of a railway station and bus stops, after the artist’s return to Portugal. In that sense, it has a specific meaning in relation to his personal development, even though the situation of people waiting for the right moment to step forward works by itself. It has various metaphorical meanings.
The video presents a succession of individuals who refrain of moving forward so that other individuals can do so, in order. Everyone complies to a system of social organization since this is the only way things can work as a whole and individuals can have their turn to move forward safely.
The artist is especially interested in the reactions, attitudes, emotions, behaviours, pauses and gestures caused by restraint at the borderline of the individual and the collective, of the self and the Other.