(video installation | HD video, 8 projections in loop, colour, sound)
This video art piece follows an anthropological process with a documentary approach to a unique and very little known cultural phenomenon – the Terceira Island Carnival dances – where the islanders come together once a year and everyone becomes an actor or an actress to reenact the old dances and ancient Morality plays, using contemporary folklore including colourful glittering stage dresses and extravagant hairdos.
All this happens in rural meeting halls having full house, while the action is live-streamed on the internet. People dance to rock, pop or kuduro music, with the only difference that it is performed with cavaquinho, accordion and tambourine. Farmers become actors, fishermen become drag artists, clergymen sing amusing irreverent songs, the island’s most highly regarded playwright is a taxi-driver and everyone plays a part in the event, onstage or offstage, among cheerful applause, laughs, communion, satire, music, tables loaded with food, rockets outside, cows and bull-impersonations.
The final exhibition was the climax of a difficult process, blurring the limits between visual anthropology and video art, and putting on record what is at risk of disappearing fast (the fragile, immaterial or ephemeral). Simultaneously, it also highlights anything arising as new, creative and innovative. The project is exhibited as a multi-channel video installation in which every projection shows a representation of images and feelings aiming at giving the audience a multiple perception of a structurally multiple phenomenon (cultural, artistic, historic, economic, social, political, ethnographic: basically, an issue of identity).
During the exhibition’s opening night, the National Museum of Ethnology was connected live, via internet videoconference, with the bar at Casa do Povo da Terra Chã (the local leisure and musical association), in Terra Chã county in Terceira Island. This was the chance not to be missed of connecting the so-called places of high culture – the museum – and places of popular culture – the local leisure and musical association – allowing the people present at the opening in Lisbon to ask questions to the people involved in the project in Azores, about what they could see at the exhibition, or simply getting to know some of the people they could see in the videos, as this association is one of the main locations of footage.
This video installation was later exhibited at the Angra do Heroísmo Museum (Azores), at the Ormond Studios (Dublin) and at the Espaço do Conhecimento Museum UFMG (Belo Horizonte, Brazil).