This video received the Prémio Margot Dias e Benjamin Pereira, a prize for best Audiovisual Essay given by A.P.A., the Portuguese Anthropological Association.

The focus of this project is on my personal questioning of the sense of the cultural construct we call Art, and the sense it makes being an agent in the perpetuation of such category, at a time when the art system legitimates art value by a problematic troika of mercantilism, institutionalisation and discourse.

 This video stated my process of reconstructing an identity as artist. It was made in a moment when I was looking for ways of interpreting the world through the aesthetic, and at the same time, exploring the transformative power of art that could bring back together aesthetics and ethics, art and society. In this sense, I explored an aesthetic that uses videoart as a medium, visual anthropology as a process, and the performative dimension of some artistic practices as object of analysis.

The video is composed with the double-play of side-by-side images, in visual pairings. In this way, I seek to obtain combinations of meanings that go beyond the addition of the meaning of single images (instead of Image A + Image B = Meaning AB; to have Image A + Image B = Meaning ABC).

During the video, I constantly used archive footage. I used my personal stock of previous art videos as a kaleidoscopic gaze to my own past, including footage of the “artivist” performances I made in 2014 in collaboration with more than 100 people.

I also used internet images. From the internet global archive came official FIAC footage -  Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, in Paris, and online images of João Mário Grilo’s exhibition about Rui Chafes at the Modern Art Museum of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. The images of indigenous rituals came from the film “Kuarup Kamaiurá” by Toni Lotar in collaboration with several Amerindians and “O Amendoim da Cutia” (The Agouti’s Peanut) by Konoi Panará and Paturi Panará, Amerindians directors that participated in Vídeo nas Aldeias Project (available online).

My option for archive images echoes the archive of movies a projectionist keeps in his cabin in the cinema (I even used images that I filmed with a projectionist at work at the screening room of the Portuguese Cinematheque in Foz Palace). As regards audio, I mixed a series of sounds I have recorded over the years, the voice of my ex-boyfriend, extracts of the sound track of indigenous rituals in the films referred to in this text and Nicolas Jaar’s song “Masterpiece”.

Everything is linked by a common thread — a voice-over which is part of the director, but is not his voice — exploring a transformative potential in art. The general undetone is looking for a way for art, within art, and beyond art.