Filipa CésarPorto ¶ 1975       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão She studied at both the Fine Arts Schools of Lisbon and Porto, and she presently lives in Berlin, as she is doing a Master's in Visual Arts at the Hochshule der Kunst, HDK. ¶ César chose video as her main medium at an early stage of her career, focusing on the relationship between inner and outer space by transforming communication strategies into introversion strategies, as well as the other way around. ¶ The relationship themes that are always at the core of her work have led to a series of works in which the flâneur's digress is transformed into a "meeting". A "meeting", that is, with the perspective of the Other, as if one is that Other, who, always and ultimately, peers through the lens, which César simulates as if belonging to someone in particular. It is as if she's staging a persistent romantic ghost of a happenstance encounter, expressing nostalgia through the notions of community and communication. ¶ The most recurrent theme in her work is that of affection's "empty lots", places of the unfeasibility of communication, such as wide urban sidewalks, supermarkets, or waiting rooms. In such places, characters walk past by in an exercise of an alienating combination of aloofness and expectancy, of emptiness and promise. In Romance (2003), the artist combines two halves, which comprise views from a standard attending desk, and creates the illusion that the two people we see are actually dialoguing with each other, generating a "suspension of disbelief" that immediately moves the viewer. ¶ Although generally speaking we will find the author to have a voyeuristic perspective, by utilizing the other people's gaze and by creating the illusion of a relationship between the ones caught by the gaze, one can also find in her work some choices that imply stage directions. In Lull (2002), for example, César stages a waiting room and the customary characters. We can witness an inversion here: instead of simulating a fiction with documentary material, it is a document that is simulated with a fiction piece. ¶ The artist has recently attempted a combination of both affinities. With the goal of producing more complex work in a narrative sense, she gives a meta-fictional use to documentary mechanisms. In F for Fake (2005), one will find an additional layer of imagination over a movie that is already the fictionalisation of a documentary. The author is showing us that in our day and age of electronics there is no within or without in any given mechanism. Rather, to asking us whether, ultimately, the fictionalisation of a documentary of a fiction leads to yet another documentary or a work of fiction.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp5.html#sigFreeIdb481d2882c   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

João OnofreLisboa ¶ 1976       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He studied painting at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, and completed his studies with a MFA at the Goldsmith College in London. ¶ One of the most successful artists of his generation, Onofre was honoured with a very early international exhibition of his work, being invited by curator Harald Szeemann for the 2001 Venice biennial. ¶ Working exclusively with video, the artist has explored the performative potential of the medium, by a classical disposition of an express time and space unity, the setting of extremely proficient communicational situations, whose efficiency, where the "message" is concerned, is rounded off by quoting strategies. One must not understand this to be quoting in its strictest sense, but rather in its wide cultural consequence, including its emotional facets and the dexterity with which the artist is able to operate it. ¶ Onofre presents an immense nostalgia for Modernity's universe of references, revisiting its myths with a look at one time clinical and sentimental. In this line of thought, the Neo-Realist voluntarism is evoked by the re-enactment of the last sentence from Roberto Rosselini's Stromboli in a casting call full of young aspiring models whose ineffable shallowness is painfully disparate from the sentence's dramatic clout: ''Che io abbia la forza, la convinzione e il coraggio" ("That I may have the force, the conviction and the courage"). ¶ Just as Onofre lines up his actors and extras or draws up his situations in front of the cameras, we may also draw up some of the other themes he has pursued. Among these are the mechanization of the human, in Instrumental Version (2001), a video that portraits a university chorus singing a transcription of Kraftwerk's electronic song The Robots; the sheer hopelessness of communicating in a love relationship, in the video that expands a sequence from Fassbinder's Martha; the unconscious' wild force, taken as a romantic paradigm for artistic production and the ensuing tension with civilizational restraint, in Untitled (Vulture in the Studio) (2002), that shows a vulture flying about the artist's studio. ¶ By making evident Modernity's history of expectancy, Onofre uses video in order to invoke a theatre stage. Adding a meta-filiation level to his production, Onofre accordingly reaffirms at a formal level what is most dear to him in terms of content: the nostalgia for an era irrevocably lost in and for electronics.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp5.html#sigFreeIdbc391722b0   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Vasco AraújoLisboa ¶ 1975     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He graduated in Sculpture at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, and also completed the Advanced Visual Arts course at the Maumaus school. In his infant yet compelling career, he was awarded with the New Artists EDP Award (2002), and he was a Core Program resident in the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston (2003-2004) and the University of Arts Philadelphia (2007). Among the artists of his generation, he is one of the most internationalised, with participations in the 2002 Sidney and the 2005 Venice biennials. ¶ Having installation, often with integrated video, as his main field of action, he also employs a given appropriate object, photography or text, more often than not in a dialogue between text and sound. Many of his works have Opera as its particular reference; music, often worked under diverse manners, is a decisive component of his creation. Himself an Opera singer, the artist uses visual narratives as the central axis of his creative process, a play between the real and the fictitious, sound and silence, the feminine and the masculine, the intimate and the social. Whether metaphors of personal dramas (La Stupenda, 2001) or games of seduction (Dilema, 2004), his are works that question identity and fate, problematizing thus human condition and communication. In an attitude close to a heteronymic playfulness, the author personifies himself some of his characters, sometimes recurring to cross-dressing (Diva-a portrait, 2000, and Duettino, 2002), bringing to the public arena the issue of communicability and opening up a conception of art (and reality itself) as a product of a super-stage direction. The references to the Baroque period and the very scenographic dimension of Vasco Araújo's work become quite evident in installations such as Dilema (Serralves, 2004), with portraits of the artist interpreting the language of handfans, or Recital (2002), in which he recreates the ambient of a concerto room that functions as a structural analysis of the several instances of meaning that are constituted by the images, voices, sounds and texts from the operatic spectacle. In more recent works (The Girl of the Golden West, O Jardim, The Garden), the analysis of issues such as the communication and the confrontation between social roles becomes even more politicized, pointing towards other themes, as those of multiculturalism and post-colonialism. In 2006, he was in the shortlist for the BES Photo Award.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp5.html#sigFreeId80dfd5edd5   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Rui Toscano Lisboa ¶ 1970     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He studied painting and sculpture at Ar.Co and at the Fine Arts School of Porto. He had his first exhibitions in 1993 while still a student. At the same time he carried out his work as a visual artist, he sought out other creative undertakings, namely music and video jamming, and he became a member of several bands (such as the Tone Scientists) that had great impact on the domestic cultural scene. ¶ The author has revealed a great capacity in terms of exploring the most disparate of media, from drawing to multimedia installations, thus also revealing a creative power - in the classical sense of the word - albeit channelled through an obvious post-modern attitude. Before anything else, Rui Toscano is someone with a very clear understanding of contemporary experience and its related technologies. At the core of such an understanding lies the notion of a contemplation state that dispenses with the formerly related notion of interiority, and outright dismisses the individual. Consequently, attention from the part of the spectator no longer needs to imply any sort of intention. ¶ In works such as Infinity (2001), a video-landscape of the city of São Paulo projected on a cutout of the word INFINITY, Rio 09 May 2001 (2002), yet another video-landscape, this time around of Rio de Janeiro, My Bloody Valentine (2000) and The accelerating Collision of Future and Past in the Post-Modern Era (1997), Rui Toscano shows this new contemplation state as something with an alienating effect. This is the symptom of a technological sublime that was imposed on the individual in the true sense of the word, and it is in that sense that Rui Toscano becomes actually the most romantic of artists, given the fact he acknowledges his own romantic urges within his original radicalism (as in One hundred over the rainbow, 2000), precisely at a time when romanticism can only emerge as a sort of nostalgic projection of oneself. In T (1998), a self-portrait as a letter of the alphabet, or in Black Painting-Perfect Lovers (1997), the very notion of an "I" - an instance of introversion - externalises itself as an automatism. In the end of The Foyer Affair (2001), in which Rui Toscano appears as a film noir gangster, for example, he smokes a cigarette and fades to blue.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp5.html#sigFreeId2bcfa689f0   Ficha Técnica | Credits