Kathrin Becker
Rui Calçada Bastos’ piece Ten Years Looking Forward
To See You from 1999 consists of two video projections facing one another.
On both walls people of different ages, sexes and from varied ethnic groups
can be seen looking into the camera. For this, he used video material taken
over almost a decade. During this period he temporarily spent time in Asia,
incidentally, above all in Macau. The shots of people looking into the camera
were separated into two large groups that form the basis for the two projections:
into persons acquainted with him; and those entirely unknown. As a result the
gazes also exhibit a variety of emotional involvement with the subject (standing
behind the camera) of their regard. They range from indifference or neutral
attentiveness through sympathy all the way to joyful encounter. Thus what resembles,
in a first glance at the video projection, a series of individual portraits
is actually a self-portrait of the artist, in which he employs other people’s
perceptions as a mirror. And in truth: isn’t the self continually reconstituted
in its thousandfold reflections within the flows of communication with others?
This thought contains a suggestion of that which occupies a central place in
Calçada Bastos’ works: within a fictional space bearing biographical features
and intertwined with personal memories, his work circles around the complex
substance of identity and the melancholy of isolation. The video piece Casting
Thoughts from 2000, which Calçada Bastos considers as the beginning of
a poetic direction in his work, likewise takes up the idea of constructing identity
through the human gaze, but with the tables turned. Casting Thoughts
shows a close up of the face of a young woman whom he filmed during a trip on
the subway. The protagonist appears not to be aware of being filmed (and also
in fact is not). While in Ten Years Looking Forward To See You the
center of observation is located behind the camera, in Casting Thoughts
the attention is directed upon the gaze of the woman and everything that this
gaze, directed mainly into emptiness, carries within it.(1)
Finally in the video series Quadrifoglio, which in its aesthetic character
sometimes recalls the early Jim Jarmusch (Permanent Vacation), a third
form of construction for the relationship between author, camera and observed
subject comes to light, where the artist is simultaneously director, performer
and cameraman. Calçada Bastos thereby operates with a more complex narration
that he recruits from the four autonomous scenes in the series. We observe a
man who carries out a series of strange, isolated actions, which give an account
of the presence or absence of things or persons, and of the human ability to
view oneself both from the outside as well as by looking at oneself from within,
as Doris von Drahten writes.(2)
So far this text has dealt solely with Calçada Bastos’ video work, however
he also works in the media of photography and installation. Ambos from
2002, for example, consists of a bed under which a video monitor is placed such
that its screen can only be seen in a mirror lying on the floor. The screen
itself is divided horizontally into two halves, each showing a landscape filmed
from a moving train, whereby the first runs from left to right, and the second
from right to left. In the room one can also hear a male and a female voice,
these voices clearly belonging to two older people who – as it turns out
– report common experiences which lie far in the past. The two are both
over 90 years old and have been together for 66 years, and for this piece Calçada
Bastos questioned them separately about the stages of their lives. The work
revolves around the question of collective memory, but also about divergence
and shifts of perspective in memory, and about intimacy. The narrative is embedded
in a complex system of meaning-loaded installation elements. Firstly there is
the nostalgia of the marital bed with gold-colored bedspread and pillow roll,
embodying the place of intimacy in wedlock. Then there is the monitor under
the bed. In many cases bulky articles as well as precious objects were kept
under the bed. In Ambos these are the landscapes, which can be read
as a metaphor for a common journey through life. The divergence of the memories,
on the other hand, is suggested by the landscape sequences running in opposite
directions. And finally there is the mirror, which serves as a reference to
the reconstruction of the shared lifetimes now only from memory, whereby the
mirror is interpreted art historically both as an attribute of self-knowledge
(‘prudentia’) as well as a vanitas symbol. Thereby Rui Calçada Bastos
has succeeded in creating a convincing space for one’s own sensual memories
and imagination.
(1) See Arte Ibérica No. 44, March
2001, p. 30 ff.
(2) von Drahten, Doris, Rui Calçada Bastos. Quadrifoglio, in: Rui Calçada Bastos [Cat.], Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Pub.), Berlin, 2003,
p. XX-XX.
