Kathrin Becker – The melancholy of arrival (ENG)

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.

Kathrin Becker 2003