Gisela Domschke and Fabio Itapura, have been working together for quite some time already and have made performances, videotapes, websites. This time they will present a VJ/DJ performance called OFF LINE, together with DJ Desperado from Amsterdam en DJ Cliffy from London who, after spending some time in Brazil, is now using this influence in his work.
Carla Hoekendijk: Could you start by telling us a little more about this performance?
Gisela Domschke and Fabio Itapura: OFF LINE is a party, a celebration, an event. It is a transgression of what is established, being together in a non-conventional way. The wish to share and take part in a collective event. See people face to face and show ourselves. Interact. The more physically separate and linked just by means of communication, the bigger we think is the desire of partying. To disconnect ourselves and reconnect in a new environment. This multiplicity of sensations in a collective experience of bodily presence forms the basis of this work.
CH: You are using images from Brazilian TV which you put on tape and then mix.
GD/FI: The images are a variety of extracts of different elements of Brazilian media - especially novelas, news and some ads. The idea is to displace values, playing with the visual and cultural significance of this material. It is a language used and shared by many: the media code our daily experience and establish a collective involvement. A novela, a scene or a take from the national broadcast presents a nucleus of meanings and references of our universe. Displacing them from their original structure, we convey a different perception of those codes and values.
CH: Are these novelas important in Brazilian television?
GD/FI: The Brazilian prime time novela is the main offering of the country's network TV. In Brazil, 82% of homes have a TV set, including miserable shanties with no running water, but with an antenna sticking out of the roof. The prime time novela is nearly a sacred moment, when this massive audience gets wired into a common environment. Perhaps the most profitable product on TV, the novela passionately leads and reflects the moral habits and thoughts of distinct social classes in the country. Scratching different sequences from novelas and sampling their soundtracks, our intention is to create a new location where original framing is replaced by a new dynamics of involvement, a different mode of experiencing of those values.
CH: You will also be using ads and news fragments...
GD/FI: Scenes are taken from the evening national broadcast, in which the news is presented under the influence of the government. These images will be mixed with ads, in order to portray the common schedule on Brazilian TV: the 6 p.m. novela, the 7 p.m. novela, a break for the 8 o'clock national news, and then back to more novela - the whole set massively dominated by loads of ads, which can cost up to $120 thoUSAnd a minute. More than providing an analytical understanding of political and social issues present in Brazilian media, our aim is to offer a sensory experience through which those elements can become observable. We are not classifying, but simply identifying the data daily poured into the privacy of millions of people's homes, creating this profound sense of involvement.
CH: You are mixing it with street sounds...
GD/FI: To bring a territorial quality to this media environment, to localise, assign a physical grid of reality.
CH: and music...
GD/FI: Our idea is to mix live different kinds of beats, a certain criss-crossing of diverse sources, from traditional popular music like samba and some funky up to date Brazilian rap to euro techno rhythms. This unusual combination of diverse tunes aims to portray the multicultural roots of Brazilian music and its fascination with, and overwhelming absorption of contemporary technology. The whole event is supposed to have a fragmented structure, in which the pre-packaged mass culture is dismantled into something stimulatingly different. The combination of images, sampled sounds and mixed tunes is discontinuous, the only link between them being the creation of an environment where the audience becomes involved in one another, in the same way the mass-media work. It is a parable. In creating a new environment we intend to reset our sensory thresholds in order to make possible the perception of familiar contents and images that shape our outlook and ways of feeling.
CH: Why are you choosing for non-linearity and fragmentation?
GD/FI: It is just an aesthetic instrument that, by splitting the original structure of images, enables a free play of interpretation. The same could be done through the use of slow motion or other devices. The unity and structure of language used by the media is based on a coherence of believe. By disturbing this unity and structure, we're somehow revealing through a parable the fetishistic and frozen manner in which media represent reality.
CH: You want “to displace values, playing with the visual and cultural significance of this material”. Do you expect western cultural values to be different from Brazilian?
GD/FI: Brazil has been colonised by western culture in an anthropophagous way. When the spiritual and political values of Christian European culture tried to dominate the sensual values of Indian and African culture, they were finally consumed and transformed into a new unfolded identity. The same happened in reaction to American imperialism and its media manipulation. We think that this rooted reaction to imposed values is an underlying feature of Brazilian culture. It is not our intention to present a rational analysis of Brazilian media, but to create a sensory environment that might communicate ethical values through aesthetic means.
– Carla Hoekendijk
|
Gisela Domschke ° 1965, São Paulo (Brazil)
Fabio Itapura ° 1963, São Paulo (Brazil)
Live and work in São Paulo (Brazil) en London (UK)
|
|
1 9 9 8 
