1978 – Cidade Submersa

To fictionalize the real is to mesticize perception. I made the pre-production of the short film 1978 - Cidade Submersa (1978 - Underwater Town) in the quay of Remanso, where I sought the object that made up this work—a fisherman of time in the missing town and his boat.

 

After finding the boat, I went to meet the boatman, who quite curiously was a worker in the construction of a house in “Remanso Nova” (New Remanso). When I saw the fisherman who had lost an entire town and was still constructing a city, also as a construction worker, I realized I had found the exact person I had imagined for that very real fiction! Back to the quay, I found the rest of the crew who always accompanied Rodolfo, and the ensemble was fully formed!

 

 The production of 1978 - Cidade Submersa was rushed, we had two days to produce and shoot. There wasn’t a written script, but the ideas surrounding Cidade Submersa ran around my imagination at a fast pace, the two times of the film were simultaneous. The story of the fisherman whose memory is blurred when he navigates on it generates a second, continuous past that follows along the boat’s path. The sea of seafarers is made up of memories between one point and the other. The bleary past overflows in Sobradinho; in Bahia’s interior, many voids leak out.

 

Mapping other realities through art is to conceive imagined territories for the denial exercised by the willful sightlessness. Here, empty waves crash meanings against what crumbles the being who, deprived of a pat, becomes the [de-exist]. I think the challenge of art is to attempt—directly or through poetic means—to restore the feeling of wonderment in regard to life and the restlessness of desires. In life and in art, the boundary is perhaps a labyrinth of desires where getting lost and experiencing the numbing of senses is the joy that makes us exist.

 

In my work, I always attempt to realize the possibility of wonderment of repetition and to restore the lost disquiet and, with this, go back to feeling again. The work is inspired by the everyday life, in the untold stories, in the seemingly indistinct place, when we cross these insurgencies, the work occurs, proposing plots.

 

The facts attract the story toward themselves, because we repeat ourselves cyclically, as a swirl centrifuges the times as in lapses of memories. It’s a continuous existence, as in the work O Mundo de Janiele (Janiele’s World), or an erasure longing doesn’t allow, as in 1978 - Cidade Submersa, or still in the work Águas (Waters), in which the drowning of the ego points to a self that is as deep as the sea. And in Rabeca, in which the sound nostalgia leads to dives in the ways of feeling time through the flows of sounds entangled in the landscaped of the sertão.

 

Involving and being involved by the work in progress is to feel the unfoldings delicately rupturing the borders and broadening them as in an endless sea with shores deepened in the work toward what each work claims for itself. But the meaning of all this is in making the work happen, and this is only occurs standing on the border, in the abyss that separates and unites people, groups, cultures. The idea of expanded body to shared identities is the means to conform another space that is not the territory, but the cohabited border. Time, verses, memories mesticizing in the dystopia the work invents to point to a lucubrated reality. What was somewhat present since always was some sort of desire for strategies to make the new appear, having as a starting point the loss of meanings, that is, try to come up with new issues de-structuring what is already established. This is perhaps the issue that motivates my process, taking into account what exists at any given time. To what is still remains latent and shapeless, I resort to intuition to perceive non-recognizable structures behind what is said or seen. It is a struggle to recognize old structures modernize themselves to remove the layers of veils covering them, usually shapeless, empty structures that remain juxtaposed to what is visible, like parasites draining power from what is living. So, what I do concerning the powers that maintain power when I discuss body and identity, broadly speaking, is to put into question these adjectivating structures that attempt to pacify and nullify the senses.

 

The investigations to create my video projects are dives. I usually choose a situation, a place or a person that work as a channel for me to dive in the shootings of documentaries and fictions such as Canto Doce - Pequeno Labirinto (Sweet Chan - Small Labyrinth). I must borrow the experience of the other to enter the universe of the proposal. Especially when the process happens in the life of the other, it’s an attempt to imprint, on the film, the underlying realities of the other, a direct relationship between my subjectivities and the subjectivities of the object of the filmed action. The real is always someone’s fiction in their way of perceiving and constructing the world. These ways of perceiving and operating are what they are and result in multiple veils of appearances, subjectivities. Intuition is the means that allows me to combine my subjectivities to those of the other, it is a negotiation that can enable this dive and, with this, to create visibility to things that already exist or that are still latent realities.

 

This discussion about realities that I present may be seen as the disorder in the processes of wonderment, where simultaneous realities may be unending versions, and perhaps for this reason I try to break the seal of the veils, to let out versions of wonderment that take place between the real and the fiction. The moment as it appears to be, seen only as it presents itself, seems poor for attempting to end in itself. What is is not what it appears to be! To remove the veils is to uncover wonderments that oil the wheels of our perception.

 

Caetano Dias in a statement to PLATFORM : VB (march 2017)