Heróis da decadên(s)ia

"I wanted to make a video of videos. A work articulated based on the illusion that it contained several stretches of videos from several periods. From that precept I started researching characters with powerful discourse and that could compose a certain antagonism, a contemporary conflict.

I used subtitles to place the characters (in fictitious places and years), and boards between the scenes to generate a longer-lasting dialogue than a mere collage, thus using the artifice of narrative, with no need for dramatization (at that time I was contrary to what was fiction, or better, far from reality). But always on the side of poetry, not prose.

I always worked with friends. And I always tried to come closer to people I admired. With these two keys in hand, the work gained strength and created feasible structures to be built and lived. The contact and research done in this way created, in a network, fertile ground for reseeding: new friends, new ideas, new projects.
 
Heróis da decaden(s)ia (1987) is the last video of the seminal TVDO trilogy of: Frau (1983), Non plus ultra (1985). It is the video of exhaustion. It is the peak work. With it, a type of discourse that we started in the early 1980s comes to an end. The discourse, anthropophagic by definition, like ‘Câmera na Olho’ (sic), and editing were aware of chance. After that, I was not interested in making videos for a while. In truth, this video no longer 'exists'. It was reproduced in 2003 removing some scenes and inserting others (all shot by Waly Salomão, granted by Carlos Nader). From that moment on, it started being called only HERÓIS 2 and I consider it a palimpsest video, that is, one I can, and want to, remove some scenes from and insert others into, heading on to HERÓIS 3. That is, a mutant video, one that blots out the previous version and is reborn as the 'same-changed'.

Heróis da decaden(s)ia was created at a moment in which the country had just left a dictatorship. The desire of conquering the discourse was immense. We, at TVDO, had been working with loud SPEECH. At that moment we already had a VOICE in the area of visual art. Therefore, there, with HERÓIS, we could SCREAM WITHOUT FEAR. We wanted to build a new way to articulate audiovisual communication. We wanted to develop a new Television. TV of the III Millennium! A plural TV, multiplatform, where the information could be articulated and communicated in a spiral and labyrinth, not in a linear and bureaucratic manner. This, today, seems to be taking place in reality.

Contemporary fiction and narratives. Statues and monuments were never part of my work. 

I have been under the light of pop Art, concrete poetry and Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Godard, Glauber Rocha, Nam June Paik and Chacrinha are among my references.

Man speaks. Man sweats. Man is in all pores of the screen. Starting with the Truth and the Real, we used the language of fragments, of juxtaposition, of poetry in opposition to prose (or audiovisual poetic prose), to illuminate and pose questions regarding this Real Truth. Travelling the trance! The work is on. Always a headlight. Never a traffic light."

Tadeu Jungle in a statement to PLATFORM : VB (January 2014)