General proposal of the video work

Letícia Parente

The artist intends to set the coordinates of each archeological situation, mainly regarding time and space.

The space reference point is frequently the author herself as an element that is sometimes passive and sometimes active in the action.

The technology, represented by the resource that is always present, is most of the time a visible or an invisible character. It may be an obstacle in the cuts, a bridge that connects the close to the far side and something that denotes the distance – so as to cross it or increase it – among the various levels of the character’s inner consciousness. In brief, the video is expected to provide the possibility of confronting the experience at the deepest level, from the visceral to the tactile, bodily level, with those surrounding areas from the immediate exterior.

Time is now “enlarged” by the machine power, like a photographic enlargement of a detail. The technology maximizes to the fullest possible extent through all access paths and all voices that provide the ability to penetrate the occurrence.

One of the most important aspects is that contradictions remain unsolved; they are rather emphasized, whether subtly or repetitively, constantly or fugaciously.

PREPARAÇÃO I [Preparation I]

The artist stands in front of a bathroom mirror and gets ready to go out. She sticks an adhesive plaster to one of her eyes and draws an open eye with an eyebrow pencil on it. She does the same to the other eye. Then, she also covers her mouth with a plaster and draws a mouth with a lipstick on it. She arranges her hair. She takes her purse and leaves.

Year: 1975
Duration: 6 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Camera operator: Jom Tob Azulay

MARCA REGISTRADA [Trademark]

The author sews on the sole of the foot with a needle and a black thread. She embroiders the words “MADE IN BRASIL”.

The purpose of the work is to materialize the idea of reification of the individual, a characteristic aspect of society at the present time in history. Reification implies belonging. Belonging, however, transcends the reification due to the deep, impenetrable connection to the motherland. The trademark may resemble the branding iron for indicating the animal ownership, but it is also the basis for the structure over which an individual will always be constituted in his or her historicity: when standing on the sole of the foot.

Year: 1975
Duration: 9 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Camera operator: Jom Tob Azulay

IN       

The artist gets in her own empty wardrobe and hangs herself through her clothes by the shoulder on a hanger. The door is closed and she remains locked in the wardrobe.

Year: 1975
Duration: 3 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Camera operator: Jom Tob Azulay

PONTOS (lost) [Points]

A hand draws a quill pen on a cardboard. After it has been drawn, the pen is cut out and sewn with a needle and a black thread on the forefinger of the left hand. Then, the quill is sunk in an inkwell and a dot is made with it on a sheet of paper.

Year: 1975
Duration: 6 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Camera operator: André Parente

PREPARAÇÃO II [Preparation II]

A person applies four injections to herself. After each application some words are written in an international health control form. The records are made in the column under the title VACCINES:

- Anti-cultural colonialism;
- Anti-racism;
- Anti-political mystification;
- Anti-mystification of art.

Year: 1976
Duration: 7 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Camera operator: Ana Vitória Mussi

CHAMADA (lost) [Call]

The artist gets in an apartment and comes to a room where there is a sound recorder and a telephone set on the table. She records the following question on a tape: “HELLO, IS IT LETÍCIA?”. She repeats the question many times. She stops the recording. She rewinds the tape. She turns on the recorder again and leaves the question echoing. She takes the telephone, calls her own apartment and leaves the receiver close to the recorder. She leaves the apartment, goes down the stairs, gets to the street, goes down the slope, gets in her own building, goes up the stairs, gets to her apartment door, opens the door with a key, hears the phone ringing, picks up the phone and hears her recorded voice asking “HELLO, IS IT LETÍCIA?”. She answers: “YES, IT’S LETÍCIA”.

The artist calls herself and identifies herself through three access paths. One of them is interior, immediate, mute, silent, from her to herself. Invisible. The other one is through her body, which calls her – she is conducted by the body, by the legs that cross the physical space to her house and she answers: “HELLO, IT’S ME”.

The third path lies within the technological means that records her voice, transmits it by the telephone to her house, waits until she arrives and calls her. And she answers: “YES, IT’S LETÍCIA”.

Year: 1978
Duration: 10 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Camera operator: André Parente

QUEM PISCOU PRIMEIRO [Who blinked first?]

Two people (André and Angela Parente) are sat in front of a mirror looking at each other through the mirror. There is a panel behind them and a hole in this panel through which the lens of a video camera (the third eye) is directed at the mirror. They watch each other in order to see who will blink first. At a certain point they put an end to the game. But who blinked first?

Year: 1978
Duration: 4 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Camera operator: Letícia Parente

ESPECULAR [Specular]

Two people are sat on the floor in front of each other. They are connected by a kind of double stethoscope; the tubes that hang from the ears of each one are joined together in the middle through a common tube.

Person 1 says:

“I’m thinking that you’re hearing what I’m saying.”

Person 2 replies:

“I’m thinking that you’re hearing what I’m saying about what you were thinking that I was hearing what you were saying.”

Person 1 continues:

“I’m thinking that you’re hearing what I’m saying about what you are thinking that I was hearing what you were saying about what I was thinking that you were hearing what I was saying”.

And it continues until the fifth term.

Year: 1978
Duration: 4 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Camera operator: Letícia Parente

O HOMEM DO BRAÇO E O BRAÇO DO HOMEM [The man of the arm and the arm of the man]  (coauthored by André Parente)

A neon advertisement of a male body from the waist to the top is shown; he stretches and contracts one of the arms in a symbolic gesture of display of strength. (It is an advertisement for a gym).

After some minutes in that scene a man with a naked torso, from the waist to the top, comes along moving his arm in the same way. As the gesture is repeated, the man gets tired and cannot keep up with the pace and slows down.

Year: 1978
Duration: 6 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Camera operator: André Parente and Letícia Parente
Model/actor: André Parente

ONDE [Where] (coauthored by André Parente, video lost)

Letícia didn’t write anything about the video ONDE. It is about a game of images to the infinite resulting from the recording of the recording of the image of a TV set, which transmits the image of what is being recorded. It is, therefore, a short circuit of the image (of the image (of the image (of the image))) to the infinite.

Year: 1978
Duration: 4 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Camera operator: André Parente

DE AFLICTI (ORA PRO NOBIS)

Gestures of entwined, contracted and twisted hands and feet are successively shown in fixed images. Each image arises from the dark and then dissolves in the dark. A voice prays a litany: ORA PRO NOBIS. The rhythm is like closing and opening an eye (the camera eye), called by the invoking.

Year: 1979
Duration: 10 minutes
Format: ½ inch portapack
Photographs: André Parente
Camera operator: André Parente

NORDESTE [Northeast]

A rough leather suitcase is dragged by the author until the center of the field of vision. The suitcase is opened and inside it there are two live snakes on a white sheet. The artist tries to remove the sheet without being reached by the snakes. When she removes it she closes the suitcase and holds herself at the same time. Background music: a song by Caetano Veloso (“No dia que eu vim embora...”) [The day I left] ending in the verse “and the suitcase smelled bad...”

Year: 1981
Duration: 3 minutes
Format: Betamax, color
Camera operator: Cacilda Teixeira da Costa

TAREFA I  [Task I]

Letícia didn’t write anything about this video. The artist lies down on an ironing board and someone irons her clothes (she is inside her clothes).

Year: 1982
Duration: 3 minutes
Format: Betamax, color
Camera operator: unknown

VOLTA AO REDOR DO GLOBO (lost) [Around the globe]

A journalist holding the O Globo newspaper and making spontaneous gestures (almost ritualistic, presenting a “merchandise”) arrives at a junction in a car. The newspaper is taken, the title is shown and a circle is made on the ground around O Globo.

Year: 1981
Duration: 8 minutes
Format: Betamax, color
Camera operator: Cacilda Teixeira da Costa

CARIMBO [Stamp]

Bienal’s address is written on the artist’s face. A picture of her face envelops the video recorded with the address and it is addressed to Bienal again. At Bienal the pack is opened and the sender’s (artist’s) face appears as the addressee on the screen of another video, at Bienal’s reception office.

Year: 1981
Duration: 10 minutes
Format: VHS, color
Camera operator: Roberto Sandoval

VERDE DESEJO / FOME DA CIDADE (lost) [Green desire / Hunger in the city]

A boy sees a man eating a coconut at a restaurant on the beach. He wants that coconut. He climbs a palm tree and takes one. He opens it with his hands. The coconut is empty. A disappointment for the boy and the hunger in the city.

Year: 1983
Duration: 3 minutes
Format: VHS
Camera operator: unknown

TELEFONE SEM FIO [Telephone] (coauthored by Ana Vitória Mussi, Anna Bella Geiger, Fernando Cocchiarale, Ivens Machado, Miriam Danowski, Paulo Herkenhoff, Sônia Andrade)

The group of artists (the video authors) plays telephone – they whisper the message into the ear of the person next to them and observe its deformation.

Year: 1976
Duration: 13 minutes
Format: ½ reel portapack
Camera operator: David Geiger