João Maria Gusmão
Nascimento : , Portugal
História
Joao Maria Gusmao b. 1979, Pedro Paiva b. 1977. Live and work in Lisbon. The Portuguese artists Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva have collaborated since 2001 on creating objects, installations and 16mm and 35mm short films. The duo describe their overall project as a kind of “recreational metaphysics,” a genre that to a certain extent they themselves have re-invented following the Portuguese poet Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa) on his layered aesthetical modern experiment on materialism. The short films depict staged episodes and sequences of pseudo-scientific experiments with both poetical and comical consequences. In recent years Gusmao and Paiva’s production has centered on the idea of movement and duration, both within the cinematographic vocabulary, with references to early film pioneers as Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, and through the artists’ own practical experiments and conceptual invention.
Director
A silent 16mm film vertical portrait on sleeping flamingos.
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Short film consisting of multiple fruits and vegetables being chopped in stopmotion.
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A major new 16mm film work Papagaio (Djambi) 2014, shot in São Tomé and Príncipe (a Portuguese speaking Island nation off the western coast of Central Africa), bears witness to a West African voodoo ritual, known locally as D’Jambi. Whilst intoxicated, the participants dance and enter a state of trance in which they channel the spirits of the dead. At times the footage is shot by the artists, and at other moments the camera becomes an alibi, held and manoeuvred by one of the participants.
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An animated 16mm film by JMG+PP.
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An elephant’s proboscis in action.
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Three albinos telling jokes by the fireplace.
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16mm silent film.
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Short silent film.
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“Wheels” is a film about relative motion as described by Descartes: if 2 objects are moving in the same direction and speed they seem to be still between each other. Inspired by Duchampian tradition, Pedro and João filmed a short chronicle of curved means of transportation in the tropics. Overlaying directly on the negative (camera editing) the feat of paradoxically freezing a moving bicycle wheel, a car wheel and anamorphic depiction of tire, João and Pedro constate that for that to happen everything else must be perceived as a gyroscope.
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16mm film, colour, no sound, 2'35"
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Food and drink transformed into unidentified flying objects.
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If a ray fish dreams…
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An encounter at Jardim Zoológico de Lisboa shot in 16mm by JMG+PP.
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16mm film, colour, no sound, 2'25"
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Short silent film.
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João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva have produced a series of silent films in 16 mm and 35 mm that, scientifically yet with a touch of irony, present small physical actions and particular optical phenomena. Their inventories of nature and their perspective respond to a physical world that is visible and yet invisible, where the concrete is always presented as something concealed. Something that the filmmakers call “abyssology, a transitory science of the indiscernible”. The simple compositions and the tricks they adopt, such as the use of slow motion or superimposed images, are reminiscent of the silent films of the early days of cinema and the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey.
Director
João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva have produced a series of silent films in 16 mm and 35 mm that, scientifically yet with a touch of irony, present small physical actions and particular optical phenomena. Their inventories of nature and their perspective respond to a physical world that is visible and yet invisible, where the concrete is always presented as something concealed. Something that the filmmakers call “abyssology, a transitory science of the indiscernible”. The simple compositions and the tricks they adopt, such as the use of slow motion or superimposed images, are reminiscent of the silent films of the early days of cinema and the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey.
Director
João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva have produced a series of silent films in 16 mm and 35 mm that, scientifically yet with a touch of irony, present small physical actions and particular optical phenomena. Their inventories of nature and their perspective respond to a physical world that is visible and yet invisible, where the concrete is always presented as something concealed. Something that the filmmakers call “abyssology, a transitory science of the indiscernible”. The simple compositions and the tricks they adopt, such as the use of slow motion or superimposed images, are reminiscent of the silent films of the early days of cinema and the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey.
Director
A glassmaker removes an amber piece of molten glass from a
high-temperature oven, rolls the glass in a tube, and lets a drop fall down in one
continuous stretch to the floor.
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Fried eggs as a cosmic event.
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A rite of passage.
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The eclipse of/on an eggshell.
