Berlin zoo, part 02

ALMOST CINEMA
Filipa César’s work is in limbo, in a place with no name, between the cinema and visual arts. She isn’t a unique case in contemporary art. Many artists inhabit this difficult and demanding field. Most of them started this movement, like Filipa César, through video, in that recent tradition born in the seventies of using a fixed camera in order to record an event. Then she went on to stage dubious situations, the veracity of which cannot be clearly assessed by the spectator. From there she went to documentary production, or to documentary constructed as fiction from a cinematographic matrix.
Filipa César also produces photographic images around these filmic works, sometimes freezing film moments, at other times making constructions of the film set, from its exteriority, like an essay taken from the memory of Godard.
In any case, the matter of her work is the thin layer from which reality is formed, starting from the principle that what we call real is already a construction edited by our gaze.
Inscribed upon the practice of her nameless cinematic field is a view that the montage of points of view constructs the diagetics that defines our relationship with the world. In other words, the fact that we assemble our gaze as in the cinema and in the space-time of life is already defined by a way of seeing that is also internal to the mechanisms of cinema.

Delfim Sardo