[open the box] Filipa César

ALMOST CINEMA by Delfim Sardo

Berlin zoo, part 02 (2001-2003) by Filipa CésarCulturgest - Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos

Filipa César

Berlin zoo, part 02, 2001-2003
PAL video, colour, sound
5'37'', edition 2/5
Inventory 557833
© Courtesy of the artist

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.

Berlin zoo, part 02 (2001-2003) by Filipa CésarCulturgest - Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos

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.

Berlin zoo, part 02 (2001-2003) by Filipa CésarCulturgest - Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos

Biography
Filipa César was born in Oporto, in 1975. She studied at the Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade do Porto, completing her degree in Painting in Lisbon, at the Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa (1999). She received a grant from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and from the Centro Nacional de Cultura. In 2003, she received the União Latina Award. She has exhibited at many Portuguese and foreign galleries and museums, namely: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2003), Kunsthale Vienna (2004), Centre d’Art Santa Mònica (Barcelona, 2004), and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Oporto, 2005). She currently lives in Berlin.

Bibliography
XXVII Bienal de arte de Pontevedra, narrando espacios, tempos, historias... (cat.), Pontevedra, Deputación de Pontevedra, 2002.
Ringbahn (cat.), Porto, Fundação de Serralves, 2007.

Credits: Story

Text
© Delfim Sardo, 2009
Biography / Bibliography
© Mariana Viterbo Brandão, 2009
Translation
© David Alan Prescott, 2009

Story production (Collection Caixa Geral de Depósitos)
Lúcia Marques (coordinator)
Hugo Dinis (production assistant)

Credits: All media
The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.
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