[open the box] Filipa César

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.

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.

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.