Filipa CÉSAR (1975)

Early in her work, Filipa César nominated the anonymous citizen as the central character in her work, simultaneously unique (endowed with his or her most idiosyncratic and incommunicable characteristics) and generic (sharing an existential condition with other fellow beings). César’s characters reveal themselves in the common breaks that interrupt daily routines, those intervals between action where nothing seems to happen, what, seen in terms of the productive and functionalist bias in the conception of time which dominates contemporary society, might be termed fringe moments. The artist directs her attention to those moments and situations when the individual forgets him/herself, becoming momentarily absent from the living theatre; solitary, and sometimes party to an unconscious introspective. César sets her gaze on the exteriorisation of poses, gestures and expressions, to express an interior life that remains greatly unfathomable. Her work rests on the antipode of the widespread critical perspective that regards the common citizen as an undifferentiated subject, without features, his or her own subjective world being standardised by the dynamics of contemporary life. The spectator is thus driven to share in a process of self-reflection with the artist: the daily situations César portrays or conjures and the common people or actors, transfigured into characters, return images of our own existence.

Filipa César has found her approach to this nucleus of issues in video, a medium par excellence, and a choice that is quite unsurprising considering the importance of narrative, and transmutation of the real into fiction, in the artist’s oeuvre. During a primary phase in her work, César’s point of departure would frequently consist of recording anonymous people in real situations with a detour, purporting to the documental register, by exploring the possibilities of the manipulation of the video image and sublimation of a discourse with a sociological inclination, rendered by the stress placed on the character’s psychological frame. Waiting Citizen II (1999), for instance, produces an effect that amplifies the situation and particular characters by replicating the figure of a middle-aged man who progressively substitutes the figures of others waiting in line with him for a bus. The editing of frames and counter-frames of images of people recorded in subway and railway stations functions in a similar way to the fictional mechanism utilised in Untitled (Romance), 2000, 2003 which served to construct relationships between strangers as they exchange glances; or as in Letters, from 2000, through the juxtaposition of images filmed in a post office, one of them being inverted, enabling the staging of a succession of frames of the face-to-face interaction between two characters as they communicate across a counter. One of her more recent works (Berlin Zoo, 2003) marks the junction of this genealogy of works based on the de-contextualisation of images captured in real-life situations: a sequence of large frames of people who look up (in search of information on arrival and departure placards on the underground and in railway stations in Berlin, suggesting the work’s title) is combined with a soundtrack, punctuated with the noises emitted by animals, arousing an amusing gallery of portraits where the physiognomic and expressive idiosyncrasies encounter the universal nature of human existence.

The artist’s choice of actors to play scenes inverts the recursive movement of the real towards fiction, nonetheless pursuing the same reflective horizon. Lull (2002) recreates the situation of a waiting room, orchestrated like the choreography of gestures and glances, strictly corresponding to the soundtrack composed by Mathias Trippner that was based on the sounds produced by the actors during the representation. Product Displacement (2002), a video installation that was subsequently created after the series of closely-related photographic diptychs (Sets for Thoughts, 2002), stages a scene that is quite familiar, juxtaposing the image (captured with a traveling movement) of various engrossed individuals in domestic environments (furniture and consumer goods showrooms) with an out of focus and abstract image (subjective frame) of her characters’ fixed gazes, presented within a double projection. Another series of photographs and a video adopt the theme of daily life reinvented as their subject, transforming, in a light-hearted manner, several moments in the life and times of a young, unemployed woman, whom the artist hired (Working with Linda Stüdemann, 2003).

Curiously enough, two of Filipa César’s most accomplished videos escape this nucleus of aforementioned themes and issues. These proposals of visual construction appeal to an eminently contemplative attitude on behalf of the spectator. In one of these videos (Stereo, 2001), two radically distinct spaces, in terms of their architecture, decoration and use (the private space of an art collector’s room and the public space of an art gallery), were filmed from differing viewpoints by a camera that was placed on top of a turntable at the speed of one rotation per minute, to produce an image, that thanks to the painstaking work of editing, unfolds and blends. Achieved in the same manner, in Untitled (2002), Filipa César filmed the surface of an uneven blanket close-up and in a circular motion, inventing a natural landscape that seemed to have been constructed in 3D.

Throughout her itinerary– as these two last examples demonstrate– Filipa César has revealed a great command (of the possibilities) of the medium’s idiom and a capacity to open her creative process, indicating an attitude to the world of experience that is personified by attention and inquiry.

MIGUEL WANDSCHNEIDER