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With the theme Resilience. Hope. Community. the 14th edition of the FUSO Festival takes place from 23 to 28 August, and returns to Palácio Sinel de Cordes. This year’s guest curators are Jean-François Chougnet, Paul Goodwin, Benjamin Weil, Leonor Nazaré, Ana Rito, and Lori Zippay.
In 2022, FUSO questions how the creation of knowledge can be a tool for critical reflection and collective change, and highlights the possibility of art as a gesture of resilience and hope.
With free sessions, the festival presents 38 works of video art exhibited in Lisbon venues (MAAT, Museu da Marioneta, MNAC, Castelo de São Jorge, Palácio Sinel de Cordes and NowHere). One of the main aspects is the promotion of new national creations with the award of two prizes - Fundação EDP/MAAT Acquisition Award and Ar.Co Incentive Award - from an Open Call to Portuguese artists and foreign artists living in Portugal.
The session at Palácio Sinel de Cordes, on 26 August at 10 pm, is entitled The Utopia of Peace - Films from the CAM Collection, Gulbenkian. The utopia of peace has been an “isle” that floats unhappily on the map of human history of all wars. Susana Gaudêncio starts from the housing areas of Porto called “isles” for a reflection on the colonial issues, which Maria Lusitano, in turn, approaches with critical humour and abundant documentation in the film Nostalgia. In a manifestly darker tone, Daniel Barroca fragments the perception of the body and the territories of war to reach the abstraction that dissolves them, Salomé Lamas gives voice to the experience of a very young mercenary whose profession was to kill at the command of corrupt groups, and Jan Fabre films the representation of an inner struggle, by a medieval knight fighting his own demons. Struggle seems to be a human condition, but the object of the struggles very often denotes a regrettable deviation from what could be thought of as the essential purpose of the experience of life: awareness linked to self-discovery, to understanding the universe and to collective construction.
At the end of the session there is a conversation moderated by journalist Vítor Belanciano.
Ilhas Afortunadas explores the act of walking as an ancestral method of critical travel, which catalyzes knowledge and the creative act, as well as the concept of insularity as desire for imagination, utopia, autonomy or refuge. (...)
In Ilhas Afortunadas, a narrator is heard in voice off - the artist is walking about in the city of Porto. Like a logbook, the animation highlights details of what she sees, of the places visited, while her numerous reflections about the “isles” in Porto are heard (the typology of insaloubrious urban housing), on the islands in Europe, the Greek myth of the Fortunate Isles and the islands of the Fifth Empire (Fernando Pessoa). Isles for tourism and for the refugees.
Between video-essay, documentary and fiction, “Nostalgia” is the product of a long research process that uses archival images representative of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, as well as interviews with portuguese people born in Mozambique, who returned [to Portugal] after the independence of the former colony. It assembles images filmed in Super 8, postcards, photographs, telegrams and aerograms transposed to minDV. The narrator in the film is the brother of a girl who marries and leaves for Africa with her husband, a soldier in the colonial war: a sixteen-year-old teenager who also leaves for Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) and describes, from an enchanted adolescent perspective, a fantastic and "paradisiac" place, which contrasts greatly with the harsh realities of colonialism and war. The work problematizes colonialism and post-colonialism.
Daniel Barroca works solely with film, developing an important and consistent research of anthropological and artistic nature. In his films he uses a register based on the poetic treatment of the "dust of time", experimentation, the predictable deficiency of the records, and the search for the medium’s expressiveness. The images are blurry and diffuse, almost always close to abstraction.
Soldier playing with a dead lizard is part of an installation composed by eight films. If the other films are a quiet journey through the joyous simplicity of a man who plays with a lizard, in this film the weapons erupt with brutality. The work was made after a super8 film Barroca found in Berlin, in 2011. It is Nazi propaganda about the invasion of Crete. The artist disassembles the film and the propaganda that glorifies violence, reinventing the film from very short fragments.
Le Boudin (The name given to the French Foreign Legion) documents the life story of Nuno Fialho, who at the age of 16 leaves Portugal to join the French Foreign Legion, in a platoon made up of fugitives from justice, with obscure missions linked to drug barons and corrupt men: ethnic cleansing and deposition of presidents in Africa, urban guerrillas and various mercenary operations. Lamas conducts an interview with Nuno Fialho in 2011, and then reproduces it through the interpretation of Elias Geißler, a 16-year-old German actor, thus giving voice and body to the narrative of Nuno Fialho.The documentary tone is enriched and destabilized by the physiognomic specificity of the boy, by the scenario, by the mitigated emotions and by the way the "doubt" about the veracity of the reports is insinuated in the apparent realism of the testimony and of the work.
The result of a filmed performance of four hours, this confrontation of romanesque inspiration has as its protagonist the famous figure of Lancelot(e), one of the knights of King Arthur. The sound structure of the film is a key element of the composition, inducing feelings of cold, discomfort, tiredness and despair. Here, the struggle is with himself, with his own shadow, or his double. The allegory is represented with screams and sweat, falls and restarts, darkness and spatial restriction, will and loss, strong physicality, but also intense inner movement. The warrior fights an invisible enemy, inside his armor and his "Grail", recreated in dark gray metal and stone.
The complete programme of the Festival can be seen here.
Resilience. Hope. Community.
We live in the midst of speculative discussions about the post-pandemic era. There is a tension between order and rupture that is reflected in artistic production. The role of art is to foster meaningful dialogue about the important social, political and environmental challenges facing the world today. Conflicts of race and class, climate emergency, wars, pandemic, are crises with a planetary dimension that the artists of our time are exploring. How can we create new knowledge and use it as a tool for critical reflection and, ultimately, collective change?
Created in 2009, FUSO is the only Portuguese video art festival with an annual programme of national and international production that takes place in Lisbon and the Azores (FUSO Insular). The programme is as eclectic as the languages that video art embodies. As a medium, it is undoubtedly the one that has greater flexibility, greater ability to encompass and cross contemporary artistic disciplines: the visual arts, performance, dance and theatre, film or literature.
To provide a more integrated view of the evolution of video art, its programming brings together canonical works from the early days of this discipline, with a tribute to historical artists, and contemporary pieces. With strong consistency and programmatic quality, FUSO aims to stimulate critical thinking around new media and promote the development of knowledge and the dissemination of video art in the Portuguese scene.