WEB EXTRA: Watch Marilá Dardot’s Hic et nunc video!

 

Cao Guimarães, Andarilho (Drifter), 2007, color 35MM film, 80 minutes.

My earliest memory of Cao Guimarães is of a tall guy, a bit scruffy and very charming, who would always show up wearing slippers to our philosophy class at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte. He was a philosophy major; I was attending the course out of curiosity, as I was majoring in communications. That must have been sometime in 1995. He was already an artist; I did not yet know that I would become one.

We became friends then, I don’t remember how—through mutual friends, or at some party, or during the long nights we’d spend talking in Belo Horizonte bars.

Since the late ’80s, Guimarães has been producing his artwork using photography, film, books, and installations. He’s well traveled and has shown his work at the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, Gasworks, and the Frankfurter Kunstverein. His films have been shown at major festivals: Sundance, Rotterdam, Tampere, Cannes.

My own art production began a decade later, at the end of the 1990s, and went back and forth among installations, videos, books, and objects. I’ve shown my work in several venues in Brazil, including the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo and the Aloísio Magalhães Museum of Modern Art in Recife. In 2006, I participated in the 27th São Paulo Biennial, and this year I took art in the exhibition “Luz ao Sul,” the São Paulo–Valencia Biennial in Spain.

I began this conversation thinking about fiction, something my work and Guimarães’s have in common, but in the course of the exchange we found many more similarities between our processes: how we think about art, how we think about the Other. . . . Time, chance, death, and dislocation are a few of the interests we share.

 

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