MAU WAL: TRANSLATED ENCOUNTERS
52’41’’, Brazil, 2002
Production: Associação Cultural Videobrasil
Direction: Fabiana Werneck Barcinski and Marco Del Fiol
The Brazilian Maurício Dias and Swiss Walter Riedweg often say that their studio is the
street. It is observation of the urban space and the people that fill it that is the source
of the projects and installations they have been creating in partnership since the 1990s.
Centred on notions of encounter, identity, and territoriality, their works touch upon
sociocultural issues through interferences in specific groups and situations that
are then documented and transformed into installations. Though immediately
associable with public art, they extend far beyond this frontier.
In Mau Wal: Translated Encounters , Dias and Riedweg present such works as Inside
and Outside the Tube (1998), in which the voices of political refugees emanate from
metallic tubes installed in a city near Zurich, and Devotionalia , a two-year project in which
600 children and teenagers from the streets and slums of Rio de Janeiro had moulds made
of their hands and feet which were then transformed into 1,268 ex-votos symbolising their
yearning for change. The documentary reveals the characters/actors behind these works:
street vendors from a fair of Northeastern goods in São Paulo, illegal immigrants in search
of the European dream, street teenagers and their memories.
Bonus
Mau Wal: Translated Encounters includes the making-of of the installation and performance
God’s Lips (2000), produced in Rio de Janeiro. In this work, Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg
tackle the need for faith and the colloquies of persuasion that come from different lips: those
of a pastor, a drag queen, a street vendor. Four projectors and four speakers involve the public
with fast images and sounds while a performer in a glass booth pulls out random numbers and
God receives forty-four four-letter definitions.
The artistS
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964, Maurício Dias graduated from the Universidade Federal do Rio
de Janeiro’s School of Fine Arts. Walter Riedweg, born in Switzerland in 1955, studied at the
Musik-Akademie Luzern. A casual encounter in Switzerland in 1993 grew into a joint artistic
practice that blends elements of performance, documentation, and installation designed to
provoke interferences in daily situations that lead to a questioning of the social, affective, and
hierarchical fabrics that connect and disconnect individuals.
“The work of Dias and Riedweg invites us to rethink the relationship between aesthetics
and politics,” writes critic Catherine David. “It is about poetic actions that temporarily or
even permanently produce and open a flaw, an interruption, a distancing in the order of
the senses and in the course of things.” Dias and Riedweg have shown at the Havana,
Liverpool, Istanbul, Venice, Shanghai, and São Paulo Biennials. In 2005 they received
a large retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland.
The directorS
Marco Del Fiol is director, scriptwriter, and editor of documentaries and feature films.
For the Videobrasil Authors Collection he has also codirected Rafael França: Work as
Testament (2001). Other directorial projects include Emoção Art.ficial 2.0 for Instituto Itaú
Cultural in 2004 and Marepe for the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2005. He is responsible for
the editing and coordination of the DVDs Nomadisms: A Tribute to Waly Salomão (2003) and
Antologia Videobrasil de Performances (2005), from Associação Cultural Videobrasil. He
has collaborated with the NGO Cedac on videos for Programa Escola que Vale [School
that’s Worth It Program] run by the Vale do Rio Doce Foundation. He teaches editing and
camera at the Miami Ad School in São Paulo.
Historian and art critic, Fabiana Werneck Barcinski graduated in Industrial Design,
with specialization in Brazilian Art and Architecture. She also holds a master’s degree in
Cultural Social History from PUC-Rio. Her published works include the lead text for the
book Ivan Serpa (2003) for Banco Pactual; a biography of José Resende for a volume on
the artist’s work published by Cosac & Naify, as well as essays on contemporary visual
artists Nuno Ramos and Claudio Elisabetski. She wrote the script for the 2005 production
Marepe , directed by Marco Del Fiol. She is the editor of the children’s/youth line for the
Girafinha label at A Girafa publishing house.
Credits
MAU WAL: TRANSLATED ENCOUNTERS
CONCEPT
Solange Farkas
EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION
Alex Gabassi
DIRECTION
Marco Del Fiol
Fabiana Werneck Barcinski
SCRIPT
Fabiana Werneck Barcinski
EDITING
Marco Del Fiol
PRODUCTION
Mariana Amaral
PHOTOGRAPHY
Marco Del Fiol
Alex Gabassi
Márcio Zavareze
SOUNDTRACK
Cacá Machado
Marcos Azambuja
POSTPRODUCTION AND SOUND MIXING
Armando Torres
PRODUCTION RJ
Taísa Matos
F or fu rth e r i n f or mati on, pleas e contact
Teté Martinho
AS S OCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VI D EOB RAS IL – Press Service
[email protected]