Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

O percurso [The Path]

Image caption
VASCO ARAÚJO

O percurso [The Path]

  • 2009
  • Digital print on paper
  • 88,5 x 100 cm
  • Cat. F_129
  • Acquired in 2010
  • Observations: Fotografía procedente de un cortometraje. La obra está enmarcada junto al texto: «¿Qué tierra? ¿Tuvimos tierra? / No importa la tierra que tuvimos cuando hoy lo que hacemos es andar».
By:
Isabel Tejeda

O percurso [The Path] (2009) is a short film directed by Vasco Araújo about the journey of a gypsy father and son through the countryside of Andalusia. As they make their way through large mown fields, the father embarks on a mental monologue that is a sort of generational dialogue on the loss of roots – a reference to the nomadic life of the Romani people -, life and death. The text, by Portuguese playwright José Maria Vieira Mendes, refers to the loss of land and the progress to a new place that will never belong to the person crossing it, as remaining on the land means inertia, death and burial. Between the scenes of the father and son walking along, Araújo introduce closed-frame static shots of the Virgin of the Macarena, whom the characters mention repeatedly. A woman’s voice is superimposed on the father’s narrative, establishing a dual version speaking of life as moving forward, as progress where the boy – a sort of metaphorical embodiment of the future – is urged not to stop.The material image of the Virgin and the repeated reference to the ‘here and now’ of life in the narrative extols the mystique of the discourse present in Vasco Araújo’s video, which encourages the search for wisdom and freedom, all set in a strange aura of nostalgia and theatricality characteristic of the Portuguese artist’s poetics.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Vasco Araújo
Lisbon 1975

Vasco Araújo completed the course in advanced photography at the Maumaus School of Visual Arts at the Lisbon School of Visual Arts and Photography, and graduated with a major in Sculpture from the Fine Arts Faculty at Lisbon University, the city where he lives and works. Vasco Araújo is a multidisciplinary artist who develops his own intimate, intense poetics based on the reflection that his pieces generate around the identity of the subject and their relationship with the context and surroundings. His work combines photography, installation, video, performance and lyrical singing, a field in which he is also active.  His artistic output seeks to inspire reflection about systems for depicting the world and its fragility, focusing on the identity of the subject and governing policies. The logic structuring his artistic poetics has to do with the representation of drama and its mirror expression of the phenomena of reality.

Vasco Araújo has taken part in various solo and group exhibitions. These include the  Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (Rome, 1999); ‘Melodrama’ at the Atrium – Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country (2002), the Palace of the Counts of Gabia (Granada, 2002), Vigo Contemporary Art Museum (2010), ‘Hereditas’ [Heritage] at Caramulo Museum (Portugal, 2006), ‘Botanics’ at Lisbon Contemporary Art Museum (2014) and, more recently, ‘Potestad’ [Power] at the Latin-American Art Museum in Buenos Aires (2015) and ‘E daqueles que nada sabemos’ at the Art School in Coimbra (Portugal, 2016).

Isabel Tejeda

 
«Power» (Buenos Aires, 2015).
Gaëtane Verna, Vasco Araújo & Eloisa Aquino Vasco Araujo: With the Voices of the Other, Montreal, ABC Art Books Canada Distribution, 2012. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.