Now or Never
Return
Audiovisual Landscapes by Maureen Bisilliat
Delving into a country’s traditions
is a daunting responsibility.
For my mistakes and successes, for what I failed to see,
and for what I saw but failed to capture, I ask for your understanding.
Maureen Bisilliat
Recognized in the visual arts as the photographer of a certain Brazil, atemporal and profound—and especially the Brazil of indigenous peoples and inhabitants of the sertão—Maureen Bisilliat has not photographed in over thirty years. Since the late 1980s, in addition to overseeing shows from her photographic collection, she has divided her time between cultural management, making books, and documentary filmmaking.
This exhibition is an overview of Bisilliat’s diverse repertoire of images in movement, one that evokes the intense experience of reexamining an oeuvre. Over the past eight years, with the support of the editor Felipe Lafé, Maureen has devoted herself daily to organizing all of her audiovisual material, while simultaneously registering new meetings with people and places photographed in the past. The Instituto Moreira Salles incorporated this collection in 2015, adding it to her photographic work, already part of the ims’s holdings. The joint endeavor to survey these vast records moved from its initial intent, of making the work available to the public, to this exhibition, a project that converged with the artist’s longstanding desire to blur the boundaries of equivalence between word and image, as celebrated in her photo books.
Edited in hd, the twelve videos in this exhibition were drawn from a heterogeneous collection of television, feature-length, and short documentaries, interviews, and even a family trip. Award-winning films and technically precarious recordings are assigned the same degree of importance by this unique visuality. Just as in her photography, Maureen’s audiovisual artistic expressions (always documental) transpire in the poetry underlying the moment of encounter—devices of supra-reality. Kept by her as a kind of repository for possible future uses, the numerous unpublished interviews of major Brazilian cultural figures who have inspired Maureen are representative of a need she has sought to satisfy her entire life: to grasp something beyond the other in their words. An interview is not, and never should be, only an interview.
There is an immediate problem when a collection is processed at an editing station. While this method allows images to emerge, suggesting potential new readings and approaches, it can also detect unrealized interactions, detract from relevance, or trigger anxiety over what was not achieved. The works gathered here are fruit of the courageous confrontation of this problem. When the unseen side of a journey is revealed, there is no desire to hide mistakes, but rather to value trials. Doubts and restiveness are shamelessly exposed here. For Maureen, precariousness is always relative, instability is language, and the urgent need for communication are the work’s raw material. Denying that she is a filmmaker, declaring categorically that she was an accidental photographer, at the age of 89 Maureen Bisilliat reaffirms herself as a contemporary artist.
Rachel Rezende
Guide to exhibition videos
- Morro da Mangueira [Mangueira Hill] (2019)
Maureen Bisilliat returns to look for the neighborhood samba school members who were portrayed in her 1969 photo essay.
Rio de Janeiro, 2015. Video. Photography.
- Abidjan (2020)
Edited from the documentary essay Ruas e mercados de Abidjan [Abidjan streets and markets]. In 1993, while in Abidjan for a brief five-day fashion shoot, Bisilliat used her spare time to capture the people and colors of the Ivory Coast on video.
Filmed by Maureen Bisilliat. Editing of original by Carmen Farão. 12min.
- Irmandade da Boa Morte [Brotherhood of the Good Death] (2020)
Forty years after, Bisilliat returns to visit the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Good Death in the town of Cachoeira, Bahia. She meets again with Mãe Filhinha, now 110, first portrayed in a 1973 photo that has become one of the most emblematic in Bisilliat’s career.
Bahia, 2013. Video. Photography direction by Fábio Knoll. 6min 52sec.
- Três homens do rio e suas razões [Three Men from the River and Their Reasons] (2020)
In 2013, Bisilliat traveled to the Recôncavo Baiano to interview residents in the town of Cachoeira in an effort to understand how their lives had changed since her 1973 visit.
Bahia, 2013. Video. Photography direction by Fábio Knoll. 10min 7sec.
- Nepal, 2020
At the invitation of the Brazilian Embassy in Nepal, Bisilliat participated in the Kathmandu International Art Festival in 2012 with photographs taken in the Xingu. Caught up in her wonderment at Nepal and the challenges it presented, Bisilliat recorded one of her most moving interviews. This is a melding of a short about the exhibition, entitled Spirit Papers from Another World, and an interview with Bisilliat, Reflexões from Another World [Reflections from Another World].
Video. Photography direction by Fábio Knoll. 7min 55sec.
- Korda (2020)
A conversation about photography and Cuban political myths with Alberto Korda, photographer of the most iconic portrait of Che Guevara.
Havana, Cuba, 1997. Video. Film and interview by Maureen Bisilliat. 9min 47sec.
- Palavras e pensamentos captados ao quase acaso – Mosaico [Words and Thoughts Captured Almost Accidentally – Mosaic] (2020)
Brief interviews by Maureen Bisilliat, done between 1994 and 2018 and each lasting roughly one minute, with Darcy Ribeiro; Orlando Villas Bôas; Burle Marx; Josef Koudelka; Pietro Maria Bardi; Aleida Guevara; Zé do Mestre, “professor of the sertão”; Jorge Bodanzky; Marcello Tassara; Emanoel Araujo; and Janete Costa.
Video. 11min 18sec.
- A João Guimarães Rosa [To João Guimarães Rosa] (1967)
Animation by Marcello Tassara, with photographs from Maureen Bisilliat’s photo essay of the same name. Based on an idea by Marcello G. Tassara. Produced by eca-usp.
35mm. Black-and-white transferred to video. 11min 24sec.
- Roger Bastide, 2020
Film clip from the exhibition Maureen Bisilliat – Fotografias, by Lúcio Kodato.
IMS Poços, Minas Gerais, 2010.
35mm transferred to video. 5min 32sec.
- Xingu, 2020
These clips from the film Xingu Terra [Xingu Land] and from institutional videos form a temporal arc that reflects Bisilliat’s contact and exchange with people living in the Xingu. Excerpted from: Xingu Terra [Xingu Land] (Xingu Indigenous Park, Mato Grosso, 1979. Photography direction by Lúcio Kodato. Editing of original by Roberto Gervitz.16mm transferred to video. 3min 53sec.); Entrevista com Carmen Junqueira [Interview with Carmen Junqueira] (Xingu Indigenous Park, Mato Grosso, 2003. Video. Filmed by Maureen Bisilliat. 2min 48sec.); Kuarup de Orlando Villas Bôas [Orlando Villas Bôas’s Funeral Ceremony] (Xingu Indigenous Park, Mato Grosso, 2003. Video. Filmed by Maureen Bisilliat. 7min 19sec.); Xingu 50 anos [Xingu, 50 Years: Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of the Foundation of Xingu Indigenous Park] (Cinemateca Brasileira, São Paulo, 2011. Video by Pedro Rocha. 2min 58sec.)
Total runtime: 16min 31sec.
INSTITUTO MOREIRA SALLES
SÃO PAULO
Now or Never | Return | Audiovisual Landscapes by Maureen Bisilliat
CONCEPTION
Maureen Bisilliat
Rachel Rezende
PHOTOGRAPHY COORDINATOR
Sergio Burgi
EXHIBITION DESIGN
Marcos Albertin
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Macela Souza
IMS PRODUCTION
Camila Goulart
Márcia Vaz
IMS LOGISTICS AND LOANS
Odette J. C. Vieira (coordination)
Ake Marc Albert Adje
Nadja dos Santos
MAUREEN BISILLIAT AUDIOVISUAL COLLECTION PREPARATION/
EXHIBITION VIDEO EDITING
Felipe Lafé
SCENOGRAPHY
Elástica
AUDIOVISUAL EQUIPMENT
MAXI Áudio Luz Imagem
SIGNING
Water Vision
PROOFREADING
Flávio Cintra do Amaral
TRANSLATION
Diane Grosklaus Whity
IMS COMMUNICATION
Marília Scalzo (coordenação/coordination)
Bárbara Giacomet de Aguiar
Mariana Tessitore
Marcela Antunes de Souza
Gustavo de Gouveia Basso
Isabella B. Viana
IMS INTERNET
Alfredo Ribeiro (coordination)
Daniel Pellizzari
Fabio Montarroios
Fernanda Pereira
Laura Klemz
Laura Liuzzi
Nani Rubin
Maria Clara Villas
Daniel França
IMS EDUCATION
Janis Clémen
Anna Clara Hokama
Felipe Ferraro
Júnior Ahzura
Marcella Camillo
Beatriz Abade
Geovanna Santana
IMS PAULISTA TEAM
Joana Reiss Fernandes (coordination)
Daniela Marcondes
Roberta Val
Raquel Lehn
Ariadne Moraes Silva
Gabriela Lima
Jackson Ribeiro da Silva
Raimundo Hermínio
Sebastião Ribeiro da Silva
Wilson Lopes
Gabriela Caetano D’Amoreira
THANKS FROM THE ARTIST
Ahmed, Alberto Korda, Aleida Guevara, Amanda Barcellos, Aritana Yawalapiti, Assis Antônio de Oliveira, Bin, Burle Marx, Carlos A. Rodrigues (Tibucinho), Carlos Dourado, Carmen Junqueira, Conceição Aparecida, Darcy Ribeiro, Dégo (Fidélis da Conceição), Dona Celina, Emanoel Araujo, Eric Gouguenheim, Fábio Ávila, Helena Tassara, Heleno Bernardi, Heloisa Vasconcellos, Jacques Alejo, Janete Costa, Jorge Bodanzky, José Carlos Avellar, Josef Koudelka, Juceniro de Jesus, Julia Bisilliat, Kyra Carbonell, Mãe Filhinha, Marcello Tassara, Marcos Duprat, Mônica Schalka, Nelcy Gomes, Nicholas Carbonell, Orietta del Sole, Orlando Villas Bôas, Pietro Maria Bardi, Professor do Sertão, Raymundo Dantas, Sophia Bisilliat, Subico, Thaiane Koppe, Valmir Pereira e Zé do Mestre.
SPECIAL THANKS: Lúcio Kodato, Fábio Knoll, Felipe Lafé, Carlos Dourado, Marcos Albertin, Flávio Pinheiro and Sergio Burgi.