‘Video Program’, conceived by Galeria Jaqueline Martins’s team in collaboration with curator Mirtes Marins de Oliveira, aims to present different works (or their fragments) in a dialogical relationship, highlighting similarities that might serve to reflect on contemporary life. For the third edition, they present Adriano Amaral (1982), with the work Rurais (2017) articulated to Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986).
Rurais, by Adriano Amaral, takes viewers on a night ride across a rural setting, deserted by people yet replete with leftover indications that the human life that once was here is in dormant. Work tools, piled up or organized organic items, machines, abandoned built structures, all presently and apparently purposeless.
Video footage captured in a time past points to a dystopian future – what happened in this place? –, occasionally relieved by the awareness that the images were captured from afar with a drone, which renders the artist’s and viewers’ operation similar to the step-by-step action of video games. Still, the images are somber, creating anxiety and tension. As in filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the places visited – evocative of the Zone in that movie – appear to have their own life and force, and anticipation over what might have happened or will happen builds up permanently, through the continuous, curious and at times abrupt moves of the drone camera. In Rurais, Amaral incarnates as an artist in the role of a stalker, and just like the character in the movie, he takes us on a forbidden journey of a known, yet mysterious place.
Watch both films and analyze these analogies.