That Which Escapes Us

That Which Eludes us

Eder Santos belongs to a generation that found in video not merely a new medium, but the possibility of blurring the boundaries between cinema, television, and the visual arts. One of the pioneers of video art in Brazil, the artist has made the electronic image a sustained field of experimentation, transforming it into matter capable of inhabiting a wide range of bodies, objects, and spaces. More than moving between distinct languages and territories, his work seems, since the 1980s, drawn to the moment when liminal spaces become porous.

The first exhibition of the artist from Minas Gerais at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum brings together video installations and video sculptures created between 2003 and 2024 around this shifting condition. Letters, bottles, wires, aquariums and seas traverse the exhibition space, establishing a fluid geography in which the border ceases to be understood as a rigid line of separation and becomes instead a space of passage, where every trajectory carries within it the possibility of straying from its course.

In a creative process that brings him close to the Benjaminian essence of play, Eder Santos constructs a poetics of instability that rejects the transmission of unequivocal messages. Between one shore and another, between one instant and the next, between what we seek in vain to retain and what inevitably eludes us, his work inhabits an interstice that runs counter to the cyclical, accelerated cadence of contemporaneity, requiring us to remain, to wait, and to set aside for a few moments the urgency of immediate comprehension. Perhaps to look at an image is precisely to learn to let it go.

Luiz Gustavo Carvalho
curator

Contemporary artist Eder Santos, a pioneer of multimedia art in Brazil, is the creative force behind the Oscar Niemeyer Museum’s latest project: the solo exhibition “Daquilo que nos escapa” (That Which Escapes Us).

Internationally recognized for developing projects that blend visual arts, cinema, theater, video, and new media, the artist brings together 12 works here that outline the scope of his multifaceted output, within a space that explores the relationships between image, memory, technology, and perception.

When presented at the MON, the work takes on an even more significant dimension. Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture, renowned for the interplay of monumentality, movement, and space, establishes a unique dialogue with a body of work that also regards space as a creative medium.

The exhibition transforms Room 11 into an experience-based setting where images and sounds engage with the architecture, inviting visitors to navigate the space in a non-linear fashion. More than a mere retrospective or a gathering of artworks, the exhibition proposes an encounter between different eras and artistic languages.

Outside the museum, the video installation “Iluminado” (Enlightened)reaches out to and engages the public in the outdoor area. The work fosters an interesting dialogue between the exhibition, the “MON sem Paredes – Arte ao Ar Livre” (MON Without Walls – Open-Air Art) project, and the building’s architecture.

By bringing together technology, memory, and sensibility, Eder Santos reinforces art’s capacity to generate new perceptions of our surroundings—and of what we carry within our very essence. The MON thus invites the public to traverse this realm of transforming images.

Oscar Niemeyer Museum

Eder Santos's work encourages us to remove our everyday lenses that make us observe an increasingly monochromatic world. It’s only by taking them off that we can perceive what is not seen. The cold technology of video is metamorphosed by his sensitive gaze and by anutterly nonlinear image editing process that achieves dizzying levels – a sort of barravento.

If references to Brazilian cinematic production have been recurrent in the artist's production,Barravento Novo [New Barravento] is the work of a multimedia pioneer in veneration of Cinema Novo. The video installation, created in collaboration with Japanese-American artist Bruce Yonemoto based on the like-titled film by Glauber Rocha, proposes a juxtaposition that confronts the past and present of not only Brazilian history, but also of filmmakingtechnologies. In the exhibition space, the scenes shot on 35mm film by the Bahian filmmaker are superimposed on the 4K digital images by the Minas Gerais artist. The worlds of Cota and Firmino, in their key roles from the 1962 film, are impressively merged in the mesmerizing performance by the protagonist of the 2017 video installation, Camila Pitanga, who simultaneously embodies both characters – another sort of barravento.

Avoiding mimicry, Eder Santos closely follows Firmino's shout: the independence of Barravento Novo is evident in the masterful editing that accompanies the speech by Antônio Pitanga at the end of the film – a tribute to the first black lead actor in Brazilian cinema as well as to Glauber’s editing aesthetics – and resounds in the barravento that unifies the film’s soundscape. The détournement present in the video installation nonetheless preserves the aesthetics and narrative in Glauber Rocha's first feature-length film and underscores some debates and tensions inherent to the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, which still remain relevant even in this third decade of the 21st century.

Just as the African cultural and religious heritage in Bahia goes far beyond the barravento in Glauber Rocha's work, the transatlantic thrust is also found in much of Eder Santos's artistic universe. The video-sculpture Oxalá demands from us a kairotic time to unveil landscapes evoked by the placid flight of the orisha and the intermittent dance of feathers, inviting the viewer to an immersive experience within the exhibition space, in a sort of counterpoint to the cyclical and quickened rhythm of Shango that coexists in the gallery.

There is furthermore a close bond uniting the worlds of Glauber Rocha and Eder Santos. Both, "with cameras in their hands and ideas in their heads," are extremely engaged and critical in regard to the domesticated society, whose main motto is summarized in the words "work, consume and die." Portraying the violence and precariousness of the third world and reflecting on the deeper layers between the oppressor and the oppressed, Barravento was the initial cornerstone of a movement that was to be severely censored by the military dictatorship in Brazil. Very significantly, Barravento Novo was born fifty-five years later, at a moment when democracy was once again under threat and culture was again being oppressed. While in Glauber Rocha's film, Aruan points out over the Atlantic Ocean toward Africa shouting, "We must react!" in the punk-baroque work by Eder Santos the landscapes that surround us are searched for the answer to Firmino's cry: "Our time is coming!" Demanding an aesthetic and ethical stance in regard to images, the artist reminds us that art always runs against the wind (à barravento).

Luiz Gustavo Carvalho
curator