In this essay, artist and curator Lucas Bambozzi analyzes the development of video production from Brazil starting in the eighties. Bambozzi argues that although promising video artists emerged in Brazil in the late seventies, the eighties will be seen as a period of stagnation because for many, video was still considered a medium as opposed to a language. Twenty years after what has been called the “electronic infatuation,” the author questions those works whose authenticity later became undeniable. He points out that on the international scene, the advent of video meant, to a certain extent, the reinvention of film. In Bambozzi’s view, Peter Greenaway was the artist who best exploited the expressivity afforded by the union of the two supports, particularly in his 1991 work Prospero’s Book [in Portuguese, “A última tempestade”]. Bambozzi asserts that video is to poetry what film is to literature insofar as the synthetic and nonlinear nature of poetry can be readily conveyed in video. The author then provides a brief overview of video artists from the nineties, pointing out that the medium has grown beyond the centers of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, expanding into cities like Campinas (state of São Paulo), Vitória (state of Espírito Santo), São Luis (state of Maranhão), and principally, Belo Horizonte (state of Minas Gerais). He specifically mentions the work of Eder Santos, based in Minas Gerais, and of Sandra Kogut, based in Rio de Janeiro.
