Video stills courtesy of the artists and FUSO.

Cuts to Violence

Mauricio Alejo, Jordan Baseman, Clemencia Echeverri, Patrick Goddard, María José Sesma, Richard Hards, Priscilla Monge, Laure Prouvost, Oswaldo Ruiz.

Fuso Video Art Festival, Lisbon.

Claustro do Museu Nacional de História Natural, 28 August 2015.

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This project tested the capacity of moving image to re-evoke violence as aesthetic experience, considering its ephemeral and ungraspable condition. The intention was to explore the relationship of art and violence, conceived as the simultaneous two-sharp-cuts produced by a two-edge knife. With an emphasis on the time-based condition of short-films, these videos were presented as a series of cuts and momentary sharp interventions. With painful implications and powerful effects, they all addressed violence through different entry points. They offered an insight into the relationship between power and politics, darkness and visibility, damage with its reciprocal effect into repair; they presented an observation of cultural and social modes of authority, and structural violence. In his speeches, Martin Luther King said that violence begets violence, hatred brings a greater hatred. Art cannot heal any damage, sometimes it opens old wounds; it can make us feel unwell. Art can challenge violence, art can re-present violence, art can also re-evoke violence or art can be violent. But in the end, art conceals violence with its inherent aesthetic veil. Hence the title Cuts to Violence: video pieces, images and sounds—brief and concise short-cuts—that confronted violence in a hurtful and aesthetic, harsh and seductive double-edge way.

Special thanks to António Câmara and Ana Sofia Nunes.