Radical Gestures

Radical Gestures is the first of two acts I shall be presenting at Rialto6.

This first act serves as a further manifesto against a fast-paced world churning out alluring imagery for instant consumption, against apathy and enforced capitalist productivity. My desire is that whomever experiences my work devotes time and attention to it, as well as an openness to reinterpretation, of my body of work if need be, to which I come back to time and again like an athlete or dancer who repeats the same movement until exhaustion, or an essayist who writes, rewrites, reads and rereads, only to put everything in relation.

As opposed to any mercantile formula of artistic production, these works remain alive and are in constant transformation. As are the “mundane” situations I film and transfigure, in a spirit of non-fictional experimentation, taking as starting point their connection to my reality, which I transform into a fiction of the real – the reality of images being the greatest fiction, and testimony, of all. I decide when and how all begins – the difficulty being knowing when and how it ends. All decisions are critical, sensitive in nature and political: filming and editing are the taking of a stand, a point of view, in relation to different relationships and power plays of perception, attraction, sensation and thought. Neither words nor images can be taken for granted.

Suddenly, all becomes a dance. A rigorous exercise in montage. It is conflict, seduction, hypnosis, being as revealing as it is exclusionary, it is body made by a body.

But when the lights go out, of the work nothing remains to occupy space in the world, only the apparatus and the memory impregnated on the body which is another kind of apparatus forced to stop, look, listen, interpret and feel.

How radical is it?

RADICAL GESTURES First Act revisits a part of my experimental film work, after more than 20 years as an artist. It incorporates a new series of video installations conceived specifically for the Rialto6 setting, in an experience uniquely tailored to engage with this space and no other.

There will also be screened concurrent showings of my film work over the 8 weeks of the exhibition. This programme I have called ARTIST’S CINEMA: A CINEMA OF ONE’S OWN –in a clear allusion to Virginia Woolf and where I revindicate the possibility of a film art that is mine alone  – where I touch on aspects of my practice which range from immersion in the museum, to the ‘forbidden cities’ and the archives ‘yet to come’,  in a transdisciplinary vocabulary incorporating cinema, theatre, music, painting, dance, architecture, photography, performance and anthropology. To summarise: the artistic gesture and the taking of pause as an act of critical and sensitive resistance. This is no interval to speak of, but pause as action. The intervals to which I frequently subject the viewer are in truth actions which break from the absolutism of silence in my analogy between image and sound, which I call image sound – two sides of the same coin. And nor can we speak of sound without speaking of time and movement also.

How radical is it?

Tatiana Macedo, Junho 2026