QMOR?
When I was still in college, on the class of Plastic Arts, one of the many exercises was to think about repetition itself. I started to remember some stories and phrases I used to hear over and over again when I was younger, and thought maybe one of the reason some of those phrases kept returning to my mind was because they were advices about some risk that I should always be aware, or were information that I ignored the meaning and couldn´t understand it.
Between 1988 and 1989 there was a soap opera in Brazil called Vale Tudo, written by Gilberto Braga, Aguinaldo Silva and Leonor Bassères, and broadcasted by Rede Globo. At that time I was four, but I already could see the impact of soap operas in Brazil’s day-to-day life. And in that specific plot, what became central from a moment on was the secret identity of the one who killed Beatriz Segall’s character. It turned into a police romance plot, and people started to ask themselves at every possible occasion or discussion Quem matou Odete Roitman?, meaning who killed her? At that age I couldn’t discern the fact from the ficction, mostly because of people’s intensity while talking about it, how the whole country was moved by that “murder”.
So I decided to find again the scene of the murder, and I wouldn’t care so much about the quality of its image, as I thought people at that time had another experience with image’s resolution and noise. I searched it in our time ordinary source, the web; the rawer the better.
And then I filmed it again. Over and over and over again. I just used a ordinary digital camera, from where I could transfer the last shot, roll it on the computer’s screen, and then film one more version.
I repetead that process until the characters become unrecognizable, including Odete, who could only be identified by the way she moves when gets shot. The rest sometimes is a black and blue abstraction, which pulses strangely. The “overlayer” process also deformed the sound until it gets incomprehensible. I can’t tell who the murder is.