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'A Maravilha do Rio de Janeiro' is a response to televisual language and how ideas of individual and collective experience are formed – or transformed – in light of such representations.

A Maravilha do Rio de Janeiro

Derek Hart

2002

  • Media related
  • Moving image
  • Video
  • Methodology
  • Recorded
  • Gallery installation>
  • Non-networked (Standalone)
  • Screened
  • Projected (frontal)
  • Previously exhibited or screened
  • Two (of six) sequences screened at a presentation for the Senses of Place Conference, 5 – 8 April 2006, UTAS School of Art, Hobart.
  • Provenance
  • Collection of the artist

Artist Statement

In 2002, TV Globo, the biggest Brazilian TV network and part of one of the largest media companies in the world, conducted a television survey asking the people of Rio de Janeiro to vote for what they believed to be the most beautiful of six locations in Rio. The results of the survey were; the Lake 6%, Guanabara Bay 7%, Maracanã football stadium 12%, Sugarloaf Mountain 13%, the Beaches 16%, Christ the Redeemer statue 47%. The programme, which was broadcast several times a day throughout the week of the survey, was called A Maravilha do Rio. I was living in Rio at the time and approached TV Globo with a proposal to make an art work in response to their television survey. They agreed to allow me to direct aerial photography for two hours, the helicopter rigged with a Betacam SP camera. In the television studio I had live video monitoring, support from studio technicians, and was in continual communication with the helicopter pilot.

I was interested in the televisual language used in A Maravilha do Rio. This consisted of dynamic and seductive sequences of aerial photography of the locations shot from a helicopter, using lots of camera movement and zooms, and with fast editing, music and voice-over. As my starting point I wanted to take a different approach to this televisual language used by the programme. With the camera fixed, using no camera movement or zoom, shots of the locations were realised only through the movement of the helicopter. In deconstructing forms of televisual language in this way, I am equally interested in the helicopter (camera) as an object or body with vision manoeuvring in space as in recording the locations with a hovering gaze. TV Globo’s facilitating my project by giving me access to the helicopter with camera, the pilot’s skills, the TV studio, etc. is also an integral aspect of the work.

A Maravilha do Rio de Janeiro can be understood as an extension of the original survey, A Maravilha do Rio. The consensus aspect of the collective event of the survey is interesting to me; the ideas of individual experience and collective experience. Also, how contemporary tourism sites are conceived and represented and how the perception and experience of locations, by tourists and residents, may be formed or transformed in light of such representation. Projected silently, it symbolises my memories of living there; there is a sense of a physical watching presence, but also of a disembodied entity high above where my own activities took place and where life and events continue to unfold.

I’d like to thank the following people at TV Globo in Rio for their support in realising this work: Alexandre Arrabal, Director Art Department – News; Cesar Seabra, Editor; Marcelo Moreira, Chief Reporter; Roberto Mello, Cinegraphist; Renato Babaroff, Helicopter Pilot; Luiza Pamalho, Production Technician; and Manuel Alves, Production Technician. I’d also like to thank the following people in Rio for their friendship and kindness: Fernando Cocchiarale, Curator of the Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janeiro, and colleagues; Márcia Rinaldi de Mattos and family, friends and colleagues; and Katia Maciel, André Parente and colleagues, N-Imagem, UFRJ.

Saudades! Um abraço!