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Projection video
16:9
Edition of 3
The film Le spectateur éternel, the latest made by Rui Calçada Bastos, almost functions like a survey of his work up until now. As in the words of Sérgio Fazenda Rodrigues, he is a “wanderer and his work [draws inspiration] from what he perceives on his travels.” Having always been on the move, this video portrays the moment in which the artist finally decides to stay at home and venturing on a journey within the confines of his bedroom. We never see the wandering inhabitant, but the lens of the camera shows us that his eyes take delight in the view of the room, the armchair, the reflections of the sun on the walls. We only see him venturing to the window occasionally to contemplate the fleeting shadows cast by passing airplanes over the facades of the neighbouring houses, a sort of travel that he has left behind.
Working with and in the cities that he travelled to or lived in (Macau, Shanghai, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro), Rui Calçada Bastos, (Lisbon, 1971) focuses on urban landscapes, objects, shapes and situations that would perhaps be overlooked at a first glance. Both in a real and metaphorical sense, the reflections, duplications and confrontations constitute variations on a leitmotiv that runs through Rui Calçada Bastos’s videos, photographs and installations dealing with the self and the other, inner and outer, the here and there. The artist continually changes his position in a perpetual attempt to reach towards self-assurance or anchorage, which never seem to take place.