The expectation caused by situations of waiting and the attention focused on the trivial actions of the average citizen are present all over the work of Filipa César (b. 1975, Oporto, Portugal). Spaces are replaced by the possibility of a suspended action whose characters reveal a tension, either discreet or profoundly disturbing, caused by the absence of the communication processes.

However, although it films anonymous persons in trivial gestures and common spaces, quite often by the means of illicit recordings (thus violating the right to privacy and the protection of individual intimacy), the artist’s work is set apart from the practice of the documentary register for the practice of a fictional device, supported in the editing possibilities of the videotaping process, through the manipulation and reconfiguration of the space/time binomial.

Some of the seminal works of this register, revealing the axis of concerns that form the core of her investigation, are, for example, the titles: Untitled (Romance) (2000) where anonymous persons – filmed in railway and subway stations – are transformed, by the means of video editing, into interpreters of ephemeral relationships through the regard; Untitled (Twirler) (1999) – a title resulting from joining the words “thriller” and “twirl” – results from the appropriation of several scenes taken from that movie genre, where travelling works as a device for action suspense, being, however, the “dénouement” suppressed in the editing process; or Letters (2000), where anonymous characters are succeeded and replaced in a post office that, by recurring to double screening (an unsynchronised mirror of the shot action) and to sound obliteration, produces encounters in which a dialogue seems to take place but one that only reveals the communication process in a differed way and in a closed circuit.

This “dystopia” of the communicational act, prolonged in the architectonic framework of anonymous spaces, everyday spaces of share (airport lobbies, railway stations, post offices...), characteristic non-places – lies in the exploration of the interludes in-between actions, of the moments in which apparently nothing happens and in recurring to time as a psychological datum. And thus a field of possibilities is opened to the construction of other fictions on the relational acts.

This set of concerns that involves Filipa César’s research is prolonged in this one-man-show, Sets for Thoughts, opening the October 29 at Cristina Guerra – Contemporary Art and, and is unfolded in research on the language of art itself, by researching one of the pictorial tradition’s fundamental axis: landscape.

Thus, in the double video screening Product Displacement (2002) (a title deriving from “product placement”: technical slang meaning the infiltration of publicity, within a context and in a subliminal way, in the cinema universe) there is a long travelling through a succession a of “real-life” macro-sets (shot in the interior projection department of a design store chain, the raw material with which each person’s “private worlds” are built), crowded with characters that express themselves by the means of a contemplative lethargy, whose regard is guided by arbitrary details in the set.

By recurring to double screening we have, in parallel, the point of view of the one who is seen: a “dimmed” plan revealing the individual’s psychological state, absorbed in a kind of contemplative trance, similar to a stereographic system in which an image, in here mental, results from focusing a point beyond the material plan.

This psychic trace is linked to the series of 14 diptychs of photographs – whose title is homonymous to the Sets for Thoughts exhibition – showing anonymous individuals, recorded with their backs turned to the observer, who can relate, by an editing artifice, to fiction on their double point of view, that of who sees and that of who is seen.

The contemplation/melancholy axis, as a subtle note on everyday indolence, is prolonged in a slanting way in Untitled (2002), the projection of a “landscape model” where a bed, by means of travelling, is transformed into a landscape horizon, a romantic reference to a state of “domestic sublime”.

Filipa César will soon be present in the video lodge section of this year’s Art|Basel|Miami Beach- the International Art Fair/ La Exposicion Internacional de Arte (Miami, U.S.A.), being held from the 5th to the 8th of December. H.M.