Regina Vater By Patrícia Mourão de Andrade, 2024
Shortly before leaving Brazil for the first time, Regina Vater organized a happening in a square in Rio de Janeiro. Its title, Nós [1973], alluded both to the figure of the knot, of binding, and to the collectivity represented by the first-person plural that formed there, precariously and ephemerally, around (or surrounded by) the ropes that the artist provided for participants to manipulate. In this playful game with the ropes, tying and untying knots, bonds were formed to form a temporary community. The artist could not know that this would be her destiny after becoming a foreigner: the search for bonds.
In 1970, Vater spent her first period abroad, first in Paris, then in New York, where she lived on and off until the end of the decade, when she settled permanently in the United States. Her discovery of herself as a foreigner – displaced, exiled, an Alice in a country she is not so sure is a wonderland – coincided with her encounter with audiovisual media. In the decades to follow, technique and land – native, foreign and, later, the planet – would walk side by side in her work.
In a foreign land, with her camera (initially a photo camera), she tries to get closer to that which she does not understand. Like someone searching for clues, paths, forms of orientation – perhaps roots? – she first looks at the ground, at the places where people have walked, at the traces of their passage. In New York, instead of roots, sprouts, greenery, breadcrumbs, she finds the debris of consumer society, garbage. From these images came her first audiovisual work – as experiments with slide projection and sound became known in Brazil –, Luxo-lixo [1973-1974], where she contrasts images of garbage with the opulence of elegant shop windows.
Then, in a perhaps natural move for those who find themselves thrown into a strange world, the artist turns the camera on herself, as if trying to recognize the stranger she seems to have become in a foreign land. Identity is often based on identification with a place of belonging; once this relationship is shaken, one’s sense of identity is destabilized. In Conselhos de uma lagarta [1976], produced in Super-8, we see the artist’s face, filmed over a period of months, with different expressions, hairstyles and moods. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in her encounter with the caterpillar, Vater does not recognize the place she is in or herself in it. Everything is strange, unstable: her memory is no longer reliable, the words she brings from home are lost, her body is mutating: “I can’t remember things the way I used to – and I don’t remain the same size for more than ten minutes! […] All I know is that it’s very strange for me,” says Alice-Vater.
Conselhos was also the artist’s first experience with an installation: the film was shown opposite another, with close-ups of eyes that seemed to stare at it, in all its versions, as perhaps the caterpillar stared at Alice in bewilderment.
In 1980, Vater settled permanently in the United States, and what began as an attempt to understand a foreign country, then to understand herself as a foreigner, becomes her home, her homeland. At first, there are songs of love and longing for a lost and somewhat romanticized land: the land of “humor and love,” “blessed by God”, where “the best city in Latin America” is located, as we hear in beautiful and brief diary films such as The end [1981-1982] and Saudades do Brasil [1984].
In a man’s world (as James Brown sings), every woman is a bit of a foreigner, here, there, everywhere. So when the married Vater moves to Texas in the mid-1980s, the Brazilian’s sense of foreignness meets that of the woman. The “land”, the place of belonging, security or strangeness, which in other films was New York or Brazil, becomes the home in the literal sense, the dwelling: a place of gender dynamics and performances. In a series of videos, she comments on this lonely and exhausting space that women must occupy if love is to prevail.
There is a very particular loneliness in Vater’s work, the loneliness of an artist who matures in transit, making and breaking connections, finding and losing peers, the loneliness of someone who has never been part of movements, and who seems to walk on the margins, never settling on specific languages, techniques, or media. She is always, as Augusto de Campos aptly described, “healthily out of place”. With time and the maturing of the artist and woman, this solitude, once the result of displacement and change, becomes a form of freedom, a freedom that leads her to find another sense of belonging or communion, now with another land, in this case, the planet, where we all live without the need for a resident visa.
The feeling of self-alienation and displacement that are the hallmark the first fifteen or twenty years of Regina Vater’s filmmaking begins to dissolve as the land ceases to be a nation, a geography inscribed in historical time that defines a sense of identity and belonging, and becomes the very source of life, inscribed in a sort of geological or mythical time. It is Mother Earth, Planet Earth, Nature, which humanity and the nations upon which we base our identities have usurped and exploited. From the 1980s onward, almost all of her videos (she no longer works with Super-8) are characterized by a sense of awe, perplexity, responsibility, or concern for the animal and natural world and the fate of the planet – a movement that places her in a rich and increasingly celebrated eco-feminist tradition. The solitude of the past becomes a form of communion with the cosmos and nature.
Oddly enough, these were her works with the greatest amount of image manipulation, or where the texture of the video image was most explored. Until then, for Vater, the camera was an “instrument-medium for an investigation”, a phrase I borrow from her friend, Hélio Oiticica, in a comment on her work. It served a process, a search, but it was not an instrument to be investigated. In the videos that focus on the natural world, she looks at nature as much as she looks at the nature of the technical images that circulate about nature.
2 OITICICA, Hélio. Text for Regina Vater, July 18, 1978 (typed document). Programa Hélio Oiticica, document number 1.806/78.
Patrícia Mourão de Andrade (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1980) is a researcher, curator and writer based in São Paulo. Her research focuses on artists films, narratives and counter narratives or art history by artists. She has organized thematic series and directors’ retrospectives at different venues and festivals in Brazil and Europe, and edited books on artists such as David Perlov, Jonas Mekas, Pedro Costa and Straub-Huillet.
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