7 ARTISTS

1995 – RIO DE JANEIRO
1’00”

The first video project by Raul Mourão, 7 artists, was produced in 1995 at the Sérgio Porto Cultural Center, in Rio de Janeiro. It includes photographic direction by Paulo Violeta, with editing by Leonardo Domingues and general assistance by Fabiana Egrejas. To produce the action that resulted in the video, Mourão called on seven artists — André Costa, Barrão, Carlos Bevilacqua, Eduardo Coimbra, Marcia Thompson, Marcos Chaves and Ricardo Basbaum. They were suspended by climbers’ belts from the walls of the gallery of the cultural center. Using humor and irony, Mourão created, as he puts it, “a visual gag, where artists and works are mixed up together, occupying the same space”. In the words of the critic and curator, Paulo Sergio Duarte, it is both a performance and an installation, presented as a video. “But the installation is alive”, he adds, since each “work” of 7 artists carries with it “a past, a present and a future condensed into the moment of presentation”. Thus, writes the critic, “7 artists enters into the history of performance and installation, injecting tension at the frontier between these contemporaneous genres and, moreover, conceiving, without seeking to, an allegory of this elastic present which extends in the moment to what will be the past and what was the future”.