Fellowship awarded to Francisco Janes for the project O Concílio
Jury: Phill Niblock, Thomas Ankersmidt, Manuel Costa Cabral, Rui Eduardo Paes, Emanuel Dimas Pimenta, Margarida Garcia and Isabel Alves
O Concílio
This audiovisual project has Serra da Estrela as its focal point. It explores boundaries within that geography together with an idea of place, specificity and tension, manifesting these as subjective and disembodied chains of observations, an experience that unfolds within the coordinates of a phenomenology of perception.
The work is centred in the relation that exists between time and motion, traces and images without marks (according to José Gil's philosophical concept of "naked-image"); it further investigates the surge of small perceptions, the issue of duration and attention, and visual illusions of scale and form by way of oscillations between sound and image.
It includes three video projections and a stereo sound work for space, developed from the manipulation of sound recordings. These include production sound together with sound produced by the wind on wires in the mountain. The installation has the total duration of sixty minutes, combined into twenty minute loops. In the prepared space, an invariable structure of signifiers collides with a contingent alignment of cinematic elements, understood as a situation of indeterminate duration.
Biography
Francisco Janes (Lisbon, 1981) lived and worked in Lisbon, New York, Los Angeles and Vilnius. Studied Modern Literature at Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa. In 2007 he concluded the Advanced Course in Photography at Ar.Co, along with an independent studies program with Nuno Faria. He received a master's degree in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts in 2012, where he worked closely with James Benning and Charles Gaines. His work has shown regularly since 2006 in galleries, museums and non-institutional spaces in Europe, the United States and Asia.
Francisco has been focusing on the scission between humans and nature through places, ideas or ways of being in the world that are insular or even utopian. His filmmaking, sound design and installation have kept a touch on perception itself and the phenomenological mechanisms of consciousness. Through montage both for spaces and the cinema, from the disembodied perspective of documents, he proposes experience-based forms of understanding.