Alexandre Alagôa
Directing
Biography
Alexandre Alagôa (1994) is an experimental filmmaker, multimedia artist and electronic music producer working between Lisbon and Luxembourg. Alagôa’s film and video work explores the mechanical, material and durational qualities of the audiovisual medium, and its immediate physical and kinetic impact on the viewer’s nervous system, often shattering the senses of vision and hearing into new sensible and obscure realms. Following a continuous research on conceptual art, the fluxus movement, and the structrural filmmaking approach, along with a constant curiosity on scientific issues on perception and psychology, Alagôa’s audiovisual pieces unfold into layered experiences often evoking optical illusions (such as the waterfall effect), studies on the physiology of the eye (such as phosphenes, after-images, purkinje trees and other entoptic phenomena) and synaesthetic sensations in order to destabilize, breakdown and (re)organize perceptual experience to its core elements, often inducing bodily and mental dispositions, at the same time leading the viewer to an awareness of their act of seeing and hearing.
Known For
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
Grid
A corridor of an apartment is transformed into a claustrophobic and vertiginous vortex that swallows and imprisons you in an infinite fall through a mise en abyme: it’s a pure enclosure inside the image world, it’s the Descent into the Maelstrom.
Vortex
A Sunday walk in a forest turns into a poetic journey on perception.
When I Close My Eyes I See Everything
An obsessive exploration of the three geometric dimensions in hopes of reaching a fourth.
XYZ
The corner of a street is matched and mixed with the chant of a bird recorded on that same street. A symbiotic relationship is triggered: the rapid and successively repetitive montage cuts between the image of the street and the corners of the video frame itself produce new textures and shapes in our brain, whilst the sound follows the same rhythmic movements by emphasizing different “corners” (frequencies) from the bird’s singing. The energetic potency stemming from the junction of these elements creates a new image that is almost tactitle, maleable and rippling. The result is a somewhat humorous operation of the portuguese word "corner" throughout the different stages of making the piece, finally unveiling a piercing physical and kinetic experience for all the corners of our eyes and ears.