UNIA arteypensamiento: Narratives in Fugue IV: Pedro Costa

UNIA arteypensamiento continue their discursive workshop series with Narratives in Fugue Part IV, focusing on the work of Pedro Costa.

The workshop will discuss the film-maker’s break with the theoretical division between fiction and documentary, in what Costa has called documentaries about sensibilities.

The cinema of Pedro Costa raises fundamental questions about the political power of this artistic practice, suggesting new ways of feeling and of doing things to develop a new framework of commitment in representing reality. Like fictional essays, his films approach reality without entering it and, rather than making a show of denouncing it, condense it. His images resist any kind of naturalism, stylising reality down to its essence. With radical use of devices such as time and space, it is by artifice, that is to say the spatial treatment of the shot (which is usually fixed), the flow of words, editing and sound (often from a scene playing off-camera), that the complex reality of a particular world is revealed.

The workshop will discuss the film-maker’s aesthetic position on his break with the theoretical division between fiction and documentary, in what Costa has called documentaries about sensibilities. These films are meticulously constructed in expanded time, a time that persists rather than flowing on, that resists the present and eliminates any spontaneity or improvisation, while transforming itself into the human and political memory of a group.

The aim of the workshop is not to contribute to the proliferation of new cultural products but to reflect, in the company of Pedro Costa and his films, on the possibilities of cultural action in the face of an industry capable of absorbing any product.

The workshop, led by Pedro Costa, will be held over three days with morning and afternoon sessions, including debates, film viewings and practical experiment.

Visit UNIA arteypensamiento’s event page for more details here.