Eder Santos

Biography

Brazilian videomaker Eder Santos creates vibrant, poetic works that merge the personal, the cultural and the technological to reinterpret motifs that are central to Brazil's African, indigenous and European heritage. Evoking the rhythms and textures of memory and history, he crafts a visual language of high-end and low-end technologies, from digital media to Super-8 film.

As a Brazilian artist, Santos is acutely aware of the socioeconomic relation of technological media and cultural representation: "I have never lost sight of the fact that I am using a technology rather foreign to my city and country — in short, there is a gap in the relation between the social and the technological. As a consequence, I always attempt to use our own cultural elements."

In the vivid UAKTI-Bolero (1987), Santos' electronic rendering of a musical performance, Ravel's Bolero has been interpreted in terms of a Brazilian sensibility. Rite & Expression (1988) is a televisual reconstruction of 17th-century Baroque architecture, religious syncretism and African cultural rituals. Europe in Five Minutes (1986) and I Cannot Go to Africa Because I Am on Duty (1990) address the use of technological media as modes of cultural "documentation."

States Santos, "I use technology to express visual and tactile sensations, moods and feelings. I aim at creating a private world that is both an inner and an outer reality."

Santos was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1960. He received a B.A. in Fine Arts and Visual Communications from Federal University of Minas Gerais. He has taught at Newton Pava College, Federal University of Minas Gerais, and Catholic University of Minas Gerais, and is a founding member of Emvideo, an independent video production company. His work has been broadcast internationally, and exhibited at Tucano Arts, Rio de Janeiro; The Kitchen, New York; FestRio, Brazil; International Festival of Television and Video, Montbeliard, France; Berlin Film and Video Festival, World Wide Video Festival, and the Bonn Videonale, among other festivals and institutions. Santos lives in Belo Horizante, Brazil.