Remembering to Forget – The work of Daniel Blaufuks

Michael Cacoyannis Foundation presents a tribute to the Portuguese Photographer and Filmmaker, Daniel Blaufuks, from 4 to 7 of July, with a series of films, shown for the first time to the Greek audience.

Daniel Blaufuks, born in Lisbon, coming from a Polish-German Jew family, is exploring through his work the connection between time and space and the representation of private and public memory.

The way we deal with it, the way we, as a single person or as a society, decide to remember or forget something, the subjectivity and instability of memory, the extent of gaining or losing our memory, are the main aspects of his artistic work. Historical memory is also a big issue of his predilection.

The title of this tribute «Remembering to Forget» concerns exactly this choice on how to deal with memory and how much this choice determines our present and future.

Daniel Blaufuks was born is Lisbon in 1963 and he is coming from a Polish-German Jew family. He studied photography and he mainly presents his work through books, installations and films. His main predilection is for issues such as the connection between time and space and the representation of private and public memory.

He has been awarded in many international contests, such as Best Portuguese Documentary, IndieLisboa, 2011, Best proposal, LOOP, Barcelona, 2008, Selected for the Deutsche Boerse Award, 2007, Best Photography Book of the Year in the International Category, Photoespana, 2007, BES Photo Award, 2007, Nominated for the Albert Renger-Patzsch Award, 2006, Best Director, Caminhos do Cinema Portugues, Coimbra, 2002, Best Director, Vila do Conde International Short Film Festival, 2001, Kodak National Award, 1990.

He has participated and produced many exhibitions, solo and group around the world and his works can be found in many museum and gallery collections such as Byrd Hoffman Foundation, New York, Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisboa , Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Centro Português de Fotografia, Porto, Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra, Colecçao BES, Lisboa, Fundação PLMJ, Lisboa , MEIAC, Badajoz, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Funchal, O Museu Temporário, Lisboa , Museu da Cidade, Lisboa, among others. Daniel Blaufuks directed several films and videos such as Life is not a picnic, 1998, Black and White, 2000, Under Strange Skies, 2002, Slightly Smaller than Indiana, 2006, Eden, 2011 and published several photography books with more recent the Works on Memory, 2012, Caderno Blaufuks, 2011, Terezin, 2010 and The Archive 2008.

Main Screenings

July 4th, at 20.30
Eden, 60′, doc., video, 2011
Blaufuks documentary look lead us to S. Vicente and through the memories left on the island by the cinema. Based upon an interesting research work, both for the testimonies and for the images, “Eden” plunges into the contemporary imagery of a people and a place through their relation towards cinema.

July 5th, at 20.30
Slightly smaller than Indiana, doc., 78′, sound, video, 2006
In the Summer of 2004, Blaufuks travelled across Portugal to shoot a road-movie about a country that can be crossed in six hours from north to south and just one hour and a half from east to west. The landscape he passed through was the post-Euro 2004 Portugal, with the provisional government of Santana Lopes about to take office. It is a country that still seems like the idea we all have of “our homeland”, but which actually no longer corresponds to reality and is becoming almost unrecognizable. Portugal today is a territory undergoing deep transformation, a mixture of what it was and an idea of America, which was imported and changed by Central Europe years ago. Meanwhile he could only think of the lyrics to a Morrissey song: How I dearly wish I was not here in the seaside town that they forgot to bomb, Come, come, come – nuclear bomb…But Wasn’t it this chaos that he’d come in search of and that had pushed him into this kind of adventure? The reality surpassed his expectations and, yes, this was what he wanted for the film. The problem was that this was not what he wanted for his country.

July 6th, at 20.30
Under strange skies, doc., 57´min., video, 2002
During the Second World War, Lisbon was a corridor for refugees going from Hitler’s occupied territories to America. This film tells two parallel stories about exile and accommodation. Through a narrated memoir and photographs, the tale of a German Jewish family that decided to stay in Portugal is recounted. The larger, more sociological account of the others who used Lisbon’s escape route is skillfully told as well, using beautifully shot historic footage and written memoirs by some of the era’s leading intellectuals, including Heinrich Mann and Alfred Döblin. This film evokes a desperate, intensely romantic period of exile, despair, and, ultimately, freedom.

July 7th, at 20.30
Três quartos de memória, 24′, sound, video, 2011
“Três quartos de memória” is a work in video and super 8, filmed and shown originally at the Eva Klabin Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, that tries to dialogue with the sensation of suspension of time and space within it, constructing sensorial atmospheres and aiming to establish hypothetical relations between the paintings of the collection, the family photographs in the archive and the probable reminiscences enclosed within the house. The title “Três quartos de memória”, which means simultaneously Three Quarters or Three Rooms of Memory, is an intentional word game, which not only refers to the space used originally by the exhibition, but also to the impossibility of an integral and objective memory as well.

What is left is right and what is right is wrong, 5′, loop, sound, video, 2009
An exercise based on a Fred Astaire’s scene from Royal Wedding. This film applied rotational background and camera techniques in order to simulate the absence of gravity. The same system was used and expanded later on by Stanley Kubrick in 2001 – A Space Odyssey to achieve the same effect. In this video, the image and sound are inverted vertically and horizontally causing a feeling of time lag and strangeness.

The absence, 20′, loop, sound, video, 2009
Inspired by La Disparition by Georges Perec, a novel written without using the letter “E”, this work is made from a re-editing of the classic French film A Bout de Souffle by Jean-Luc Godard, with the main character, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, missing. What is left from this absence is our cinematographic memory which instinctively tries to fill in the void around which everything seems to revolve.

Traum, 12′ 20 min., loop, sound, video, 2006
Traum is a non-narrative video fantasy, based on historical memories.
It was shot on location in the abandoned Parisian-style house of Aristides Sousa Mendes, which is still the largest building in a small village in the center of Portugal. Mendes was the Consul of Portugal in Bordeaux and, against the orders of his government, passed thousands of entry visas to refugees in June 1940, permitting in this way the escape through Lisbon to many people, who had been trapped by the German invasion of France. After three days he was suspended and taken by force to Portugal, where subsequently he was expelled from the diplomatic service and dishonored. Unable to work, he became “a refugee in his own country” and was, as well as his large family, dependent on aid from the Jewish refugee agency in Lisbon. He died in poverty in 1954.

Traum is the German word for dream, which means a story that occurs during sleep. The related word Trauma comes from the Greek and it means a wound. Both, the dream story and the wound are visually evocated in this video, as it shows in very slow camera movements the Mendes house in its present state and simultaneously remembers the dream it once must have beenThe music used is by Dmitri Shostakovich, who had a difficult relationship with his government and founded TRAM, a youth theater.

Motel, 4´min., loop, sound, video, 2005
A short video trying to recreate the experience of a long night and the memory of it.

The artist will introduce to each film and will accept questions from the audience at the end of the screenings.

Tickets: 5 euro

Parallel Screening
From 4th to 7th on Video Room.

Theresienstadt, 90′, loop, sound, video, 2007
Through tinting and slowing down the speed of the remains of the original print, this work tries to find some truth in the remaining footage of a Nazi propaganda film. The video is part of Terezín, a larger photographic project edited in book and dvd.
Admission Free.