Although Ana Vidigal is not known for her video production, Domingo à Tarde (Sunday afternoon) can be seen as a synthesis of her visual work.

This video, domestic in nature and amateur in register, uses a camera that focuses on the artist’s face as she performs various actions: she wraps her face with adhesive tape, sticks drawing pins onto it, models it with plasticine and covers it with a transparent plastic bag, filming it through a glassy surface that deforms and transforms it.

Using everyday materials she finds to hand, the artist creates a sequence that incorporates several common elements in her work, such as self-representation, overlapping, collage and transparency. At times, this succession of interventions becomes disturbing: the distortion of the face under the materials looks painful, impelling and repelling the viewer. The idea of the mask is also frequent in certain sections of the video, with the intention of protecting but at the same time provoking, for example with the use of drawing pins.

In a statement recorded in 2012, at the time of the CAM’s 30th anniversary, the artist said that this video is an unpretentious work about tedium and solitude, about ‘what we do on a Sunday afternoon when we feel like doing something and at the same time don’t feel like doing anything.’ Although it seems to evoke a kind of self-punishment, the artist claims that this was an accidental outcome and not the intention behind the work.

Later, Ana Vidigal used stills from this video, to which she added excerpts of text, to create the work Tornei-me feminista para não ser masoquista (I became a feminist to avoid becoming a masochist).

COMPLETE CYCLE

11 jan – 03 feb 2022

Vasco Araújo, Mulheres d’Apolo, 2010

05 feb – 03 mar 2022

Ana Vidigal, Domingo à Tarde, 2000

05 mar – 03 apr 2022

Maria Lusitano, Modern Woman, 2015

05 apr 2021 – 03 may 2022

Gabriel Abrantes, A brief history of Princess X, 2016

This second cycle of videos in the CAM Collection deals with the female condition, feminism, anxiety and solitude, pleasure and even gender issues.

Curator: Patrícia Rosas

CAM IN MOTION

CAM in Motion is an ‘outdoor’ programme that brings together a series of site-specific interventions by artists and exhibitions with works from the Collection in different spaces in the city of Lisbon and its surroundings.