Quando

Video, soundtrack (3’43”)

This video is part of a series of works dealing with pop music (here, Brazilian pop music) and audio/video processes. It employs a simple process that that creates separate “times” within the same video and audio, in stark contrast with the song name. The song here is the silly but lovely Quando (“When”, in English), a 60s hit by Brazilian pop king Roberto Carlos used in the musical movie Roberto Carlos em Ritmo de Aventura.

The song starts as a regular music video, and then slowly drifts into disarray because of the process. Besides the interesting effects and the tension between the original and this processed version, this kind of process interests me because it breaks the syntax of well-known cultural symbols. This way, the remainder pieces cannot be read as a repetition of a simple and closed symbol, something we already know: each of its shattered pieces, frames, sounds bear a significance and an interest on their own, marks of an epoch and of a style that define much of Brazilian culture as we know it.