Director Biography – Vasco Diogo (PAINT ON PAINT #4)

Vasco Diogo was born in Lisbon in 1970. He has a degree in Sociology by Universidade Nova de Lisboa, a master degree in social sciences by Universidade de Lisboa and a PhD in Communication Sciences by Universidade Nova de Lisboa, with the thesis: “Video: specificity, hybridity and experimentation”(scholarship by FCT, 2008).
From 2008 to 2020 he was a professor at University of Beira Interior teaching mainly cinema directing, new cinemas and experimental cinema.
After being co-founder of Projecto Teatral, works, since 1998 in performance, video art and experimental cinema around themes such as self-presentation, truth and manipulation. In experimental cinema he has won several international awards (more than 70), specially with the film: “anexperimentalviralvlog – the movie remix # !”. He has shown his works in several exhibitions and festivals in Portugal, Spain, Italy, USA, Canada, India, Germany, France, Cyprus, Poland, etc.

Director Statement

I consider myself a beginning artist with a beginner’s mind. Most of the time I don’t know exactly what I’m doing except for the fact that
I’m working in a flux of expanded consciousness quite different from ordinary life. In spite of that, I like to work on the blurring of
frontiers between life and art by including processes and actions that were always available to my intuition and judgment. It’s probably only a matter of listening to “silence”. Accordingly, improvisation and indetermination are constant ludic concerns in the processes I like to work with. Moreover, an outsider, primitive or raw creation spirit always drove my urge to make things, both in video art as in performance art or mixed media. But, on the other side, I’m strongly influenced by the language of experimental cinema and video art, not only as a viewer but also as an academic researcher and teacher. That led me to a growing conceptualization of my work regarding issues of medium specificity (mainly related to video art) such as technology
co‐creative determination, temporality, manipulation, self
documentation, the body as language, the hybridization between
image, sound and real space and the viewer’s implication in the
work. These are all “serious” things which I like to explore with a
good sense of humor keeping in mind “classical” artistic values such as image composition, color, form, rhythm, etc. All intuition is also a matter of perception and all perception is also a matter of reasoning.
This principle works both for the single channel videos I make but
also for the installations and “live video performances”. These
different forms of expression I’ve been using share a common
characteristic: making us listen, see and feel impossible, more than
beautiful, things while believing in their hidden, spiritual truth.