Catarina Campino

Catarina Campino trained in the visual arts at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual, in Lisbon, Portugal. In the early 1990’s, she conceived her artistic work as a manifestation and an exchange of affection, creating texts, drawings, and objects centred on the relationships with those closest to her in daily life and on an emotional level. Ever since, interpersonal relations, and in particular love relations, remain at the core of her work. In 1995, she developed an interest in using sound as a working material. In her subsequent works, she has sought to investigate audition as a form of perception and the performative possibilities of sound, as well as involving the spectator as an active participant in this process. Her interest in exploring sound lies at the origin of one of the key features of her work, and in particular, her video works: the use of music as a fundamental issue from both a formal and semantic point of view. Another decisive consequence of this interest in sound was her approach to other creative fields. In fact, since the mid 1990’s, Catarina Campino has worked on a regular basis with creators from the fields of theatre, music, cinema, and dance. This vast collaborative experience has been extremely operative in the definition of her video work, where the performativity and the characterization of the performers, the artificiality of the environments, the way in which the narrative of the image merges with that of the music, and the simultaneously narrative and contemplative logic inscribed on linear time are recurrent features. However, her video work clearly distinguishes itself from the way in which she uses this medium when working with other creators: she systematically uses the single steady shot, avoids editing (or conjures its presence), and refrains from using ostensive visual effects. Between 2001 and 2003, many of her works take conventional spaces and situations from the world of opera and classical singing as their starting point and transfigure them. Since then, and with her current use of installation, sculpture, performance, and photography, she has broadened the scope of her work. More recently, her approach to emotions in relation to music has materialised itself in a series of works where the contribution of professional performers (actors and dancers) is realised by intentionally nearing in on their biographical context. Blurring the frontier that lies between the “real life” and the artistic realm – induced performativity – Catarina Campino challenges the conventions of representation. Her agenda has also expanded to encompass processes of observation, analysis and criticism of the socio-political contexts she deems to approach. Her use of the codes and rules of well-known games, such as “Monopoly” or “Snakes and Ladders”, supports the conceptualisation and formalisation of latest works, as well as interactive strategies which convert spectators into participants. Throughout her career, Catarina Campino has maintained a sideline activity as a curator and producer of independent group exhibitions. Moreover, she has published reflective texts concerning the work of several artists from her generation, as well as interviews to other artists and agents of the contemporary art scene.