Director: Robin Vanbesien

Cinematography: Graça Castanheira

Sound: Isabel Dias Martins

Actors: Cláudio da Silva, Diogo Bento, Ricardo Vaz Trindade

Sound Design: Bart Aga

Editing: Robin Vanbesien

Producer: Maumaus Artists-in-Residence Programme/Lumiar Cité

Year: 2015

Runtime: 23’

HD Video

Colour

Sound



Funded by: Governo de Portugal/Secretário de Estado da Cultura/Direção-Geral das Artes/Flanders State of the Art

Because he’s alone, a sailor’s always telling himself who he is, writes Kathy Acker in her short story ‘Lust’ (1988), revisiting Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest (1947), a novel about a young sailor and a trade-off between a murder and a transgressive sexual act. A sailor is nowhere home, always alone, which gives him the opportunity to act within the illusion of a mirage. Taking his cue from Acker’s and Genet’s “sailor”, Robin Vanbesien unfolds a metonymic figure for a nameless desire circulating through painted partial objects and prolific poetic images invoked by words. Characters, genders and bodies appear at sea before the possibilities of an undecidably erotic (homoerotic or just autoerotic) fantasy. The relations appear dissociated, stemming from the desire of an emptied-out self. All seems to be given with the gravity that yields a passive tense of verbs, static gestures, and staged compositions. Landscape, painted or filmed, functions as the medium to circumscribe the figures. It reflects the notion of a framing gaze returned from its object in a specular dialogue. Although they seem to encompass each other’s plastic-pictorial unity, the author and its hero, the figure and the spectator, are conjoined in worlds separated from each other.