Margarida Paiva’s video works narrate discontinuous stories based on real events, which she deconstructs to reassemble the fragments in unexpected ways to create new plots.
Using cinematographic narrative techniques, her works relate intense portrayals of pensive emotions in which the characters become trapped inside their own mental state. These characters are used to lead the story into a subliminal, dark and fragmented world. Themes of death, trauma, isolation, and memory are reoccurring motifs in these films. Characterizing an existential contemporary solitude, these are poetical narratives with a hint of something undefinable.
Margarida Paiva (1975), originally from Portugal, lives and works in Oslo. In 2007, she completed her Master degree at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her work has been shown widely in exhibitions and international festivals such as Oslo Intercultural Museum (NO); Muratcentoventidue Contemporary Art Gallery, Bari (IT); Screen City Biennial, Stavanger (NO); KINO DER KUNST, Munich (DE). Her short film ‘Every Story Is Imperfect’ (2012) has been awarded at FOKUS 2014 Video Art Festival at Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen (DK).
Every Story Is Imperfect
HD Video / 09:10 min / 2012
“Every Story Is Imperfect” is an interrupted narrative which deals with the fictionalization of news reports. The film starts as a common story, we hear news on the radio about a missing woman, but soon there are breaks, interruptions, unfinished actions, an unraveling of places and voices. The characters remain emotionally distant and unavailable, wandering around in trains or empty rooms, absentminded. The stories touch on themes such as loss, murder, abuse and rape. The film approaches the inability to communicate when confronted with random acts of violence.
THE DAY I WASN’T THERE
HD Video / 12:08 min / 2014
The film is a fragmented narrative which captures the distressing memory of a train accident. The camera follows three unknown women in different urban scenarios as simultaneously a female narrator recounts about an experience of trauma. It is unclear whether the violence was really due to the accident or if it was self-inflicted. Slowly a story unravels.
In Her Footsteps
HD Video / 14:17 min / 2013
“In Her Footsteps” is a film originally made as a digital city walk in Grønland, an area in Oslo, made for the project Multiwalks, artistic walks in intercultural cities. A female voice leads the audience through eight different locations telling stories of people and places. In each location one can see a short video and meet a person. In the frame of the 100-year jubilee of women’s suffrage in Norway in 2013, these stories focus on women and their place in Grønland. Throughout the years, distinguished women had a strong position in this area and stood together to fight, help and protect their families and the ones in need. Today the women’s community is still remarkable in Grønland and parallel stories are drawn between past and present.