SARA RAMO
Os Ajudantes (the helpers), 2015
HD video, color, audio 5.1
19’26”
Edition 1/5 + 1 AP
Acquired in 2017

Core to Sara Ramo’s artistic research is her interest in the way conventions and rituals vary from one culture to another and how this affects perception and understanding. Having split her life between Spain and Brazil, from very early on Ramo experienced these differences personally. Brazil also happens to be a place where many different cultural influences have blended into each other.

Os Adjudantes is part of a trilogy of short films that focuses on music performances. Indeed, rituals for experiencing music —and the way of understanding it— vary drastically from a concert hall to a ritual dance or other spiritual undertakings in a ‘primitive’ culture. Blending various cultural references, Ramo stages rituals of her own invention. She confronts the viewer with the way she or he creates meaning, consciously or not. It is in fact noteworthy that, while she primarily presents these works in exhibitions, they are at times screened in film festivals, where the references are altogether very different.

The trilogy was initiated in 2010 with A banda dos 7 (The Band of the 7), which consisted in the staging of agroup of seven musicians wearing masks and costumes. They appear to the left of a long grey wall in the middle of a desert landscape, and perform as they mechanically glide in front of the wall; on reaching the other end, they disappear behind it. The musicians in Os Adjudantes are also masked and costumed, but their ghostly presence in the darkness of a forest at night gives their performance a magical, almost conspiratorial quality, as they emerge from the dark and disappear again, always at a distance from the camera. As the night comes to an end and the tropical forest awakens, their curious sounds give way to an intense concert of birdsong.