FUSO Festival Open Call received 193 applications from Portuguese artists or artists residing in Portugal, from which 13 finalist works were selected by the festival's artistic director, Jean- François Chougnet. The jury responsible for the EDP Foundation Acquisition Award was composed by the visual artist Irit Batsry, the art historian Isabel Nogueira, the film director Susana de Sousa Dias, the responsible for the Art Collection of EDP Foundation, Margarida Chantre, and by the winners of the previous edition, Sofia Arriscado and Costanza Givone.
The jury wants to acknowledge the enthusiastic participation of all the artists who submitted their works and to congratulate the finalists of this year's Open Call for their talent and involvement, which will undoubtedly contribute to the field of video art in Portugal.
The artists whose works have been selected are: Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro, Gui Athayde, Hoji Fortuna, Inês Norton, José Taborda, Júlio F. R. Costa, Léna Lewis-King, Leonor Sousa, Marcelo Moscheta, Maxime Martinot, Ricardo Leandro, Sara Carneiro and Tiago Bastos Nunes.
The jury decided to award a video which, from the very first moment, maps out the complex and in-depth reflection on the present threats to global security and our individual freedom. The video opens with a sentence from the startling tale “The Antelopes” by Marguerite Duras: “One day, on the Moroccan shores, a hundred and fifty years ago, thousands of antelopes together threw themselves into the sea.” Excerpts of videos, found on the internet, show images of antelopes being followed by drones flying over bare landscapes. It is a raw composition, as an electronic game with pixilated glitches, in step with the growing cadence of the soundtrack.
This construct converges in the aerial images of Paris during the confinement of 2020, revealing the author’s starting point. The COVID 19 in France, with the drastic sanitary measures subject to intense policing of the population with drones, was the context that made the artist confront, in an uncompromising way, the question: an ultra-policed free nature, an ultra-policed free man? Accept or resist?
The jury recognizes this work as a gesture of resilience and hope in its bewildering and challenging analogy, and it is with great pleasure that it announces that this year the winner of the EDP Foundation Acquisition Award is Maxime Martinot with the video “The Antelopes” (2020).
The Ar.Co. Incentive Award, which results from the public vote, also went to “The Antelopes”, by Maxime Martinot. This award consists of a scholarship to attend one academic year of Individual Project in the Cinema/Image and Movement department of this school.
