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Paulo Sergio Duarte (…) The characters within the character
We must not forget that Miguel is also a filmmaker and an artist who works with installations where time, music and sounds are crucial raw materials. There is a narrative order and a syntax in his photographic work. But be careful, narrative order does not mean literature. Miguel's narrative incorporates different rhythms, syncopation and hyperbole, but in the form of images. In the last analysis, different times. He derives from this experience the ability to unfold dramas and dramatise everyday occurrences without the stereotype of a calculated representation. The skin may be a new character involving the actor, the character which belongs to him, which is part of him, but it also acts, it has its own place and is transformed. While sharing the scene, the epidermis changes on stage, the ground on which other characters shall walk: the marks on the body. It would be possible to classify these marks by looking at Miguels' photos. The accidental ones, the voluntary ones, the ones made for rituals, the initiation marks, the ones that are visible at a distance, others almost invisible, and so on...it doesn't matter which class they're in, they are all manifested like marks of distinction, they take part in the identity of the character who gives them life by showing them. If we look from a purely aesthetic i.e. formal point of view, we shall establish types of bodily marks, the sex of the characters, colour and shadow. We may notice that marks caused by aggression are often shown in interiors or nocturnal scenes. Those works of art which wrap the body for participation in rituals, such as indigenous paintings, require light, a lot of light. They are depicted in daylight and we can imagine that if they were shown at night, they would be illuminated by a bonfire. Mutilations caused by accidents are accepted by the characters, they are never shown off. This game of differences, these relationships in the construction of the images, the preponderance of warm tones, all collaborate so that the autonomous detail of the body marks be reintegrated with the whole: the body. The body, in turn, is always situated, its social condition is explicit and its ethnic origin is underlined. And thus, from theatre to theatre, from one drama to the next, the total dynamics are recovered, while always considering society as the base. The important thing is to point out that the characters' dignity is never questioned. Not even at the saddest moments, misery is not taken to be a natural state. That is the formal result accompanying the ethics of the work: in a world without utopias, at the very edge, in the furthest limits of material and existential experience, where sadness sets in and the pessimism of intelligence is justified, the manifest strokes of joy go further than the élan vital: they all share their participation in some part of the social body. These are the times, times in existence and in society, felt in limit conditions, which Miguel Rio Branco restores and emancipates. Times which have been forgotten in a world dictated by the totalitarian demands of the times set by the market and by technology. (…)
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