In 1989 Robert Cahen made 'Hong Kong Song', a twenty-minute video which caught a striking likeness of this great ant-hill of an island-city. Éder Santos travelled to Hong Kong after it had been handed over to the Chinese and made a video-letter of 7 minutes, in which he tries to reorder the urban chaos. Santos uses titles to creates a series of conceptual frames within which to view the successive images. The same fragmentary images reappear under different denominators: the city is framed as smoke, sound and water. And when the occidental and the oriental begin to cross over into each other in a 'frame by frame' montage the resulting synthesis of the two looks perfectly feasible in Hong Kong. Nowhere in the world do East and West encounter each other more directly than in Hong Kong. How much of this has changed now that the city is no longer a formal western possession? Is there any possibility that West and East will one day really understand each other? In this video Santos allows you a look at the various subjective positions from which the everyday tableau of the city may be seen. The tableau remains fixed , but there is still a difference between the western and the eastern look.
– Lies Holtrop
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Assistant director, editing: Andre Ampara, Pedro Vilela, Music: Paolo Santos, Frederic Conan
Éder Santos ° 1960, Belo Horizonte (Brazil)
Lives and works in Belo Horizonte (Brazil)
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