About The Artist: Hugo Cataldo Barudi
- About The Artist:Hugo Cataldo Barudi
Hugo Cataldo Barudi (Asunción, 1978) is an artist and director working in Asunción, Paraguay. He is the current President of the Organización de Profesionales del Audiovisual Paraguayo (OPRAP), which could be described as the Paraguayan Director’s Guild. He is also the owner of Ficticia, a production company specializing in feature film development, film and TV production services. In this interview we talk about his digital art, painting and drawing, (the Monsters series, the Punto húmedo series, the Frida series and its reception), his last feature-length film on sexual deviance, (Semana capital, 2010), his next feature-length film on innocence in love (La chiperita, 2015), and filmmaking in contemporary Paraguay.
This volume of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies features works of art from the Frida series; a series that began as strictly digital variations on the theme of iconic images of Frida Kahlo, yet quickly moved beyond that as art collectors requested prints and later painted versions. Once Cataldo began producing the painted adaptations of these digital originals, demand for the pieces exploded. In this interview Cataldo speaks a little about the sometimes ironic implications of this situation in terms of the market’s treatments of pieces qualified as “originals” versus “copies.” This interview took place in July 2013. More of Cataldo’s selected digital art can be seen here: http://hugocataldo.blogspot.com/
A Word with Cataldo
Hugo, I presented some of my work on Semana capital (2010) at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Chicago, and the question I couldn’t answer was: How did the gay community respond to Semana capital?
I don’t know how to answer that question, either. The gay community doesn’t really exist here. It’s very fragmented. It’s the same as if you talk about a syndicate of producers. They aren’t organized yet, so it doesn’t exist. You can see a lot of happy-go-lucky, proud and out people, but there isn’t a community. There is PARAGAY (NGO), which is an association that organizes the Besatón every year around gay pride week, where [End Page 7] they go to congress and start kissing. So that’s what I know, but most of my gay friends aren’t really political. I know more political lesbians than political gay men. What I got from some people—not necessarily gay people—that really surprised me, was if I have something against men in general, and why do I mistreat men in the film. And I find that so interesting because I didn’t do that. Well, I did, but I didn’t. Because most of the stories were created by the actors thinking they were writing for the opposite sex. So you get really strong females, which were roles written for men originally, and then you have the opposite.
So am I understanding this correctly? You wrote roles for a man or a woman and then you switched them?
That’s why we, the actors, had seven weeks of training. Muy lúdico fue. Veníamos a las reuniones y yo les decía “Tengo esta historia. Esta historia se va a basar en la gula, pero va a ser de una pareja”—no se sabía si era hombre y mujer todavía—“Uno es un bulímico que come en el baño y el otro o la otra, en vez de darle asco eso, le gusta.” Entonces, “¿¿Qué??” decían los actores, “¡Me encanta!” Para ellos era un placer. Bueno, entonces yo les decía, “Eva, escribí un personaje para Hugo pero basándote en el bulímico. Pero vos le describís como vos querés al bulímico, con toda su personalidad en primera persona…” Entonces escribía Eva, “Hola. Me llamo Roberto y tengo 24 años. Tengo este problema…” y sobre su relación con el otro personaje, etc. Y después yo escribía uno para Eva; “Eva es tal cosa, Eva es así asá.” Y después yo...
