Velmora
Canal Zero is putting sixty years of Portuguese television online. For the launch we bought forty sets by weight from a repair shop in Almada, wired them into one wall and filmed a man tuning them in the dark until a lost broadcast came back through the snow.
[Project Images]
Frames from the project
Forty sets by weight
Canal Zero’s archive held sixty years of broadcasts, and almost nobody knew it was there. The brief was one film for the launch, with no talking heads and no montage of famous clips.
We bought forty televisions by the kilo from a repair shop in Almada, the kind that still work if you tap them in the right place. Duarte spent two days wiring them into one curved wall.
One night in the studio
Every screen shows real static from its own aerial. The man at the centre tunes them one by one, and the only picture that holds is a 1974 weather report from the archive itself.
After the launch
The film ran before the evening news for two weeks. The archive’s first month brought 210,000 visits, most of them after nine at night.
[Testimonial]
People write to us about the weather report. It was the one clip we never planned to show.
Inês Moura, head of archive at Canal Zero
