The third panel of the Seminar Places and Meanings in Art: Debates from the South (curated and moderated by Sabrina Moura) put together the curator and Latin American art professor at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Texas, Austin, Andrea Giunta (Argentina); the full professor in social history at the University of São Paulo, Julio Pimentel (Brazil); and the essayist, psychoanalyst and professor at the Department of Art of Fluminense Federal University, Tânia Rivera (Brazil). The debate revolved around Rethinking Narratives: Art, Memory and Fiction. The event also included video statements by Gabriel Abrantes and Ting-Ting Cheng, artists participating in the 19th Festival, providing food for thought for the panelists.
Julio Pimentel opened his speech by delivering an analysis of Abrantes’ and Cheng’s work, listing their differences and commonalities. According to him, they both use humor to “build imaginary worlds we would love to get lost in. Andrea Giunta discussed how we remember the dictatorship eras, and the relevance of eyewitness accounts: "for the history of dictatorships, these accounts are not fiction; they are a primordial source for one to understand what was going on", she said. Tânia Rivera said that according to Freud, “reality conflates neither with the realistic narrative nor with the perceptual indices that might endow memory with some degree of factual value,” and dreaming and reverie “bring fiction into our daily lives.”