With performances that challenge the traditional concepts of the modality, Videobrasil continues this year with what has become a permanent feature: stimulus to artists who are researching hybrids resulting from the combination and dialogue between image, movement, music, dance, the body itself and scenic space. In this edition, Alexandre da Cunha, Eder Santos, Luiz Duva and Marcello Mercado – the latter prize winner at 12th Videobrasil – are representatives of this live form of expression in constant transformation. The programme, varied and of various approaches, advances the Festival’s idea of promoting a kind of permanent thinking laboratory.
Argentinean artist Marcello Mercado brings work of impact, in which his orifices, his own body and a politicized discourse are key elements.
artists
Works
Curator's text 2001
The Body as a point of convergence
The performances by Argentinean artist Marcello Mercado usually make use of disturbing elements and references: rats with tumours, stuffed dogs, suggestions of medical practices, the body of the artist being penetrated by invasive tubes. The actions, with the participation of the audience, can be broadcast in real time, taking concrete events into the virtual world. The work of Mercado (born in Córdoba and now based in Cologne, Germany), also makes use of mathematics, as in the series of performances in 2001 based on Kurt Gödel’s theorems. In 1988, Videobrasil brought to Brazil his video The Wam Place, which won the main prize of the Festival. The work dealt with “the individual reconstruction after the historical fragmentation caused by the violence and the failure to recognise it”.
In this edition of Videobrasil, Mercado presents the performance Politik – preceded by a lecture – in which the artist interacts with a tube that penetrates his body. “We re a single hole – infinite-hole-tamed-hole. The articulation of... forces”, writes the artist about his work. In Politik, Mercado, naked on a bench to a background of video monitors displaying details of bodies. The presentation, non-linear, lasts for about half an hour and, as in the artist’s videos and texts, is strongly politicised, placing the body in the centre of the discussion about manipulation, vigilance, desire and duty. Mercado had already shocked, provoked horror and fascination with videos in which he recovered Argentina’s most dramatic memory: the time when the country, under the sword of the military regime, lived immersed in fear, silence and torture.
In the video El borde de la lluvia (1995), for instance, Mercado exercised impacting contrasts to talk about such period of Argentinean history. He brought together foetuses and animals in slaughterhouses to the sound of Wagner. Imbued with sadness, touched by the pain of a country that to this day asks for those disappeared during the military dictatorship, Mercado’s work built metaphors and gave new meaning to the images.
New meaning giving, indeed, is a chief characteristic of Mercado’s collages. A delirious world, very much his own, full of now lyric, now grotesque elements, which articulate to speak of what we have been through and what we are still living. Mercado does not lock himself up in nostalgic melancholy. On the contrary: he uses technology and explores the possibilities open by to incorporate new elements in his work. Cameras taking to the streets, internet broadcasts. Mercado redeems history and ideas, and from this original combination, has been producing videos, suggestive sites and performances, full of strong images.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, " 13º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil", pp. 209-210, São Paulo, SP, 2001.