Invited curator |

With research and curatorship by critic Arlindo Machado, “Made in Brasil - Three Decades of Brazilian Video” is the most comprehensive retrospective on the theme already made in Brazil. Coordinated by Roberto Moreira and executed by the Cinema and Video Nucleus of Itaú Cultural, the full show, which is being specially screened in this commemorative edition of 20 years of Videobrasil, gathers 50 works by numerous artists, who were grouped in thematic programs approaching different aspects of these three decades of video production in the country. The project also results in the book “Made in Brasil - Three Decades of Brazilian Video”, with references to the historical context of the production and its players, analyses of works made in the period and essays by critics and curators who had an important role in the promotion of a video circuit in Brazil. Obsessions and procedures that traverse the video history – body, politics, hybridism, the relation with TV – support the programs in the show. Behind them one can perceive an evo-lution that begins in experiences carried out by the so-called “pioneers” (plastic artists of the generation 1960-70 who manipulated the first home video equipment in search of more dynamic supports, such as Antonio Dias and Annabela Geiger), thrives in the work by the independent video generation, devoted to the documentary, social themes and TV possibilities as an expressive system (Olhar Eletrônico, TVDO), and, from the 1990’s on, leads to authorial works (Sandra Kogut, Eder Santos), focused on the investigation of electronic language. In the introduction to the book, Arlindo Machado writes: “It’s curious that we celebrate the majority of our video in a moment when a whole current discourse seems to decree the death of this medium, as if it has been excelled by digital technologies and ‘virtual’ forms of diffusion in the telematic nets. It is a matter of point of view. But if we consider ‘video’ as the synchronization of electronic image and sound, whether analogic or digital, if we understand electronic image as that constituted of discreet elemental units (lines and dots) that succeed in highspeed on the screen, then we can conclude that today almost everything is video and, instead of being moribund, this medium ends up occupying an hegemonic place among the expressive means of our era. What is the ‘digital cinema’ but a form of video? What are the digital animation formats in the net but forms of video? Don’t the graphic computerization, the videogame, all kinds of interactive animations essentially appear to receivers as electronic images and sounds and, thus, as videos? Nowadays, isn’t the cinema mostly enjoyed in the form of video? Si la vidéo est mort, vive la vidéo!"

artists

Works