Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Carro-bomba

There are moments when anything can happen. Specially a tragedy. For the feitoamãos/F.A.Q. group, the general feeling of the imminence of an attack – be it in a street in the Middle East, be it in a car stuck in São Paulo traffic – has reached an unheard of degree of palpability after September 11 2001. “Carro-Bomba” speaks of the instant in which the notion of danger has become unquestionable, to the point we desire it to resume quickly, so that life can go on. The preparation for an unpleasant conclusion is the circumstance that the artists’ collective exposes in their performance, which makes use of smoke, projections, noises and the crowding of people.

The idea does not derive solely from a meditation on terrorist actions. In its triviality, everyday life also presents situations of risk. “Banal objects can contain some form of violence, as in the insecurity a boy playing with fireworks feels because he knows that the firecracker in his hands is going to explode. This is the feeling of terror that is expected and even desired”, explains video artist Lucas Bambozzi, member of the group. “We start from the notion that we do not know how to relate to all these terror issues. We, Brazilians, routinely live with equally tragic forms of violence.”

The suspension of the space-time relationship caused by all forms of violence is the point of this performance. “Taking as a metaphor the dramatic expectation that arises in the imminence of a happening of this nature, we intend to translate the uncomfortable feeling inherent to the many forms of violence that surround us.”

F.A.Q. is an offshoot of the feitoamãos collective, which has produced collaborative research projects on the languages and possibilities of electronic art since 1999. Besides Bambozzi, the group is formed by André

Amparo, André Melo, Claudio Santos, Marcelo Braga, Rodrigo Minelli and Ronaldo Gino. “Our presentations have always touched on themes relating to politics, to violence and to urban daily life. With ‘Carro-Bomba’, we aim to question the politics of violence and violence in politics, or the forms of political action that discard cul- tural, religious, racial and gender differences as fundamental elements for humanity.”

Conception: feitoamãos/F.A.Q. Participants: André Amparo, André Melo, Claudio Santos, Lucas Bambozzi, Marcelo Braga, Rodrigo Minelli, Ronaldo Gino, Vitor Garcia. Special guest: Wilson Sukorski.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "15º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil": de 06 a 25 de setembro de 2005, p. 128 a 129, São Paulo, SP, 2005.

Performances

Centered on the body, the performance, as ephemeral and unpredictable as it is, is not a form of entertainment, but an artistic genre that involves confrontation and risk. Political by necessity, it subverts the relationship between the work and the public, who is not invited to suspend disbelief before a fiction, but to pay witness to an occurrence. Transiting amongst disciplines every bit as much as it evades them, the performance becomes the expression of an art form in which the boundaries between genres cease to make sense. Perhaps that is why it is singled out as the contemporary artistic manifestation par excellence.

It was the observation of this phenomenon, especially in the evident manner in which it reverberates through electronic art – now increasingly more politicized and linked to the presence of the artist –, that motivated the gathering of such an expressive group of performers at this Festival. Brazilian, North American, Asian, African, they represent various takes on a genre of infinite hybridism, intent on dissolving the limits between artistic expressions one moment, and pointing to social issues and sharing universal scars the next.

One of the most striking of these approaches, the performance openly constituted as a political gesture, is rep- resented, among others, by the Cuban-born New Yorker, Coco Fusco. She commands an urban intervention which stages a ritual of subjection common in North American military prisons, though seen here as a kind of compulsory performance in which the body is violently used against man himself. The observation of the way situations reflex themselves in the media and in the society is also the source of the recordings brought together in “Futebol”, a work by Frente 3 de Fevereiro that echoes an act of racism; and the distressing sensa- tion of imminent tragedy the feitoamãos/F.A.Q. group takes as its subject matter.

No less political in their essence, the works of Kenyan artist Ingrid Mwangi and the Indonesian Melati Suryodarmo are the fruit of a performance conception in which the body is the field of projection for disturb- ances born within the sphere of strictly personal experience. Mwangi, who created “My Possession” for the

Festival, uses voice and movement to speak of an existence in displacement. In “Exergie – Butter Dance”, Melati, who studied performance with Marina Abramovic, draws upon the imminence of the accident – and not uncommonly, the accident itself – to produce a concentrated level of intensity without the use of any narrative structure whatsoever.

In different ways, Marco Paulo Rolla and Detanico Lain represent the performance that is born of the fine arts. Rather than abandoning the white cube, the paradigm for the contemporary exposition space, Marco Paulo appropriates its formal rigor in performances that speak of the disconcerting bursting through of chance into a world of placidity and balance. Artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain environmentalise their pixel landscapes and enter the scene themselves to manipulate them live so as to accentuate their character of digital representation – and, ultimately, understand how the representation constructs images of the world.

Plastic, music and video are the founding elements of a performance genre that is particularly vigorous in Brazil. The previously unseen works of the Chelpa Ferro group and the artist Eder Santos to be shown at the Festival are some good examples. In Chelpa Ferro, Barrão, Luiz Zerbini and Sergio Mekler broaden their spectrum of action by producing music and noisy objects, which they position on the stage as parts of an installation. “Engrenagem”, which reunites Eder Santos with musicians Stephen Vitiello and Paulo Santos and with performer Ana Gastelois, is a re-reading that validates the artist’s talent in the use of video to multiply the visual effects of performing acts of dance, music, drama and poetry.

Both Eder Santos and Chelpa Ferro have passed through the Festival before, as the presence of their work in the Antologia Videobrasil de Performances attests. Eder created an historic series of performatic works for the Videobrasil Festival, while Zerbini, Barrão and Mekler featured under the name Chelpa Ferro for the first time at the 12th Festival, in 1998. It is therefore symbolic that their new work has been chosen to close the 15th Videobrasil. Within the ample panorama of this most contemporary of genres, they represent a line in performance that was the pioneer on the Brazilian scene and which the Festival is proud to have nurtured since its inception.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "15º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil - 'Performance.'": de 6 a 25 de setembro de 2005, p.98-99, São Paulo-SP, 2005.