Associação Cultural Videobrasil

My Possession

Neither here nor there, but in the space in-between, Ingrid Mwangi (Nairobi, 1975) has moved within estrangement since she left her native Kenya at the age of 15 to live in her mother’s native Germany.

Too dark-skinned for Europe, too fair for Africa, she became a receiver of perceptions and influences from both sides, the Western present and her ancestral roots. Her work makes use of the body and voice to express the singular personality that this experience has moulded. As in “Song of the Devastation”, a high-voltage emotional sound libel against gagging, stigma, stereotypes and prejudice. The artist enters a circle formed by the audience, and, lying down, lets her body show that struggle and resistance alternatives arise from destruction. “I deal with black identity, with living surrounded by violence, but I also explore how to create something positive out of it”, explains Mwangi. “My Possession”, the performance she created for the Festival, derives from “Devastation”.

The two worlds that nourish her generate the issues proposed in the course of her artistic itinerary – and the body is the only place where they finally meet. “Using my body as my main tool of expression was not an option, but a necessity. This is what I had at hand. The beginning was very difficult, a painful process in which I had to know myself, discover my interface with society, discover how it saw me and what my projections were. My body is the only thing that really belongs to me. I can cut myself, I can appropriate this material as I see fit.”

Feet, hands, back, face and voice are the scenic elements that her oeuvre highlights, besides the ever-present hair: dreadlocks that, tied to the ceiling, convert into cages, hanging tresses, threads weaving into a shawl.

Mwangi plays both coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, she tackles the notions of fairness and darkness with irony, she paints the maps of Germany (which she defines as the “burnt country”) and of Africa (“the brilliant dark continent”) on her belly; she replaces figures of women in a Nazi advertisement with her own face, multiplied beside Hitler. Her body is medium, message, laboratory, point of entry, window, sensor of the world.

“My prime material is circumstance, the direct and indirect experiences that spark a sense of urgency, that alert people to the need of dealing with problems. Living abroad gave me a hard sense of my private space, of differences, of conflicts that can be transformed creatively. With the passing of the years, the use of personal references in my work became more diffuse. I avoid being specific, I try to be more abstract and universal. I use art to create consciousnesses. I want to open a forum for discussion.”

Conception: Ingrid Mwangi.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "15º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil": de 06 a 25 de setembro de 2005, p. 140-141, 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.