Associação Cultural Videobrasil

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.

Urgência Social

In the performances by visual artist Marco Paulo Rolla (São Domingos do Prata, MG, 1967), programmed chance emerges to shatter the pomp and comfort of daily routine. Such is the case in “Banquete” (2003), when a seemingly Victorian reception becomes an orgy of naked bodies and chickens. Or in “Café da Manhã”(2001), a performance about the irruption of turbulence in the life of a man as he quietly and orderly enjoys his breakfast. Once again, with “Urgência Social”, he greets visitors with the possibility of the unexpected, of a rupture of expectations, of the unusual found within routine – not an idealised routine, but a somewhat absurd pictorial version of the quirks and apparatuses of our days.

The artist’s questions on human desire are projected onto daily life, specially those “geared by society towards the construction of a safe routine”. The emergence of the unusual is opposed to the concept of safety, which makes evident the omnipresence of uncertainty, of which no one is free. “I try to understand the design that man makes of the world, the aberrations as well as the beauties of our existence. I like to work in the in- between, in the fissure, where there is doubt. For me, the human being is driven by this angst because of death.” The apparent control of reality, the reinvention of the world by means of technology, media hypnosis, the greed to have, the power of the image in the dissemination of goods are other aspects of existence that alarm the artist. His performances try to “restore reality through accident”.

In his 20-year career, Marco Paulo has worked with painting, drawing, video, ceramics, digital records, installation and music. Performance is the synthesis that redeems even his incursions into music. Part of his recent experience is recorded in the “Manifestação Internacional de Performance”, which he is publishing with Marcos Hill and the Fine Arts School of Minas Gerais Federal University, and launching at the Festival. The book records the work carried out by the duo at the Centro de Experimentação e Informação de Arte (Ceia), in Belo Horizonte in 2003.

Conception: Marco Paulo Rolla. Participants: Marco Paulo Rolla and volunteers.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "15º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil": de 06 a 25 de setembro de 2005, p. 146 a 147, São Paulo, SP, 2005.