The architecture of Southern Panoramas retains the proposal announced at the 14th and consolidated in the 15th Videobrasil Festival, with the same tripart approach: State of the Art, Contemporary Investigations and New Vectors.

State of the Art presents examples of maturity in the use of electronic media through videos and works that reveal the potency of electronic creation, its vocation for dia­­logue with other artistic fields, and its capacity to produce intense feelings and thoughts.

Selected artists

Selected works

Awards

Jury members

Trophy design

In an allusion to the advertising procedure of turning key scenes from movies into still (and emblematic) images on promotional posters—a practice as old as cinema itself—, the trophies presented at the 16th Festival are created by the artist Rosângela Rennó using stills from the prize-winning works.

Applied to each winning film, the movie poster principle will generate a unique work by the artist, built upon an image from the film and featuring the names of the authors. 

With an oeuvre that takes photography as its point of departure in describing a journey that reflects upon the uses and places of the image in contemporary subjectivity, Rennó has shown at the Biennials of Venice (1993), Johannesburg (1997), and Berlin (2001).

Curator's text 2007

Limit / Remix

The selection of works that comprise the Southern Panoramas axis of the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil draws up a map of transits, drifts, and experimentations in and of the image that range from technical appropriations from antique cinema to today’s Internet circuit.

Along this interval, we sifted through a huge wealth of investigations into narrative in search of imaginary geographies and draft maps of unknown expanses—an undertaking that took us closer to the inquietude palpable in Mario Peixoto’s inescapable feature-length work—the conceptual base of this edition of the Festival and particularly of its theme Limit: Moving images and lots of strangeness (a reference to the filmmaker’s own description of his film). In these borderlands between personal spaces and real spaces (of the world), subjective memories make incursions into the terrain of documented stories, creating a cartography that no longer separates the techniques and technologies of cinema from those of the electronic image.

In general, Southern Panoramas favoured proposals that use cinema as raw material or as a “database”, with sequences from films remixed, whole scenes recontextualised, snatches of dialogue “borrowed”: with pieces in loop, layers, scratches, montages applied to/impinging upon classic and affective images. Here we have Hitchcock, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Godard remixed and incorporated into contemporary processes, or perhaps just a single frame, a fragment, a camera movement, an effect of editing or programming turned into a work, into a hyperfragmentation.

Everyday life, seen from within the context of global conflicts, assumes diverse forms—as much in documentary as in fiction—and draws closer to those essays on video that present commentary on contemporary environmental and social transformations. The essay as a form of audiovisual thought that problematises fiction and pushes it to its limit. We have placed emphasis on the incorporation of video in the production process of urban interventions and tactical media actions, not merely as a record, but as an integral part of projects that involve risk, learning, and the building of experience through and by images.

In the mobile, unstable, and recombinatory worlds of electronic art, a jump-cut brings us to this 16th Videobrasil Festival. Moving images and lots of strangeness: couldn’t these be the limits/remixes of contemporary experimentation?

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica SESC_Videobrasil": de 30 de setembro a 25 de outubro de 2007, p. 184 - 185, Edições SESC SP, São Paulo-SP, 2007.