Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Also focused on the geopolitical representation of art, the 20th Festival has selected works by 50 artists from 25 countries, 15 of whom are Brazilian. They include representatives from Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Solange Farkas is chief curator of this edition, assisted by four guest curators: Ana Pato, Beatriz Lemos and Diego Matos, from Brazil, and João Laia, from Portugal. Together, the curators analyzed approximately 3,200 works submitted by two thousand artists from 109 countries.

The Festival’s exhibition features videos, paintings, installations, sculptures, photographs, engravings and even artificial plants forming a small acclimatization garden. These diverse works reveal a multiplicity of worldviews, stemming from a society which, seeming to sense its own demise, resorts to its origins to avoid such a fate.

“The artist’s spectrum of observation of his or her surroundings varies widely in scale: from microorganisms to the realm of the cosmos, from actions in the field of micropolitics to mass mobilizations. Voices symbolically hailing from other starting points, previously relegated to the fringes, now seek to qualify a new order, distinct from the modern empire, from the great historical narratives that have bequeathed a traumatic legacy, and from the scientism of other times that have made us believe in the omnipotence of man and his technology,” point out the curators.

The artworks have been organized according to six main themes: Cosmovisions (Origins; Rites and Cosmogonies; Sciences and Cosmologies); Ecologies (Nature, Earth and Fungi; Catastrophes, Crises and New Consciousnesses); Reinvention of Culture (Techniques, Appropriations and Representations); Politics of Resistance (Urbanity, Bodies and Affections); Invisible Histories (Memory and Microhistory); and Other Modernisms (Other Spaces, Other Landscapes).