Associação Cultural Videobrasil

At the Center, the South

As it completes its thirtieth year, the Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil leads with the exhibition Southern Panoramas, its biennial sampling of contemporary production in the geopolitical South. Having proved its wisdom at the last edition of the Festival, the decision to open the segment to all forms of artistic manifestation bears fruit in the form of an expositional experience endowed with fresh potency and expanded representativeness that anchors a vast platform of content and activation mechanisms. In consonance with this, the historical nucleus, 30 Years, proposes a polyphonic immersion in the many facets of the progression that saw Videobrasil, originally a video stronghold, become the first Brazilian contemporary art festival dedicated to mapping and investigating the artistic practices emerging in this specific “territory”—sifted through criteria unrestrained by market tendencies.    

The program the 18th Festival rolls out for visitors at SESC Pompeia and CineSesc attests to the ripening of projects especially dear to Videobrasil. By establishing dialogues and juxtapositions between the recent work of nearly a hundred artists, the spatial conception of the Southern Panoramas show does more than simply evince the discourses most relevant to these geopolitical regions. By adopting a historical perspective, it also captures clearly the impact the advent of video had on the art system by offering it a new relationship with the real and the material, as well as other factors—movement, time, sound, light, projection—that lend fresh dimensions to the space and course of the exhibition.      

Built out of nearly two thousand submissions, the exhibition is the result of a process that was exhaustive, yet efficient in ensuring equal opportunities for overlooked talents and artists from countries with inapt prospection mechanisms and incentive structures. Southern Panoramas also owes its range to the growing articulations between the Festival and its partner institutions throughout the South. With different platforms, but similar intentions, these organizations form a vital port of entry for local output.     

Woven around these and other partners is a strategic network that enables Videobrasil to award participants in Southern Panoramas with artistic residencies—opportunities for circulation, formation, production and insertion—at a number of institutions around the world.  The 18th Festival offers residency prizes in partnership with  Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (São Paulo), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, USA), Residency Unlimited (New York, USA), Red Gate Gallery (Beijing, China), Instituto Sacatar (Itaparica, Bahia), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut, Lebanon), Raw Material Company (Dakar, Senegal), Arquetopia (Puebla, Mexico) and A-I-R Laboratory (Warsaw, Poland) – and with the support of Res Artis (New York) and China Art Foundation (London, UK). 

This residency partner network consolidates Videobrasil’s search for exchange mechanisms and formats—a search that gained momentum in 2003, but which actually began much earlier, back in the 1990s. Thirty-something residency award-winners relate the impact the experience had on their careers in the in-house publication In Residency – Routes of Artistic Research over 30 Years of Videobrasil. The book will be launched at the 18th Festival at a special gathering of the partner institutions to discuss hospitality and exchange in the artistic residency experience. 

Open to the public, the gathering is part of the extensive and intense set of Public Programs, designed to stoke and trigger the Festival’s content in conjunction with SESC São Paulo’s mediation and educational curatorship. A sort of prelude to the Programs is the Façade Project, in which a series of works from the Videobrasil collection will be projected onto the façades of SESC’s various units and assorted public spaces throughout the city. Over the course of the Festival, thematic foci derived from the Southern Panoramas and 30 Years exhibitions, as well as other Videobrasil 2013 content, will be fully explored.      

The theme of Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil 09, the maps of a world being redrawn from a Southern perspective is one such focus. At the launch, the curator of Caderno 09, the artist Marie Ange Bordas, from Rio Grande do Sul, will explore the theme in conversation with this edition’s collaborators, including the geographer Rogério Haesbaert and the Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe, inventor of the term “Afropolitanism”—the contemporary condition of Africans who cross worlds and balance identities whilst remaining African in essence—, widely recognized for his renewal of post-colonial academic thought.      

Performance, an artistic manifestation that has been a recurrent presence at editions of the Festival and which maintains a close relationship with video, is another focus on the Public Programs. As part of the 30 Years exhibition, artists and theorists discuss the relationship between the act and the record, while the artist Alexandre da Cunha and the group Chelpa Ferro restage some historic performances: respectively, Coverman (2001), an important point of inflection in the Festival’s approximation with the field of the visual arts, and Gabinete de Chico, one of the sound-art collective’s seminal experiments.      

These re-performances are symptomatic of the way Videobrasil takes stock of its thirty-year past, not with nostalgia, but with the aim of bringing the Festival’s history up to speed, opening space for necessary revisions and making a valuable contribution to the recent historiography of contemporary art in Brazil and abroad, which is still insufficiently studied and lacking in systemization. This immersion in the collection has borne fruit, primarily the book 30 Years, which revisits transformative milestones in the Festival and the contemporary art scene; more agile content distribution mechanisms, such as Canal VB; and the feedstock for the new season of Videobrasil on TV, coproduced by Sesc TV. Another development is the acquisition of works of referential importance to the history of video and videoart, to be exhibited in informative screenings over the course of the Festival.     

The commissioning and launch of Deserto azul (Blue Desert), Eder Santos’ second feature-length film, is another significant example of a gaze that looks to the past in order to glimpse a possible present. Like the Festival itself, at which he has featured frequently and memorably, Santos’ career, originally centered in video, gradually and inevitably branched into the wider field of the visual arts.   

Another visual artist with close ties to Videobrasil—she was my trusted curatorial assistant for many years—Erika Verzutti authors the 2013 addition to the collection of pieces especially crafted by Brazilian contemporary artists as trophies for the Festival’s prizewinners. Like Raquel Garbelotti, Luis Zerbini, Tunga, Rosângela Rennó and other consolidated names before her, the sculptor rose to the challenge to produce an object of great expressive power that manages to make the always fleeting moment of achievement reverberate in time.    

A confluence of visual poetics, actions, reflections and re-readings, the 18th Videobrasil Festival presents itself as a broad platform that has spent the last 30 years cementing an identity for video in the field of the arts. Of our past visions that have materialized in the present, we draw special satisfaction from the prominence the new discourse of the geopolitical South has achieved in the face of the incapacity of hegemonic thought to shed new light on the contemporary world. In a sense, this is a reality reflected in the fact that, here, Southern Panoramas takes center-stage.  

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. 18º Festival Internacional de Arte Contemporânea SESC_Videobrasil. De 6 de novembro de 2013 a 2 de fevereiro de 2014. p. 226 a 227. São Paulo, SP, 2013.

An unlikely design for the South

Is the artist a social and historical Sisyphus endlessly searching for new meanings to the roll of his rock beneath the inexorable gravity of the relationship between art and society? 

Paulo Herkenhoff, Fluxos desiguais, 2006

Considering the South as a complex, shifting field no longer constrained by precise borders has always been something of a curatorial polestar for Videobrasil. With each edition of the Festival, which has been held for thirty years now, a new set of works buttresses and expands a possible understanding of the region’s artistic output, posing questions that keep bringing us back to human experience in a globalized world; a Creole[1] world in which negotiations between cultures are based not on isolated identities, but on processes of their coexistence and dissolution.     

At a time when ideas of identity are being reshaped by new axes of geopolitical and economic articulation, many social segments are trying to get a handle on this context. An example of this is the Southern[2] hemisphere’s inclination to draw on its everyday challenges as a lens through which to rethink dual and hackneyed notions about its territorial configurations, its cultural exchanges, and social fabric as a whole.   

Fields of interaction, conflict, and friction; complex arrangements in which the set of actions undertaken by the Public Programs, part of the 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, are cast. The exhibitions Southern Panoramas and 30 Years function here as colliders that condense and irradiate content and actions not restricted to the exhibition space itself, but which ramify into various lines of research and dialogue that move and last beyond it.           

From the reflection zones to the activations of the exhibition space and the online research platform, the Public Programs overlap different readings and articulate voices from other fields of knowledge around an understanding of art. If the artistic and cultural production with which we deal emerges from and feeds upon multiple discourses and gestures, then it is in these fields of interaction that we want to operate.  

Activate in order to reflect, and vice versa

The public meetings programmed for the 18th Festival deal with the Videobrasil corpus and its history through approximations that are transversal to and convergent with the exhibitions that comprise it. Inside and outside the exhibition space, these meetings—on complementary fronts: activations and reflection zones—examine issues that have accompanied the Festival over the last three decades.    

From an overlapping of curatorial gestures to the re-staging of historic performances, the array of activators suggests broadened frontiers for the Festival. Largely taking place at Sesc Pompeia, which also celebrates its thirtieth anniversary in 2013, these activations draw upon the potential emerging within this heterogeneous territory to add new experiences to this apposition between the public and art. Between the Galpão [Warehouse] and the gangways that lead onto the sports courts in Pompeia, the series of exhibition routes highlights the disintegration of their original narratives and creates new situations in which to assimilate the contents found within these spaces. 

The second flank of the program revisits the reflection zone concept presented at the 15th and 16th editions of the Festival (2005 and 2007). Once again underscoring the transversal character of the public meetings, the discussions raised by reflection zones, which can go from informal debates to actual seminars, endeavor to move beyond the specificities of the art world to relate the featured works to their historical, political, social, and economic contexts. Added to this is a proposed multidisciplinary approach to issues arising out of Southern Panoramas concerning recent editions of the Festival. Amongst these are the fictionalization of nature as a means toward instilling new visions of the world, the political forces at work in configuring the urban space, hospitality, and the politics of mobility in the globalized world.    

Taken together, these fronts represent a movement toward the gestural and discursive re-appropriation of the exhibitions, which, in turn, are grouped under a series of program blocks to be presented over the course of the Festival. The recording and refreshing of performative acts, new perspectives on the geopolitical South, translocation as a field of interaction and the way in which experience of the real and the moving image reciprocally create tensions are just some of the thematic lines pursued by the structuring foci of these programs.   

The educational program developed by the Sesc team proposes more than just lines of approach and mediations for the exhibitions, but also activities derived from the research stations and interaction hubs conceived for the 30 anos [30 years] installation. These spaces invite the public to interact with mobile video library units, through which the user can research a series of the Festival’s award-winning works, as well as recordings of performances and documentaries from the Videobrasil Authors Collection.

VB Platform: on words that form maps

The VB Platform takes shape within this conjuncture of actions and brokerings. A thick web of investigations about art, the platform operates as a collective online research tool, in which the readings of artists, curators, researchers, and the public cross-fertilize. As in a laboratory of interactions, their contents draw out rhizomatic structures, or mental maps, as we call them here.     

Developed as an ongoing fixture, designed to accompany the future actions of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, the platform was created for the 18th Festival, which is the main template for its content. As such, the public meetings and the works featured in the two exhibitions, Southern Panoramas and 30 Years, set the coordinates for the maps and cartographic vectors that comprise it.    

A way of representing and structuring cognitive processes, mental maps are normally associated with centralized diagrams in which connections between the elements emanate from a single nucleus. If the images of linearity and causality this type of representation elicits jeopardize the wanderings and drifts of thought, oblique and rhizomatic structures,[3] on the other hand, suggest a plural cartography; the denser its polyphony, the more complex the connections between its vectors and the more visible the gestures that draft and contemplate its maps.   

“Detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, [with] multiple entryways and exits,”[4] rhizomatic mapping affirms itself “as a provocation, evocation and driving force in the transformation of gazes and worlds.”[5]  This sort of epistemology of relations finds its main method in the act of mapping, and in the “mapped” an agent who points out paths capable of making apparently disparate and heterogeneous elements converge around concepts and emotions.   

The generative act behind words and key concepts that illuminate and dilate the platform’s contents, mapping inhabits the universe of the verb, working syntheses, articulations, and particular formations of meaning. It renders explicit the affinities evoked by the agents operating therein and proposes references capable of oxygenating the reading of the works in question. Before the contexts that instigate and shape creative experience, the act invests itself with the methods, processes, and flipsides of art in order to make them all visible.  

Each keyword included in this relational mesh refers us back to the most diverse procedures: from free associations to depuration in mediations and curatorial practices, as is the case with the selection process for the Southern Panoramas section of the 18th Festival. This project also proposes integrating new themes and concepts into the description of the works that comprise the Videobrasil collection. Made possible by the support received from artists, critics, curators, and mediators, the idea is to expand the vectors for research within this collection. 

In an ongoing gesture parallel to this process, the platform revisits this semantic universe whilst also proposing a revamped lexicon of themes and concepts through which to broaden the understanding of its content. Here, the vocabulary is successively renewed through layers of shared readings, suggesting a flow of interactions that begins with the artist’s own words about the work and undertakes to integrate, gradually, new horizons of collaboration and mediation into this tapestry of collective research.    

Latitudes and meridians in rearrangement

Being constantly tuned-in is an essential factor if a seasonal manifestation like ours is to renew itself and have a lasting impact on its surroundings. In the case of the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, the same driving force that makes it question the flows of artistic production and diffusion also nudges it toward new fields of friction in the visual arts sphere. Starting with video, a language considered “fringe” in Brazil back in the 1980s, the Festival slowly incorporated new connections that allow the geopolitical South to set its curatorial scope.   

Celebrating three decades in the light of these movements is also an opportunity to invite the public to join us in shaping the future of a cultural manifestation in constant mutation. This action horizon may involve dilating the mental images suggested by the geographic coordinates that slice up the globe into latitudes and meridians. Perhaps it is time to eschew the horizontal/vertical demarcations and draw less precise lines that expand the borders of our territory, our context, the bounds of our own thought.     

Perhaps the South roams intangible lands, redrawing imaginary lines to suit the movements of man in search of new polestars. If following a North star means laying down an axis, a sea-route, a metric, then searching for a South star might well imply trading the compass and the Polaris for incalculable portions of space and time, and letting ourselves be guided by the radial motion of relations instead. It is within the parameters of these negotiations that the public programs of the 18th Festival present their actions; as an invitation to join together in graphing a new South.      

by Sabrina Moura and Thereza Farkas - Public Programs curators

[1] In a clear allusion to the thought of the Martiniquean Éduoard Glissant, in his prologue to Altermodern (2009), the fourth Tate Triennial, the French curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud reinforces the image of Creolization in order to broach the cultural fluxes of globalization. Available at http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/altermodern.

[2] On this subject, the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos suggests, in his book Refundación del Estado en América Latina: Perspectivas desde una epistemología del Sur (Lima, 2010), an epistemological proposal to enable the South to work out the bases of its theoretical corpus in the light of its context and knowledge forms. 

[3] “Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines; lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, transl. Brian Massumi (Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 21.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Guillaume Monsaingeon, Mappamundi (Lisbon: Museu Coleção Berardo, 2011), 9.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. 18º Festival Internacional de Arte Contemporânea SESC_Videobrasil. De 6 de novembro de 2013 a 2 de fevereiro de 2014. p. 230-231. São Paulo, SP, 2013.

Art and openings

The 18th edition of the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil proposes a gaze that spans time and space. These two vectors, the very fundaments of our apprehension of the world—as succession and contiguity, respectively—enable us to survey aesthetic consonances and dissonances within a broadened scope.  

The world as succession: the viewer is invited to visit the Festival’s thirty-year existence through a historical show that activates the Videobrasil Collection in order to underline issues that remain of contemporary relevance despite the passage of time. It’s a way of thinking about History, of lending fresh meaning to what has gone before, of looking for lucidity in the construction of the present.  

A milestone in Videobrasil’s history, which started in the 1980s, internationalized, and underwent a progressive diversification of languages, was the partnership with Sesc, sealed in 1992. There has been a clear zone of convergence between Videobrasil and Sesc ever since, one that is grounded in diversity. Beyond mere variety, the crux here is to lend visibility to uncrystallized forms of thought and expression.    

The contemporary thinker Edgar Morin—a friend present in our reflections and actions—inhabits that zone of convergence, serving as an important reference through the geopolitical connotation he gives to diversity. Morin invites us to “think the south,” that is, to consider the idea that a geopolitical South offers us new ways of analyzing and understanding reality. Values bound up with human cohabitation, the systemic notion of the environment, and the distrust of excessive rationalization, developed in many regions throughout this vast “South,” function as opposition to a pragmatic and homogenizing north.   

The French philosopher leads us toward a second movement: the world as contiguity. The Southern Panoramas exhibition gathers together facets of an artistic production that operates on an altogether different key from the Western European/US axis. Artists from Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania articulate a kaleidoscope of versions of our world today. Examinations of shifting aspects of contemporaneity—cities, landscapes, borders, identities—materialize in mutual contrasts and offer the possibility of conversing with the viewer.   

The two exhibition fronts are the arteries irrigating a program that also includes publications, an artistic residency network, courses of study, and mediations. Each aspect illuminates the vision of the others, configuring the very complexity Morin values so highly. At Sesc, foremost is the chance to host this art movement in all its fertile incompleteness; with the standing invitation for that incompleteness to transform into openness to multiple gazes, so that they can trigger the emancipatory vocation of culture.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. 18º Festival Internacional de Arte Contemporânea SESC_Videobrasil. De 6 de novembro de 2013 a 2 de fevereiro de 2014. p. 226. São Paulo, SP, 2013.