Impacts of internationalization
The second meeting held on November 6th, as part of the extensive program of the 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, tackled the evolution of video art and the identity of the geopolitical South, and was titled “Around the world: processes and meanings of internationalization in art.” Featuring the Cuban artist and professor Yolanda Wood, the artist and film and video curator Michael Mazière, and Elvira Dyangani Ose, a curator specializing in African art, the debate was part of Focus 2 of the Festival’s Public Programs, titled Vectors and Inflections, whose goal is to discuss the themes on which the Festival was based throughout these 30 years. The mediator was the Argentinean researcher and curator Jorge La Ferla.
The French-born, England-based Michael Mazière opened the meeting with a review of the evolution of video art through the 1990s until today. According to him, up until the last decade of the 20th century, the international video art context was marked by a strict conditioning of its production means – cameras, editing and exhibiting locations – and by a very specific language, far removed from film and TV. “Today, these boundaries are more fluid,” he says. “There is no longer a distinction between video artists and other artists, like there was until 1984.”
In the 1990s, as a result of technological developments such as the popularization of PCs and cheaper video cameras, that began to change. “That decade represents a transition for video art,” he says. During that period, video research and artwork gained an international outlook, and video artists began exhibiting at galleries, in installations and mixed-format pieces.
Geopolitical South
Yolanda Wood said now is the time for the Caribbean and other countries in the geopolitical South to look at themselves. “We are a part of the South, and yet we don’t know exactly what this region is,” she says. To her, at its current stage of civilization, the countries of the South have outgrown the issue of constructing their national identities – a strong issue in the 1930s and 1940s. Now, according to Yolanda, said identities have been established, and one can focus on cultural internationalization and exchange instead, without a need for approval from Western culture, which she believes used to bear a crushingly heavy weight upon the new continent. “There wasn’t just the domination through power, economic domination. There also was a cultural domination that determined the aesthetical value of what was produced in the region,” she says.
The South, says Wood, is the bearer of an “interior geography,” of a thinking aimed at solving the problems of man, at building a new humanism. The idea is echoed by the speech of Elvira Dyangani Ose, whose participation capped off the meeting. Ose said that unlike what is often said, there is no such thing as an African art, but rather local identities in each country, and within each country, there are resonances within specific communities. In order to address this reality, publications have been created such as Chimurenga (printed magazine and website), whose goal was to publicize the universality of African culture and its specific issues and timing, extending beyond tribalisms, which are often indulged on.
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