The sense in discussing the South
Titled “Southern Territories: experiences, cities and borders,” the third meeting of Focus 2 of the 18th Contemporary Art Festival, Vectors and Inflections, emulated the weather in the city of São Paulo and heated up this morning, with a debate about the geopolitical South: “I no longer see the sense in discussing the South at a time when barriers are being disrupted, when there is a dissolving of the sense of boundary, and a great fragmentation. It is no longer a question of passport,” the Lebanese-born artist Akram Zaatari disputes. The curators Eduardo de Jesus, Solange Farkas and Moacir dos Anjos argued in defense of the South.
“Ever since Videobrasil first focused on this theme, its intention was not to create a polarization or to oppose South and North, but rather to seek a horizontalizationto give a voice to artists from countries about which we know next to nothing, but whose artistic outputs are very strong,” said Solange Farkas, sitting amid the audience at the meeting, which was also attended by the Chinese artist Morgan Wood, by Indonesia’s Mahardika Yudha, and Brazil’s Lais Myrrha, mediated by Moacir dos Anjos, curator and visual arts coordinator at the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation, in Recife.
Since 1992, Videobrasil has focused on the production of artists from the geopolitical South, comprising countries located outside the hegemonic axis of North America and Europe. That was way before this flow of displacement became stronger, and before the internet enabled increased circulation and exchange. “We knew very little of our own selves. The art we knew was basically that of European countries and the US. And yet what interested me at that time, and still does, is getting to know the collective imagination and the poetics of artists from these countries which we know so little, even today. Festival Sesc_Videobrasil is a Platform for access and visibility to this production, which we seldom see at biennial exhibitions and more traditional international art shows,” Solange explained.
To Eduardo de Jesus, it is still very important to reaffirm this discourse, seeing as economic and social differences still exist and are daunting. “Even though I believe that borders are now fluid, and that they create “network territories,” the Southern issue is still key in Brazil and Latin AMerica. There are millions of excluded individuals.” Moacir dos Anjos complemented Eduardo’s speech, reiterating that border-related notions still make much sense to the Mexicans who try to cross into the United States, for instance. He, however, conceded that the debate really is a more complex one, because the issue of North and South exists not only in the more traditional geographical sense, but that south and north exist within the South itself – and even within the North. “There are symmetries of power between the South and the North. And what we are discussing here all the time is Power. The power of representation. Differences which are affirmed based on the way we process the information we receive. It’s like accents. Even if he speaks English and makes his art using state-of-the-art technology, the artist’s voice is there, carrying his ‘accent,’” said dos Santos, at a meeting which ultimately reaffirmed the importance of Festival Sesc_Videobrasil’s focus on the South.
Borders and miscegenation
Born in Hong Kong, Morgan Wong worked in 2009 and 2010 out of Beijing, a city which, apart its economic growth, has seen a huge increase in its art scene over the past 15 years, mostly due to market-related issues. Questioned by Moacir dos Anjos regarding the influence of the market and of the Chinese government on art proudciton, Wong said there is no binary opposition between art and market and art and government in that scenario. He did say, however, that several buildings, including some that possessed artistic value or used to harbor galleries and exhibitions, are being demolished in Beijing. Still the local artists do not shut up. “We hold fairs and art shows to protest against these demolitions,” he said. “According to him, the Hong Kong art market has experienced the same growth as China, driven by economic development, and several artists from the so-called North, especially Europe, have settled in the region because of that.
Akram Zaatari, who works with photography, video and performance, discussed the experience of the Arab Image Foundation, created in 1997 to establish a space for iconographic representation of the region, criticizing its initial conception, which he deems problematic. “Are we discussing the Arab world as a geographic or artistic ‘belt’?,” he inquired.
According to him, this original conception has been abandoned and, today, the Foundation, which he says has been crucial to many artists, does a service by making a photographic archive of the Arab world available for consultation, and helps with artistic creation by ignoring the geographical borders between countries in the region. Apart from discussing some of his creative process, Zaatari also spoke about the piece he is exhibiting at the ongoing show, The End of Time, where he seems to cast aside strong issues of past works, such as conflict, territory and memory to focus on sexuality. “As a matter of fact, I have never worked while considering what was or was not allowed in my country. I created an art piece about the act of falling in love, and falling out of love, about the impossibility of relationships. We live our lives making believe that the law does not exist, but it does exist, and perhaps that is the issue somehow,” said Zaatari, who lives in Beirut, Lebanon, where homosexuality is considered a crime and punished with imprisonment.
The Indonesian artist Mahardika Yudha, who spent a season in India, discussed his immersion in local reality and said that it was based on his integration with that reality and the people who live in it that his work and identity started being understood. “I was surprised when I got there, because I was in the car when a bomb exploded near me. However, little by little, this issue of conflict and violence was replaced with daily life, the interaction with people. They would ask me what I was doing there, why I was recording that port,” he said. “It was as though I was conducting a workshop along with the people.”
Brazil’s Lais Myrrha, the last to speak, explained the relationship between her installation, Teoria das bordas, and the issue of miscegenation. “It is a piece that allows me to address several issues which interest me, such as boundaries, the borders of the South,” she said.
Defined by the artist herself as an investigation that puts forth a metaphor by mixing colors, the installation is interactive. The floor is covered with separate portions of black and white marble dust, for people to walk over it and mix the two dusts together, conveying the idea that miscegenation is a complex issue, as is Brazil. “Here we have this false belief that because we have miscegenation, there is a harmony, but we know that’s not exactly the case. The same holds true of my piece. It is not like liquid, where black and white would turn to a single new thing, grey. This mixture takes place slowly. The material (marble dust) is very heavy. The white and black are able to remain intact for a longer period of time at the borders, and looking up close, microscopically, we see that the black and white are still there, in grains,” she explains.