Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
Our involvement with the Stronger Family started in 2016. I already knew Elvis as an activist, and he sought me out because the Stronger Family wanted a video to celebrate its 10th anniversary. We started filming that same week and soon realized that a feature film alone would not do justice to the wealth of the Family’s world. That’s when the idea for the transmedia storytelling project came up. We started the creation and programming process of the beta phase of the web documentary, which includes 14 portrait videos, photographs, social media page, in an interactive kinship diagram. Last year we created the video installation Domingo, exhibited at the 21st Biennial, drawing on footage of only one day of the more than three years of the entire project.
Besides images of the family’s daily life, this work also includes images of a demonstration held by the family following the coup that ousted President Dilma Rousseff. The reason is that some of these LGBT families such as Stronger have in recent years been subjected to an intense process of politicization, usually marked by situations of extreme violence, including police violence. So our work of following the Family’s daily life inevitably led us to scenes of political manifestation currently experienced in Brazil. It became clear to us to what extent the micro dimension of everyday life and the macro dimension of politics are totally interrelated.
Therefore, observing this work in the context of the 21st Biennial is important when one considers that in the last decades several resistance groups, from anti-globalization movements to so-called identity movements, have used art to advance and demand political agendas. The connection between art and politics, which has always existed, has strengthened and taken on very specific formats. And just as artists take to the streets to produce their work, activists are increasingly occupying institutional art venues, turning them into spaces of struggle.