Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Visual Utopia

In response to the intriguing proposal of the Biennial's curatorial team, this program aims to address themes pertaining to resistances, frontiers and utopias by means of works that use original strategies to approach the South American reality.

Upon referring to an island where society was organized in a fair and equal way, in his 1516 book Of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia, Thomas More coined the term that would later be so widely used to describe dreams, lofty ideals and perfect societies.

By establishing a dialogue between the poetic works featured here and the poetics brought about by this idea, we intend to place the concept of utopia in contemporary times under discussion. It is an attempt to understand what would More's utopian island in the artistic problematic: what is the transforming power of art and what are its developments in the surroundings of the artist and his work?

The notion of resistance, which inevitably comes up within this theoretical horizon, is also at the core of each of these works. Conceiving resistance as a way of opposing something – a power manifest in any form, a potential agent that deprives of collective or individual freedoms –, and considering that it may take on a nature that is political, social, poetic or otherwise, we intend to establish a discourse that aggrandizes freedom. 

In different ways, these works speak of the freedom to move between territories, beliefs, discourses and spaces. But they also speak of the freedom to create and build new relationship modes, be it in the interpersonal realm or in much larger planes, such as that of interactions between nations. 

They also touch on the freedom to just be, without it interfering in the nearest frontier or affecting the surroundings in a negative way.

In contemporary times, the notion of frontier – as a limit, a contour, is increasingly closer with its opposites: fusion, intersection, range. Population displacements and the uncontrolled flow of information – which crosses territorial limits – engender a constant need for building new types of frontiers, perhaps ones that contradict themselves.

In different ways, these works speak of actual frontiers and of frontiers that outline themselves in other spheres. Frontiers that set the boundaries of territories – spaces occupied by nations, beliefs, ideas, artistic practices and investigative analyses. The relation of man with the spaces of contemporary times guides this segment, attempting to span conflicts, intersections and new formations brought about by the latent need for change.