Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Haroon Gunn-Salie presents his works that integrate the exhibition Agridoce [Bittersweet] as a result of the 1^st SP-Arte/Videobrasil Award, which selected the South African artist due to his participation in the 19^th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, and he holds forth on the project’s development process. Right after his return to Brazil, a disaster took place in the city of Mariana, where tailing dams controlled by the mining giant Vale burst, destroying cities and provoking immeasurable social and environmental damage. The artist tells how the tragedy’s socio-environmental impact compelled him to retrieve the human dimension of the story. Through artistic collaborations with the residents who refuse to be taken away from the location and still live in the most affected areas of Paracatu de Baixo and Pedras, Haroon Gunn-Salie resumes his methodology, consisting of a collaborative artistic practice based on dialogue, which translates the narratives of social groups communities who remain isolated, on the fringe. The artists talks about how his work serves as a channel for the representation of their life stories and for the reconstitution of the experience with the disaster. The artist introduces the elements that constitute the exhibition. A site-specific installation rebuilds part of one of the flooded houses, allowing the spectators to put themselves in the residents’ shoes through a visual language that speaks for itself.  Associated to the installation, a video registers the displacement process of the debris from Mariana to São Paulo, suggesting that it is not only a reconstruction; it is someone’s actual house. A second video registers a couple of residents, João and Maria Ângelo, restaging the moment they visit, for the first time, their house flooded by the mud. The sounds rendered by the mudflows are reproduced in an audio installation through a vocalization made by one of the residents. Photographs are displayed, documenting the artist’s social intervention in the affected areas. The presence of a drum that was used in the Folia de Reis Festival [Revelry of Kings Festival] attests to the disaster’s cultural impact—in order to rescue this collective memory, a reenactment of the Folia was carried out during the exhibition opening. Finally, the artist talks about how art can bear a real social impact and thus change a concrete situation by embodying collective memory.