Associação Cultural Videobrasil

What came first in your life: your involvement with art or with activism?

I don't really think in terms of activism. Something that was very clear in my mind, ever since my early work, was the notion of urban intervention and of acting upon the public space, thus shunning away from traditional artistic formats such as painting or sculpture, in order to build a new format, one that fits into space through the creation of situations and images. As I developed my intervention work, I grasped the fact that more than merely a visual discussion, these interventions entail a debate about urban logic. I was driven by the possibility of discussing the artist's field of action, which is a recurring issue in art history: the widening of the scope that took place during the 20th century, the propagation of the notion of art and life as being interconnected, as opposed to being separated by a frame. My involvement in politics was just a consequence.

What is your artistic background?

When I graduated from the Artistic Education College, I felt like there was nothing really new for me to do. It was as if everything had already been done. I directed short films and wrote movie scripts, but cinema did not suit me either: since it is an industrial structure, you never have full control over it. I wanted to experiment with language, to be authorial, autonomous. I got into visual arts after attending an exhibition by Ana Tavares at MuBE, entitled Relax'o'visions (1998). Her work revealed to me a potential I did not know existed in visual arts. In that exhibition, one couldn't tell exactly where the artwork ended and the museum itself began. Her art melded with the architecture using benches, mirrors, everyday objects. The dividing line between what is considered art and normal life-which we don't usually perceive in different ways-contains an interesting tension to work with. And Ana Tavares does so in a very sophisticated fashion, with high standards of visual quality. 

Is that important?

Yes, it is. Whatever political discussion or intervention concept is going on, the artwork itself also needs to function as a language, it needs proper finishing. Political discussions are temporal discussions, focused around certain issues, while my interest lies in discussing language issues, which are nearly atemporal. The great danger of falling into the political art category is in losing your most valuable asset. Art, as a tool, is atemporal. When you deal with politics, things can get mixed up to a point where the work may not attain transcendence, which is not about a specific story, but about humanity as a whole.

Do recordings have a special importance within that framework? 

The idea of the recording is always there: the work is developed with that in mind, too. My first exhibition, which I did in my own studio, was already a work comprised of two distinct moments: there was the upward pointing laser beam, a work with a clearly defined sculptural principle. And then there was the recording, in which the work appears within the context of the city, in the form of photography. My early visual work-which began with a study I did on light trails in the sky from helicopters, for instance-used light, which is the raw material for photography, and the idea of photographic recording was already there. This recurring game I play with things coming out of the exhibition premises was already there as well.

No matter how visual your pieces may be, they never seem complete until they reach a public space, where a political dimension is added to them. I would like you to talk about the Coluna Laser series, which is a clear example of that. 

After my studio exhibition, I was invited to show my work at the Salão Nacional de Artes de Belo Horizonte, in 2000. Coluna Laser II (2004), presented at Sonarsound, São Paulo, showed a development: two horizontal laser beams pointing to the São Paulo Business Center and to the favela of Paraisópolis. It was a fortunate strategy: the overwhelming force of capital of Nokia-the event sponsor, who was solely concerned with potential cell phone buyers-was redirected in the form of light to a point in the city that would never be illuminated by the company. Coluna Laser III (2005), presented at the Pan-African Exhibition of Contemporary Art, in Bahia, is a corollary of Sonar. Here, however, a discussion on Black identity was involved, and therefore I intended to point to the nonplace, the place that can be lost if you have no means of determining exactly what is your Black, White, or Indian identity. That's what the piece is about: it points in a direction, but not to a specific location. 

You have such a strong graphic signature that it stands out even in your more action-oriented work. What's the importance of drawing in your work?

Everything I do has a drawing behind it. The drawing as a foundation of the work gets less and less clear, as I leave the realm of visual arts and enter the realm of human relationships. In my visual work, however, drawings always comprise the basic structure, which sometimes gets spatially expanded and turns into a sculpture, or else is pictorially transformed through photography. Nevertheless, even if the graphic concept should disappear, in the sense of a set line, the idea of the gesture remains. One such example is the work in which I attached myself to a drawbridge in Rotterdam, thus revealing its motion.

In your intervention processes, you almost always work in groups. How did the A Revolução Não Será Televisionada, the idea of doing TV interferences, and your connection with the so-called tactical media come about?

The relationship with media is uncomfortable for all of those who live in this spectacularized contemporary society of ours, which removes the individual from his/her social relationships and places him/her in a world that cannot be experienced, only contemplated. All art, spectacular though it may be, always entails an experience of exchange. A Revolução Não Será Televisionada started out with a show I did along with Eugênio Lima, Roberta Estrela D'Alva, and Unidade Móvel. I edited a video containing some of my interventions in order to use it in that show, and later on I realized that there was room for that material on TV. We got a weekly show on Canal Universitário, put the group together with Fernando Coster, André Montenegro, who work in the field of cinema, and art critic Daniela Labra, and then we began recruiting video artists who had no place outside the art scene where they could screen their work. The shows were structured with narration, video, interventions, and music, and consisted of collages using the work of fifty of those artists. It was a very interesting intervention concept: you might be zapping away between the SBT and Cultura channels, and then all of a sudden you would stumble across someone such as Lia Chaia making drawings on her own skin, in Desenho-Corpo. It was a clear departure from the concept of repetition and copy in TV. The Mídia Tática Brasil festival, promoted by Ricardo Rosas in 2003, was the moment when several groups realized that they had connections with the international activist network, and identified themselves with it. 

Liberte-se [Free Yourself], 2003, by ARNSTV, emerged out of a partnership that was established around that same period, with the Cia. Cachorra theater group, and is a finished example of an urban intervention that defines itself through street response. How does such a work begin? 

When we began, all we had was the sign. We decided to go out on the streets and see what happened. The work took shape as we went along with the action. People started asking us: “What are you guys telling me to free myself from?” We realized that the thing to do was to reply with another question. “But what do you want to free yourself from?” And that's when the whole thing started taking shape. Liberte-se is a nearly ironic work about a kind of heroic artist figure who goes out to the streets, within his/her individual scale of things, and then takes on the urban scale. The idea of inviting a theater group, of putting stage actresses in a nonstage situation, a situation of completely improvised exchange, and then taking those same actresses to a stage in order to perform scenic work parallel to the screening of images of themselves on the streets is a way of playing a game with that hero artist.

Irony is the trademark of Blitz (2002), as well. What does it offer you?

In Blitz, I proposed a photographic blitz to policemen: just like they approach me with their weapons and put me in an embarrassing situation, I would approach them with my weapon, which is the camera, and ask to take a picture with them. Most would refuse, some would accept. The officer would take a picture, just me standing next to the policemen, that was it. The resulting images are quite ambiguous: one can clearly notice the fact that I felt uncomfortable, and the policemen's poses of authority and strength also became evident. I have managed to show the pictures at the São Paulo Military Police Headquarters and they missed out on the irony of the whole thing. For them, all that the images conveyed was the positive aspect of a citizen trying to approach the police. The critics, on the other hand, would point out precisely to the ironic twist of the whole thing, to my signaling in some of the photos-police signs, you know? Hip-hop kids would come to me like: Hey man, how come you've been taking pictures with them cops? For me, that limit situation is what turns the work of art into a moving thing. Otherwise it would just be cheap, politically tinged work. It would be as if I were taking pictures of the police beating up some guy. I want my art to be open to different interpretations. 

Frente 3 de Fevereiro works with a very specific subject matter: the distinction made by police between Black men and White men. What is your particular contribution, as an artist, to the group's work?

It was my mother, Maurinete Lima, who came up with the idea of putting together a working group aimed at discussing the Flávio Sant'Ana affair and the way in which it defies a whole belief system according to which, if a Black man follows on the social footsteps of the White elite, he will get rid of prejudice. Sant'Ana went to college, he graduated, had a White girlfriend, he had all that, and still he was brutally murdered by a police whose definition of a suspect is determined by the color of skin-a police that kills people based on “suspicious attitudes.” My contribution does not pertain to the theoretical discussion of racism; it pertains to the organization of language and the creation of intervention strategies. Our first action, Monumento Horizontal, 2004, relates to the legacy of Argentina, a country with a solid history of political activism, and of combining art and politics. In order to mark the places where people had been killed, they would use monuments which, due to their nonvertical nature, could be made clandestinely, and thus last longer. Our idea was to produce monuments in series, so they could be used in other police incidents, so they could become a popular protest strategy. 

In Jailtão - Ônibus, the artist attempts to sell awareness inside a bus, like a street vendor. In Liberte-se, boys at a street sign sell pamphlets with the title written on them. Discovering these gaps for action is a recurring concern. Is teaching strategies a concern as well?

The gaps, the breaches, the unfilled spaces in the urban setting or in public life are the interesting places to explore in interventions. My goal is to find the right strategies for each action, to think about the impact they will have upon the urban setting, what they will convey, etc. In Futebol, for instance, the banner that is flashed with the inscription “Onde Estão os Negros” [“Where Are the Black Men?”] at the time when a goal is scored uses a moment when the TV camera focuses on the crowd, in order to convey a message which has nothing to do with soccer. Therefore, it is as though we were building a repertoire of strategies for us to use and disseminate. Whether they will be used or not, history will tell.