Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Is every artist supposed to go where the people are?

This question faces us with an important issue for the group, the distinction between people, multitude, and masses*. The people have been traditionally viewed as a unitary concept, by which diversities are reduced to one. The multitude, on the other hand, is multiple, comprised of various inner differences that can never be reduced to one single identity. The multitude is a multiplicity constituted by all singular differences. Masses are comprised of all types of species, but their essence is indifference: every difference becomes submersed and drowned out in the masses. If the crowd is not an identity (as are people), nor is it uniform (as are the masses), then its inner differences must discover the common factor that allows them to communicate and act as a group. Thus, if we stop and think about art as being part of the production of what is common, and about the multitude as singularities that act in common, then we believe that the proposal of art is the same as that of the crowd: to create and act in defense of what is common. That is the position of BijaRi.

Is it the artist’s duty to discuss reality?

One way or the other, every artist places his or her own reality under discussion. Our background in architecture compels us to constantly battle the city. The exercise of living everyday life with a critical stance makes you suffer a series of stimuli and tensions. The interventions arise from a sense of urgency that attempts to bridge the gap between your view of a possible reality and what the actual reality is. In other words, we attempt to create another possibility for viewing the world, living with it, ascribing meaning to it. We place ourselves down in this fragile trench, trying to move forward with creation amidst the dryness that characterizes relationships and the contemporary urban imagery, and seeking immaterial products, subjectivities, and affections that deny the forms compromised by capitalist accumulation. 

In these twelve years, which work posed the biggest challenge to the group, both in artistic and logistical terms?

It was the work we did near the Prestes Maia building—which was the largest vertical occupation in Latin America, with more than three thousand people. The project lasted for about four years, and counted on ten actions by BijaRi and a hundred other ones by other collectives and artistic movements. The funniest thing is that never for a second did we regard those actions as a project; they would result from a sense of urgency that compelled us to act upon reality and attempt to transform it, using our subjective occupations, our bodies. In 2003, the first artistic exhibition was held at the building. It was extremely questionable, in terms of an actual collaboration. It took a long time before the role of each party in this process of exchange between artists and social movement was understood. The artists grasped the fact that their best weapons are “artistic,” by means of which strategies, shapes, and subjectivities become powerful. We also understood that learning about politics and about organizing a large number of people into a network was the greatest thing that the movement offered in return. 

BijaRi creates based on the relations between individuals and with the city, and has São Paulo as its central investigation site. What other city would you like to work in?

It is very difficult for an artist who works with urban intervention to carry out an intervention in a state or country other than his or her own. Our approach to developing public art projects was to always seek a close connection with the context in which the work will intervene (be it social, political, architectural, etc). That is why we now believe in lasting projects. It is not impossible to work outside of São Paulo, but it would take time, research, and sensitivity. We believe that Latin American cities have more to offer us, both for the sociological and aesthetical similarity, and for the URGE that we feel to let those splits be perceived, to strengthen other relations that are common to all Latin American cultures. 

Besides Tropicalism, what are your influences?

Initially, the collective was named Fábrica da Bijari (“Bijari Factory”), in a reference to Andy Warhol’s Factory (multiple languages and pop iconography), and to Brazilian Indians (Bijari is name derived from Indian language Tupi). Such attitude was already a fruit of the Brazilian Anthropophagy and Tropicalism, by which different foreign cultural references are processed from the vantage point of local culture, to become raw material. Given our architectural background, the Situationist legacy became a must, and processes such as derivation and psychogeographies became more and more of a part of the group’s procedures, blurring the boundaries between art, politics, and reality to create intervention strategies. In politics and philosophy, we transit through the Nietzsche-Espinosa-Deleuze legacy, and finally through the multitude, as in Negri and Hardt. Some critics, such as Brian Holmes, Marcelo Expósito, and Suely Rolnik (who collaborate with magazines Multitud and Brumaria) are important influences. In the pop and entertainment world, music video directors such as Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Lars Von Trier, designers such as David Carson, Neville Brody, and Saul Bass, and woodcut typical of the cordel [Brazilian Northeast literature]. We have gone full circle and arrived back at Tropicalism!!!

You have already stated that social movements are more important influences than critics and curators. Is the Brazilian art circuit unable to grasp artistic manifestations with political content?

When BijaRi got started, our work aspired to be institutionally independent, with no relation with the “art world” whatsoever. Our effort was focused on producing actual change in the political sphere. When we started to discover (especially outside of Brazil) artists and critics with whom we had affinity, it became clear that we were not up against the art world, but rather that we had communication problems within the Brazilian art system. Social movements, psychologists, and architects became more important to our dialogue than local critics and curators, who usually looked at our work from a formal standpoint, and were not as interested in the work’s actual intention and potency. The question that posed itself to us was: How and why relate to curators and institutions? Dialogue is necessary in order to build a shared body of knowledge. It is in this space that political art and Brazilian critics stand: without a good dialogue. 
Nowadays we know that these questions about taking part or not in the “art world” are a false problem. The question is how to entertain a critical dialogue with the institutions and the capital. The key lies in how to maintain the integrity of our project and yet continue to intervene in that context. Many museums and galleries outside of Brazil contribute in a positive way to the development of artistic-political processes. Here, the boundaries between capital and art are less defined, and it is more difficult to obtain support. One must have a very clear idea of the project and the ways for making it viable, without losing it or selling it. It is like walking on a razor’s edge.

One of the collective’s commercial clients supported the action against Bush’s visit. Have you ever lost commercial jobs because of the political content of your art?
This is a very interesting issue. BijaRi adopts a stance that is simple—and at the same time radical, here in Brazil—with regard to the division between commercial and auteur work. We openly take on the contradiction of doing artistic-political and corporate work at the same time. To some artists, we are a bunch of sell-outs, commercial to the extreme; to the commercial world, we are too artistic. In this small space we establish ourselves, believing that it is possible to make art with quality while remaining independent, paying for the research needed with the money from commercial gigs. Sometimes we sense uneasiness from some commercial client, as was the case with the censorship that was imposed to us by [music festival] Skol Beats in 2005. We were invited to make a live-image presentation at the main stage, and then we received a message stating that we were not allowed to screen images with contents related to politics, religion, soccer, or sex. In most of our relations with commercial clients, however, the opposite takes place: they usually admire our artistic work, even though it is often acid.

What work(s) is BijaRi currently involved with?
In July we are going to present the Multidão zero performance, with thirty people, at Galeria Vermelho, as part of the Verbo event. The work discusses the issue of protests, forty years after May 1968. Other projects include:
Natureza urbana: a partnership with architect José Subero (of the Dominican Republic). At the Galerias Subterrâneas exhibition, in the city of Curitiba, we occupied galleries at bus terminals, and turned an advertising billboard into a vertical garden. The work was conceived for the city of São Paulo, which is now experiencing a shift in visual paradigms with the removal of advertisement. 
Disk mobilidade: in keeping with the proposal of interventions aimed at discussing the urban nature, we have created, for the Motomix 2008, a project of mobile gardens in dump boxes normally used to carry waste in the city. The dump boxes were turned into gardens with images. 
Entropicália: remixada e amplificada: we are going to present a previously unseen audiovisual piece that remixes the Tropicalist movement, bringing together experimentation and the politics of our times, at Itaú Cultural.
Visionários: curated by Arlindo Machado, among others, seventy experimental artists from Latin America were selected for the exhibition, which kicks off in August here in Brazil, and will travel the world for two years.

* The concept of multitude that we are working with was developed by Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri, and published in the book Multidão, guerra e democracia na era do império, Editora Record, 2005.