Associação Cultural Videobrasil

A Policy of Disagreement

We do not want to expand the art within reality, perhaps the reality within art and, if possible, reality within reality itself.

BijaRi

 

IN THE FIRST SCENES ONE SEES AERIAL SHOTS OF A LENGTHY URBAN AGGLOMERATION, DENSELY VERTICALIZED, WHOSE LIMITS DO NOT APPEAR IN THE HORIZON. AN ENTHUSIASTIC VOICEOVER NARRATOR TRANSFIGURES THE IMAGES OF THE METROPOLIS INTO A SCENARIO FOR A SPORTS CONTEST. IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS STREETS, SOCCER PLAYERS RUN FAST TOWARD A FIELD: ‘VÁRZEA.’ IN A REMARKABLE CHOREOGRAPHY, THEIR BODIES MIX WITH MUD, WORKING HARD IN THE ABSOLUTE NOTHINGNESS. THEY END UP PROSTRATED, WEAKENED, COMPLETELY EXHAUSTED, WITH NO EXCEPTION. A TACITURN SOUND TAKES US OFF THE SCENE, AND THE SPACES OF THE SOCCER FIELD ARE DERIVED FROM THOSE OF URBAN PRECARIOUSNESS...

The metropolis and urban life, their conflicted sociabilities and the ways in which they deem spaces for coexistence (un)available are issues continually raised by collective BijaRi. The urban landscape that their art deals with is not the one that is readily accessible to the instant perception. They are interested in the (in)visibility of cultural tensions impregnated within public spaces, the emergence of contrasts that set people and material resources apart, the struggle between social groups for the right to the city.

Formed twelve years ago and comprised of artists and architects, BijaRi presents us with aesthetic interventions in which the art consists of thinking about oneself, thinking about the city, most of all this (non)city of São Paulo. By the urbanistic comprehension that sharply permeates their work, the city is not a background, a support, a gimmick; it is, in itself, a protagonist, at the core of what is at play. Urban processes are approached as a sensitive field to be artistically reelaborated, in an aesthetic reflection that includes the adoption of a critical stance with regard to its sociopolitical values. These processes, under the scope that characterizes the group, are not approached based on abstract references, but rather in their direct relations with the urban concreteness. Their physical dimension is understood in the light of social relations that take place, replete with controversial aspects, almost always fetishized.
 

Estão vendendo nosso espaço aéreo (2004), which used different languages such as posters, acts of celebration, multimedia presentations, postcards, and balloons, centered around Largo da Batata, a traditional working-class region of São Paulo, configured as an important intersection of bus lines. Remodeled under new demands, including the insertion of a subway station, the area started to be included in sales of “potential for construction” bonds (locally Cepacs), a recently established financial procedure for adding value to real estate, implemented in urban deals between the state and investors. The aesthetics of ‘modernization’ of the landscape involved in this operation leads to the gradual expelling of habitual users of those spaces, destructuring relations consolidated there for decades.

This phenomenon of ‘enoblement’ of certain urban perimeters, along with the due replacement of its users or inhabitants, to the detriment of the poorest, was also at the core of the piece entitled Gentrificação (2005). Defined by the group as a “viral intervention,” it consisted of sticking two thousand posters in different locations of the metropolis of São Paulo that are currently targeted by this type of transformation. This intervention developed into new situations and conflicts, generating 468 ocupação subjetiva (2006), an action aimed at criticizing the eviction of 468 families from the Prestes Maia building, which was the largest vertical occupation claiming for habitation here in Brazil. The field here was characterized by the controversy involving the existence of various closed and abandoned buildings in the central region of the city, coupled with the absence of housing policies for the low-income population (both of which are maintained to this day).

BijaRi’s opposition to “social cleansing” policies implemented by the São Paulo city hall are clear in Lave suas mãos (2005), João bobo (2005), and Combate (2005). This series of works staged in the main squares of the city’s historic center, emphasized the clash of the means for appropriation of public spaces, the social contradictions on which they are based, and the forceful removal of the homeless in the region, so as to make it apparently free from the poverty common to it.
Várzea (2006), an award-winning video made by the group along with Ricardo Iazzetta, amplifies this line of action. In it, if on the one hand we view our city and cultural references typical of it, on the other hand, we view the very contemporary urban condition: in current terms, the way in which the video was produced is reminiscent, to the overwhelming majority, to a game that is lost beforehand—as ratified by the recently published book Planeta favela, by Mike Davis. The appropriateness and conciseness of its scenes, its metaphorical articulation, and the way in which its sonority leads one from a state of profusion to an agonic tone comprise the atmosphere of this haunting piece.

In their aesthetical formalizations linked to video art, performances, installations, and design, BijaRi operates with both analog and digital media. In the multimedia realm of image production, one of the inescapable questions for art has to do with the pervasive stretchings of the image culture that stem from its use as a privileged market device. Currently, when we are under the impression that ‘everything’ is exposed or, vulgarly, about to become exposed, artwork using digital image is constructed as if ‘on a razor’s edge.’

The group’s interventions are characterized by a state of alert regarding the situations and conflicts taking place in the city, and the choice of the adequate moment for artistic action. Many of their formulations are based on an urgency associated with certain events, as for example the expelling of the homeless from the center of the city, of the 468 intervention mentioned above, or of Porque Luchamos? (2007), which was in synchronism with the coming of the U.S. president to the city.

Their lineage of work, which includes a series of critical actions—of which we mentioned only a few—lays bare the relation between the aesthetical and the political, that is so often discussed within the current state of art. As we know, this controversial field pertains to changes that occurred in the realm of experience, in which critical and political radicalism was lost at the same time. As philosopher Jean Baudrillard put it, in our contemporary situation we find ourselves immersed in an “integral reality” of sorts, one which supposedly absorbed all of its transcendence, wearing out the notions of opposition and confrontation.

The idea of resistance has certainly changed, and along with it the ways in which culture rethinks and transmutes itself. The duo resistance/political action no longer resonates in our cultural practices at all. Perhaps, however, we might think of resistance as disagreement, discordance. And we might think of political action not as that of the great refusal, but rather, according to philosopher Jacques Rancière, as the policy of disagreement. In these terms, interventions into the sensitive can be simultaneously strikes of power, and poetic acts can be at the same time argumentative, adverse, dissentious. Thus, a significant field of comprehension opens itself up to contemporary art movements, such as these turned to the art/city relation. Nevertheless, one must pay attention to the fact that dissentious action does not take place within a terrain of guarantees, therefore it is always in danger of cancelling itself within the realm of established consensus.

In the field of art, this inner articulation between the aesthetic and the political must not be taken as equivalent to the idea of, ultimately, eliminating the asymptote relation between art and life, enacting the complete dissolution of art in the world, and thus nullifying it. On the contrary, this is an effort to reaffirm it. It is along these lines that we can grasp the efforts involved in the group’s initiative of attempting to expand “...the reality within art and, if possible, reality within reality itself.”

The holder of a degree in architecture and philosophy from the University of São Paulo (USP), Vera M. Pallamin is a Ph.D. professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at USP. She developed postdoctoral research on the relation between art and the public sphere at the University of California, in Berkeley (USA), and at the Università degli Studi di Firenze (Italy), and is the author of the books Arte urbana – São Paulo, região central (1945-1998), Editora Annablume, 2000, and Cidade e cultura, Editora Estação Liberdade, 2002, among others.