Coordinated by Eduardo de Jesus, the “Panoramas” panels discussed the diversity of image production strategies in peripheral environments.
The debate “Contemporary Memories: the image as redemption of recent cultural heritage in the context of traditional culture” was mediated by Christine Mello and the panel was composed by Miguel Petchkovsky (artist cultural producer, Mozambique), Stephen Wright (correspondent editor of Parachute magazine, Canada) and Akram Zaatari (curator and artist, Lebanon).
Essay Eduardo de Jesus, 2003
To understand the images today
“Just as there is no innocent media, so there is no painless transmission.” Régis Debray To think about the images today it is necessary to delineate a course that manages to bring together the countless cultural, social and political processes triggered by their presence in society and their technical characteristics (new production and conveyance manners). To see how these technical and discoursive mechanisms of production are connected to political structures of control that expose the whole society to a flow of images which condition predetermined visions of reality. This ceaseless control generates new visibility regimes which are structured by means of images produced through the most diverse forms, in search of somebody who perceives them. What happens is that the perception, as Virilio warns us, turns into a “matter of logistics”, of handling of contents and very well defined purposes, most often related to the control and dissemination of dominant cultural, political and economical forms. In this scenery we have no other alternative but to transpose the aesthetical appeal of those alluring images and try to search for other ones produced in different circuits (or as a resistance amidst the main circuits), which reconnect us with our more immediate surroundings, with our disquiets, so that they are perceived in a non-logistic form. Nowadays the image production oscillates between the possibility to reveal new forms of showing reality and the “image-cliché-live broadcast” which presents the world in a perverse and subtle mix of information and entertainment, in transnational communication nets. In this configuration, the artistic propositions seem to take, between these two poles, multiple routes and sometimes they manage to reveal the latency of conflicts, the power and control games, the circuits of negotiation of advertising spaces, the most strange global control strategies and the new sociocultural processes provoked by the almost omnipresence of images. How can we understand the countless strategies that represent the image production in the contemporary world? How can we evaluate these strategies, especially in peripheric sceneries which recognize themselves due to the unprecedented influence of the visibility established by communication and image production technologies? For us it is interesting to ask how this visibility redirects the construction of identities, conditions the records of reality, and participates in the definition of political panoramas without any commitment with the collectivity. It is in this moving scenery that Videobrasil reflects on the contemporary artistic production, adopting the diversity of visions and the multifaceted global reality as a point of departure to trace possible routes among the perspectives of displacement. In this sense we propose a series of meetings with theoreticians, artists and curators to debate the present artistic production and its new articulations — in order to understand, in a deeper way, the images today.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "Displacements - 14th International Eletronic Art Festival": 22nd September to 19th October 2003, pp. 267-268, São Paulo, Brazil, 2003.