Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Chelpa Ferro

An installation-band, performance group and instrument factory, Chelpa Ferro returns to the Festival where it first performed seven years ago. After important participations in the Venice Biennale (2005) and Bienal de São Paulo (2004), Barrão (Rio de Janeiro, 1959), Luiz Zerbini (São Paulo, 1959) and Sergio Mekler (Rio de Janeiro, 1963) perform a “very Chelpa Ferro show”, but with room for silence. A drum kit built with 80 incense sticks will perform a “silent solo” as it is lit during a pause in the music produced by conventional and unconventional instruments: a samba-playing sewing machine, the ashtray of unsuspected musicality. Between instruments, video projections and incense drums, the artists navigate from rock to electronic music.

In 1995, the desire to make music brought together visual artists Barrão and Zerbini and video and cinema editor Mekler around the project – at the time, musical producer Chico Neves was also a member of the group. “From the beginning, we were all interested in music. Each one of us had a different background, but we all liked to do it”, says Zerbini. “For us, music is fundamental”. Within the context of sound, plasticity unfolds in original and diverse ways: in daily life objects that the group appropriates to extract noise, in the way in which they are deployed on stage and in exhibition spaces, in the images that are part of the act. It unfolds in installations such as “Acqua Falsa”, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in June 2005: sound emerged from a speaker hanging 10 cm up, facing downwards. The sound hit the water-covered floor, spread about the space and was absorbed by foam sheets hanging on the walls and covered by blue and white lights. Or in “Nadabhrama”, a metallic bush featuring leaves that agitated in response to the interaction with the Bienal de São Paulo public.

The new performance created for Videobrasil bears some resemblance to “O Gabinete de Chico”, a performance the group created for the 12th edition of the Festival in 1998. The arsenal deployed by the group in the event included video, an orange juice extractor and a foosball table. “This piece is a continuation of the one we showed seven years ago, but it is also an evolution. We perform, we set up an exhibition. Videobrasil offers the possibility of mixing it all, performance, installation, music, show, video. It was the first place that really fit us.”

Conception: Chelpa Ferro. Musical production: Berna Ceppas. Production: Luiza Mello.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "15º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil": de 06 a 25 de setembro de 2005, p. 104-105, São Paulo, SP, 2005.

Performances

Centered on the body, the performance, as ephemeral and unpredictable as it is, is not a form of entertainment, but an artistic genre that involves confrontation and risk. Political by necessity, it subverts the relationship between the work and the public, who is not invited to suspend disbelief before a fiction, but to pay witness to an occurrence. Transiting amongst disciplines every bit as much as it evades them, the performance becomes the expression of an art form in which the boundaries between genres cease to make sense. Perhaps that is why it is singled out as the contemporary artistic manifestation par excellence.

It was the observation of this phenomenon, especially in the evident manner in which it reverberates through electronic art – now increasingly more politicized and linked to the presence of the artist –, that motivated the gathering of such an expressive group of performers at this Festival. Brazilian, North American, Asian, African, they represent various takes on a genre of infinite hybridism, intent on dissolving the limits between artistic expressions one moment, and pointing to social issues and sharing universal scars the next.

One of the most striking of these approaches, the performance openly constituted as a political gesture, is rep- resented, among others, by the Cuban-born New Yorker, Coco Fusco. She commands an urban intervention which stages a ritual of subjection common in North American military prisons, though seen here as a kind of compulsory performance in which the body is violently used against man himself. The observation of the way situations reflex themselves in the media and in the society is also the source of the recordings brought together in “Futebol”, a work by Frente 3 de Fevereiro that echoes an act of racism; and the distressing sensa- tion of imminent tragedy the feitoamãos/F.A.Q. group takes as its subject matter.

No less political in their essence, the works of Kenyan artist Ingrid Mwangi and the Indonesian Melati Suryodarmo are the fruit of a performance conception in which the body is the field of projection for disturb- ances born within the sphere of strictly personal experience. Mwangi, who created “My Possession” for the

Festival, uses voice and movement to speak of an existence in displacement. In “Exergie – Butter Dance”, Melati, who studied performance with Marina Abramovic, draws upon the imminence of the accident – and not uncommonly, the accident itself – to produce a concentrated level of intensity without the use of any narrative structure whatsoever.

In different ways, Marco Paulo Rolla and Detanico Lain represent the performance that is born of the fine arts. Rather than abandoning the white cube, the paradigm for the contemporary exposition space, Marco Paulo appropriates its formal rigor in performances that speak of the disconcerting bursting through of chance into a world of placidity and balance. Artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain environmentalise their pixel landscapes and enter the scene themselves to manipulate them live so as to accentuate their character of digital representation – and, ultimately, understand how the representation constructs images of the world.

Plastic, music and video are the founding elements of a performance genre that is particularly vigorous in Brazil. The previously unseen works of the Chelpa Ferro group and the artist Eder Santos to be shown at the Festival are some good examples. In Chelpa Ferro, Barrão, Luiz Zerbini and Sergio Mekler broaden their spectrum of action by producing music and noisy objects, which they position on the stage as parts of an installation. “Engrenagem”, which reunites Eder Santos with musicians Stephen Vitiello and Paulo Santos and with performer Ana Gastelois, is a re-reading that validates the artist’s talent in the use of video to multiply the visual effects of performing acts of dance, music, drama and poetry.

Both Eder Santos and Chelpa Ferro have passed through the Festival before, as the presence of their work in the Antologia Videobrasil de Performances attests. Eder created an historic series of performatic works for the Videobrasil Festival, while Zerbini, Barrão and Mekler featured under the name Chelpa Ferro for the first time at the 12th Festival, in 1998. It is therefore symbolic that their new work has been chosen to close the 15th Videobrasil. Within the ample panorama of this most contemporary of genres, they represent a line in performance that was the pioneer on the Brazilian scene and which the Festival is proud to have nurtured since its inception.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "15º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil - 'Performance.'": de 6 a 25 de setembro de 2005, p.98-99, São Paulo-SP, 2005.