Associação Cultural Videobrasil

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.

Bare Life Study #1

No fields, no deserts or beaches of hard landing. In the era of “intelligent bombs”, hand-to-hand combat has left the sphere of the war theatres historically delimited by warring powers. It is in the recesses of cells and military bases that political prisoners are confronted, cruelly, with their opponents’ true face. In this territory, the artist, writer and curator Coco Fusco (New York, 1960) sets up her performance. With a few dozen volunteers, she enacts one of the most frequent tortures imposed by American soldiers on prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo: they make the inmates clean their cells with toothbrushes. Fusco uses a public space in São Paulo and mobilizes her small army to bring to light what takes place daily in the authorized darkness of military prisons.

“With ‘Bare Life Study #1’, I want to provoke reflection not only on the implications of this state of exception that has befallen contemporary life, but also on the role of witness played by public opinion worldwide,” says the artist, known for her performances, interventions, installations and videos conciliating political sharp- ness with fresh and instigating aesthetics. Military rituals – in addition to the role women play in them – have recently become object of her attention. In July, as part of the research for her new piece, she visited a group of retired American military who offer training to those wishing to specialize in conducting interrogations.

Fusco states that the interest that originally moves her work is “to investigate the complex psycho-social dynamics found in the contact between people from different cultures and how it affects the building of personality and ideas on cultural diversity.” To make the point clear, she unapologetically resorts to a combination of unusual languages, such as surveillance circuits, Latin soap operas and fake documentaries. In order to approach the issue of cultural estrangement, she always chooses the less facile angles. In the video “Els

Segadors”, described by The New York Times as “both subtle and entertaining”, she takes an excluded culture, that of the Catalans, to deal with the principle of exclusion that rules every culture, even the Catalan culture itself. “The Couple in the Cage” is a performance in which she incorporates a Central American aboriginal and locks herself up in a cage in order to observe the reactions of passers-by, attesting to her rare sense of humour.

The poetics of Cuban cultural identity and the experiences of immigration and Diaspora have been favored subjects for the artist, who now concentrates on the “effects of globalization and the notions of belonging to or identifying with a culture.” “Bare Life Study #1”, she hopes, will be a tribute to an old connection. Daughter of a Cuban mother and Italian father, Coco Fusco defines herself as a Brazilianophile. “I have loved Brazil for 20 years, since when I went to Havana Film Festival and the Brazilian contingent was always the most vibrant. I have great spiritual identification with many Brazilians, such as Glauber Rocha, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, Caetano Veloso and Naná Vasconcelos”. “I know that, in Brazil, there is a long path of politicized conceptual art and that artists take their interventions to the streets, and I think it is very appropriate to create something that somehow pays tribute to these traditions.”

Conception: Coco Fusco. Participants: Coco Fusco and volunteers.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "15º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil": de 06 a 25 de setembro de 2005, p. 110 a 111, São Paulo, SP, 2005.