Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Strategies and Risks

The result of four years of critical questioning and redesign, the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil confirms an orientation that first began to form a decade ago. The Festival’s opening up to all forms of artistic expression brings to fruition a gradual approximation with the visual arts prefigured over the course of four editions devoted to such languages as performance and cinema, and placing increasing importance on exhibition segments beyond their original remit. The intensification of this dialogue, especially in the 2000s, was in synch with the growing space allotted to video and the moving image on the contemporary art scene, in their capacity as the preferred mediums for artistic experimentation and in a context propitious to a cross-contamination of languages.

The change that sees Videobrasil become the first Brazilian contemporary art festival is an expanded stage in a process that can be discerned not only within the scope of the Festival, but within Associação Cultural Videobrasil’s activities in general. Exhibitions recently held in partnership with SESC, such as Sophie Calle – Take Care of Yourself (SP and Salvador, 2009) and Joseph Beuys – We Are the Revolution (SP and Salvador, 2010), are examples of a line of work that has gravitated toward contemporary production and its core themes. It is no accident, therefore, that these exhibitions—like more recent editions of the Festival—are brought into proximity by the striking presence of video, here indelibly affected by its relationship with the exhibition space.

Bound up with video in both history and name, in a condition of identity we would never wish to deny—though it denotes a specialization that no longer defines us—, the Festival and Associação Cultural Videobrasil make this transition inthecomfortableassurancethatacyclehascometoaclose.Overthecourseof twenty‐five years devoted to mapping, promoting, diffusing, and divulging video production—first Brazilian and then from the whole geopolitical South—, we have played an active part in eking out a circuit for this medium and in deepening its kudos and role as a tool and manifestation on the contemporary scene.

The ambitious Your Body of Work show, the first solo exhibition in Latin America by the Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, resoundingly and joyously underscores this change of scope. Fruit of an intricate poetic and wide-ranging research, involving issues from the sciences and philosophy, Eliasson’s work constantly reminds us that artistic practices only truly find completion in the fruition of the public. Accessible insofar as they require no mastery of the issues that engendered them, the sensorial experiments he proposes question the object’s preponderance over the subject and invite the audience to see itself constructing the work.

Curated by Jochen Volz, the exhibition will be revisited in an artist’s book scheduled for launch before the end of 2011. Eliasson will also be the subject of a film in the series Videobrasil Authors Collection, guest‐directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz. The approximation between these two artists within the context of the 17th Festival also gave rise to a proposal we were proud to commission as a work: Sua cidade empática [Your empathic city], an installation in which Eliasson uses images of São Paulo captured by Aïnouz’s highly unique gaze as raw material for experiments with the phenomenon known as afterimage, the retina’s postexposure retention of projected colors and forms.

In addition to the Eliasson exhibition, much effort has been made to broaden the opportunities generated by the Panoramas do Sul show, which will bring the recent output of a hundred or so artists to SESC Belenzinho. A commissions prize, a revised residency network, and seminar focused on the particularities of the art circuit in the geopolitical South are some of the responses we have found to the questions undergirding the changes made to this edition of the Festival. Reflecting critically upon its role as a vehicle for the affirmation and legitimization of a given artistic production—and its capacity to involve a larger set of dialogues—, we have sought to move beyond questions of form and material in a bid to understand the transformative impulses and potential of artistic activity.

Southern Panoramas

The Southern Panoramas show was created out of a surprising body of submitted work, of which over a third was produced in languages not normally within the Festival’s remit. All of the regions of the Southern axis are present here, albeit with some, such as Africa, represented in proportion to their output as circuits in formation. The submissions point toward Eastern Europe and Israel as renewed foci of production, while in South America, Colombia stands out for the volume and power of the presented work.

The selection committee, formed by the artist Felipe Cohen and the curators Fernando Oliva and Marcio Harum, aligned its choices with the Festival’s conceptualchanges,includingworksinotherlanguagesbesidesvideo.“Fromthis ‘clash’ of different lines of artistic reasoning, which assumed different platforms depending on the needs of form and content, criteria emerged that went beyond the staple gauge of quality”, says Oliva. Also considered, for example, was the degree to which each work sought to push the envelope of its respective platform.

The need to contemplate the languages and questions that proved recurrent in the submitted works was another determining factor of selection. “All of the main issues in contemporary art are, in some form, represented in the final panorama: from the political to the symbolic and metaphysical, even the whole modern and postmodern questioning of the mediums proper to art itself,” says Felipe Cohen.

The selected works display striking “grammars of rupture,” explains the curator Marcio Harum. “Especially so in those that reflect on the present collective human condition versus the individual and that deal with perception of the environment, an animaic clash between nature (landscape) and culture (witness), whether through exacerbation or through the erasure of a nebulous memory, lost somewhere between fiction and reality.”

Emotional Mappings

Selection becomes a curatorial exercise insofar as it approximates strategies and identifies common questions. From this observation came the sections that informed the curatorial project and materialized as exhibition chapters. The first of these, Emotional Mappings, features works that could be understood as attempts to create possible representations for questions of a subjective order—very often arrived at via singular paths, though couched in a common language,both intra and extra to art.

To map, understand, and inventory the subjective becomes, in these works, a quasi‐archeological effort insofar as it strives to find and even recreate meanings for emotions—whether through memories or some other 28 attempt to understand subjective experience. In sundry forms, they deal with boundary sensibilities, skirting the frontiers between the personal and collective, the individual and society. In Love, Jealousy and Wanting to Be in Two Places at Once, Gregg Smith narrates the experience of a couple who, hoping tosave their marriage from tedium through an amorous reencounter, adopt the unusual strategy of arranging dates with other dance partners at a tango club. In Phone Tapping, by Heewon Lee, an aerial view of the city right at the transition between day and night points to ward a meeting be tweenth emental (voice-over narration) and visual contexts engendered within the urban landscape.

In the series of paintings entitled Ubatuba, Rodrigo Bivar avails of documental photographic technique to represent moments loaded with history.These are suspended narratives,factual documentations of subjective experiences which invite us to create an unexpected trajectory for the protagonists. The non narrative of Tezin Phuntsog’s Four Rivers is a cinematographic and meditative exercise that pays silent witness to the monumental landscapes of the Tibetan tableland.

In Mientras paseo en cisne, Lara Arellano uses the gaze of a young girl travelling with her parents as a means toward establishing dialogue between the outer landscape and inner states, while in Ovos de dinossauro na sala de estar, by Rafael Urban, the widow of a collector of paleontological material devotes her time to preserving her husband’s memory and collection through a paradigmatic shift toward the notion of an intimate archeology.

Nature and Culture

How might we return to history in a free way, devoid of the prejudices and vices inherited from the past? This would seem to be the question posed (to themselves and to us) by the works that comprise this second chapter of the exhibition. Ironically, the answer may lie in the oldest structure of the art system: genre, host rather than home to artists not in search of comfort so much as somewhere to exercise their subversive, questioning parasitism. Their aim is not to restore the torn tissue, but to rend it further and more deeply.

The contemplative or investigative relationship with landscape—which, at the same time, threatens to overrun us -coexists in Inspiration, by the Russians Galina Myznikova and Sergey Provorov. The work leads us on an aesthetic, almost pictorial journey through a mysterious, lusterless landscape reminiscent of the contemplative atmosphere captured by the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovski in Stalker. Mimicked, quasi-imperceptible characters perpetrate the most inexplicable acts, creating an atmosphere of suspense that enchants and disturbs the eye in equal measure.

Pilgrimage, a video by Eder Santos, is a poetic record of mineral extraction. The author documents the stages in the process in images that resemble paintings, exposing textures and colorations.The narrative un spools slowly, conductingthevieweralongapowerful,eye-catchingthreadofvisuality.The mining process itself, which is recorded in detail, reveals the fragile relationship between the natural and the man‐made; between mankind and nature.

In Transferring, Storing, Sharing, and Hybriding: The Perfect Humus, Marcello Mercado discusses the connections between natural and cultural processes.Through an intense narrative woven out of the relations between digital archives, the human genome, satellite data, and data bases, he creates what he describes as a work of ‘ecological science fiction.’

Two video poems intertwined by Mihai Grecu in Surfaces: Coagulateand Centipede Sun flirt with science fiction and image manipulation to create political and ecological reflections. In Bronze revirado, Pablo Lobato pits a religious tradition against its own impactful physicality,while in Cruzada, Cinthia Marcelle orchestrates and reorders a military formation as a metaphor for sociocultural conflicts. Finally, Theo Craveiro’s Vanish captures perishable and natural elements in a rigorous formal arrangement.

Political Landscapes

The artists in this segment populate the field and circuit of art with dilemmas that hitherto belonged to the shared public and social domain. Old opposites, such as art/politics and local/global, are reduced to the same vector. Far from configuring itself as a move to circumscribe territories, the strategy reveals a potency that seems to derive precisely from a total unconcern for appearing too literal or explicit, or for following already beaten paths.

Edwin Sanchez’ Crossing Points cobbles together snatches of video footage showing the daily lives of groups of Colombian guerrillas, succeeding in simultaneously revealing the violence of this sort of warfare and its inevitably prosaic aspects. In H2, Nurit Sharett narrates her exchanges with the women of Hebron, a city in the West Bank rent into opposing sections of controlled communication, governed by the Palestinian authority and Israel.

Employing very simple means, Unforgettable Memory tries to recover remembrances of the anti-Deng Xiaoping protests held in Beijing in 1989. The author, Liu Wei, seems to ask himself which is stronger, memory or indifference? Aisha in Wonderland, by Zafer Topaloglu, is less a metaphor for than a portrayal of the physical and emotional violence rife in Lebanese refugee camps.

Parodying in tone, Solenidade de hasteamento da bandeira “Ao Vivo”, by Cristiano Lenhardt, recalls the Brazilian military dictatorship, while the ironic Beitbridge Moonwalk, by Dan Halter, associates Michael Jackson’s trademark dance with a trick Zimbabweans use to sneak unseen into South Africa.

In Superbloques, Luis F. Ramirez Celis draws parallels between the demolition of a symbol of modernist architecture and the personal drama of a resident of a condemned housing block in Caracas. The Australian Shaun Gladwell subtly treats of violence and beauty by opposing two unlikely performances in Double Balancing Act.

Optical Devices

The works in this chapter of the exhibition summon into the center of the debate the notion of a “generating” mechanism, in the broadest possible sense of the term. Frequently expressed in the construction of optical devices that 30 alter the gaze and propose new visions, the option configures simultaneously as a starting point and a destination. Between one point and another, it opens space in which the new, the experimental, and the risky can impose themselves, revealing procedures that seem to demand visible presence (perhaps its most generous characteristic). 

In Até onde vamos?, Roderick Steel interferes with video footage in such a way as to slip narratives into narratives and explore the human capacity to imagine and navigate through subjective worlds. In Eight‐Times‐Twenty‐Five, Rolando Vargas uses audiovisual material from the U.S. National Archives to trace the path to the Colombian war of independence some two hundred years ago, while, in Funny Games, by José Villalobos Romero, it is the viewer who creates the narrative by interfering in two versions of the eponymous film by Michael Haneke.

O instante impossível [gotas e taça], by Alexandre B, revisits the magic lanterns of the 17th century, the first‐known experiments with image projection, to create mechanisms that alter the three-dimensional perception of translucent objects. Ilan Waisberg does something similar in Transfers, a series of devices that visualize photograms as building blocks for narratives. In Em um lugar qualquer – Outeiro, pin-hole cameras set into matchboxes capture images with which Dirceu Maués attempts an emotional recreation of Outeiro Beach in Belém, Pará.

Perspectiva sobre fundo negro, by Ricardo Carioba, uses animation to oppose the notion of perspective present in a produced image and that perceived by the human eye. Filmed in Reykjavik, Iceland, Marcellvs L.’s Toga follows a huge fishing net as it is hoisted from a trawler that has just returned from a two-month stint at sea. Deploying a strategy of repetition that produces the effect of continuity, the film creates a reflective dimension and a movement that prevents the viewer from focusing.

Residencies

One aspect of artistic experience gaining in relevance on the international art scene is the residency program and the possibilities it offers. Strategic partnerships with educational, research, and production institutions enable the 17th Videobrasil Festival to confer eight residency awards across three continents. The Festival strengthens its partnership network by presenting its programs in detail and participating in work sessions destined to reflection on the impact of residencies on artistic output today.

Another concern reinforced by this edition is that of fine tuning the criteria by which an artist is allocated to this or that residency, adecision based not only on the nature of the programs themselves, but also on the characteristics and developmental stage of the work. This aptness is critical in the context of a network that offers experiences as diverse in nature and focus as does ours.

The two Brazilian residencies are a case in point. The FAAP Artistic Residency, which offers two awards through the Festival, is based in the Lutetia Building in downtown São Paulo and stimulates artists to explore the urban context. It is run by the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation. A third residency takes place at the Sacatar Institute, located in Itaparica, Bahia. This program stresses the importance of its beach-side environment to creating a convivial dynamic for collaborative action between residents. The prize is sponsored by the Prince Claus Fund (Holland).

Two other residencies take place in Latin America, at Galería Kiosko, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Created in 2007, the gallery program teams up one Bolivian artist with a non-Bolivian counterpart for a two-month period of collaboration. With a social and political bent, this program encourages artists to tackle cultural issues through original proposals. A member of residencias_ en_red, the residency is granted by the Spanish Cultural Center and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development (AECID).

The network extends to Europe through partnerships with Videoformes, in Clermont-Ferrand, France—thanks to the French Consulate in São Paulo and Aliança Francesa—, and the Vrije Academie Werkplaats voor Beeldende Kunsten, in the Hague, Holland, both of which receive one prizewinning artist. A center for the production and diffusion of artistic languages based on video and digital technologies, Videoformes offers technical support and knowledge exchange through its residency program. At WBK, the program encourages young artists to explore new visions that might contribute to their work.

For the first time, Videobrasil is offering a residency in Africa. Created in 2003 by an artists’ association, the contemporary art center pARTage, based on the Mauritius Islands, fosters the development of projects that respond to the environment by stimulating interaction with local artists and the islanders in general. The prize is sponsored by The Prince Claus Fund.

Videobrasil Open studio

From our reflection on the process of in‐residency art research and the artist’s contact with the other and with space comes another initiative, The Videobrasil Open Studio, a commissioning project launched by the 17th Festival. The residency focuses on place and the city, and the idea was to stimulate the creation of art from within a work dynamic that hinges upon effective encounters that leave no way to escape the challenge of confronting the limits of our ideas and means of bringing them to bear.

The premise of the project was to work with artists resident in São Paulo. Selected by the Festival, four artists developed works convivially at Casa Tomada between April and July 2011, under the supervision of a group of curators and teachers. The choice of this independent, uniquely-structured São Paulo location was aligned with our desire to encourage initiatives run by artists and independent organizations whose work strategy discusses and reflects on the need for institutional relationships and their impact on the resulting artistic work.

“The term residency does not describe a format, but rather the idea of uprooting the work of the artist, who undertakes to step outside a comfort zone in order to be immersed within another dynamic,” says curator Tainá Azeredo, from Casa Tomada. “Being in company is the main point of the program.To think of the organicity of cohabitation is to reflect on the destabilization of the resident’s methods of work and research. Experiencing 32 this residency is all about being present in contact with the other”.

“From a contemporary perspective that applies to that proposed by the concept of a residency, the atelier is no longer necessarily a space of pure isolation,” says Marcos Moraes, a member of the supervisory team. “With this possibility of cohabitation and displacement within the city of São Paulo itself, the Studio can be seen as a counterweight to the isolation that derives from the attempt to flee contemporary life and all the dangers that go with a large metropolis like ours.”

The first edition of the Open Studio resulted in a significant body of work generated from a mosaic of possibilities and potentialities of mediums, languages, supports, lines of investigation, and interests, and impregnated with the signs of the immediate and surrounding space in which it was produced. Integrated with the Southern Panoramas show, these works transit between video and painting.

São Paulo

In opening itself up to all contemporary artistic practices, it is intriguing that the Festival should resume, with fresh intensity and impetus, its creative approximations with the possibilities of television. The Festival’s weekly program on SESCTV serves as an additional platform for its content. This arrangement broadens the spectrum of the Festival, which can now also articulate through the perception of TV as a space for creation, reflection and the construction of meanings around contemporary artistic production. Devoted to culture and education, and rebroadcast by independent education-based channels and cable TV operators throughout Brazil, the channel has proved an ideal vehicle for expanding upon these possibilities.

The changes that characterize this 17th edition of the Festival find an icon in a trophy created for the Southern Panoramas show by Tunga, a Brazilian artist well known on the international contemporary art circuit. In the sculpture/object he has created for the event, elements from his own poetic repertoire, such as crystal and liquid amber, contained within a metal mesh, envelope a video camera and half-obscure its lens. The fully-functional camera-trophy affords a view that has been irremediably tampered with by the artist.

The set of accompaniments conceived of for the 17th Festival is an example of what we have sought to achieve as an institution: a model that functions as a platform for production and the circulation and discussion of contemporary art in the South in partnership and dialogue with curators, artists, and other institutions. Expanded forums for artistic reflection and production that configure and constitute a circuit help ensure that these practices and investigations trigger other possibilities for the reading, understanding, and circulation of art. By breaching their own boundaries and engaging in possible cross-fertilizations, the visual arts can transcend the official circuit, feeding other spheres of insertion within a possible history and criticism of art.

By establishing temporary zones of interchange through artistic propositions, with SESC’s continued, essential, and always inspiring partnership, the Festival places itself on a different platform within its circuit: the city of São Paulo. Assuming the considerable curatorial risks that go with a submission-based Festival, we have taken a tomography of singular size and diversity of an imposing body of work: the art produced today in the geopolitical South. In the generous light of the work of Olafur Eliasson, the 17th Festival takes shape as the event that identifies São Paulo with contemporary manifestations in all their amplitude.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. 17º Festival Internacional de Arte Contemporânea SESC_Videobrasil. De 30 de setembro de 2011 a 29 de janeiro de 2012. p. 26 a 33. São Paulo, SP, 2011.

Art, Education, and Formation: The Exhibition as a field for an experimental exercise in liberty

Art is what makes life more interesting than art.

Robert Filliou¹

I do not think the world in the act of perception: it organizes itself in front of me.

Merleau-Ponty ²

The will to know the things of the world and live situations intently leads us to experience them, examine them, and plumb their depths. Art, science, and education are some academic fields in which human experiences interweave to construct forms of sharing what is lived and examined. Each in its own way, and employing specific procedures, these fields embrace research as their mode of pursuing their target, which is, from the outset, unknown in its entirety, but only through shards of meaning.

In this sense, art, education, and science view everything as a subject of study: places, people, relations, nature, cities, books, works, contexts, feelings, and concepts. Examining these and other aspects of experience broadens our range of seeing, feeling, and thinking, along the course of which our perceptions of who we are, how we position ourselves in the world, and the nature of the relationships we establish with it are forged.

Within the ambit of contemporary art, the issue of experience as a form of knowing the world is approached by the North American educational reformer and philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952), the German mathematician and philosopher Edmund Husserl3 (1859-1938), and the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). First off, it is everything that occurs between the world and the body of the artist at the moment in which a work of art is produced, that is, it is everything that underscores the fact of the artist’s being alive and in sensible, rational, and sensorial relation with the environment.

For Dewey ⁴,  the experience of enjoying art sets it apart from other forms of contact insofar as, calling our attention to the reality in which we live, it concentrates and intensifies certain aspects in the form of signs and objects that can also be apprehended by the senses; functioning as an invitation to perplexity and discovery in the face of a species of reorganization of experiences that can only be shared to their full potential through art.

This approach to art is the platform for the educational curatorship of the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil. Here, the two exhibitions that comprise the Festival—Southern Panoramas and Olafur Eliasson – Your Body of Work—are seen as permanent research labs open to their various audiences, including students, families, and guest artists, and researchers involved in the processes that unfold over the course of the event.

The curatorial line that runs through the activities on Art, Education, and Formation fundamentally purports to develop platforms that can ensure that audiences of diverse interests, origins, and age groups have access to the curatorial investigation that serves as the plumb line for these shows. Structured by a mapping of the art produced in the geopolitical South over the last two years, Southern Panoramas features works that invite us to confront, critically, our forms of feeling, cohabiting, doing politics, and relating to the world, the other, to nature, and to culture.

These invitations are organized around the key lines identified by the Festival’s curatorial committee, and which also inform the spatial configuration of the show. On the educational program, they resonate in works that approach the relations between nature and culture; manifestations of human emotions; the actions and ambits of political endeavor and artistic production in specific contexts throughout the geopolitical South; the multiplicity of forms of creating and observing images through mediation and optical devices.

Core issues in the formation, production, circulation, criticism, and curatorship of contemporary art in the context of the geopolitical South and its relationship with the international art scene are the theme of
one specific activity designed by this curatorial project: the Southern Panoramas Seminars. Curators and artists share their experiences in this context, which are then gathered into a forum for debate. The Seminars feature Brazilian curators Adriano Pedrosa, Lisette Lagnado, Cristiana Tejo, Cristina Freire, Fernando Oliva, Eduardo de Jesus, Thereza Farkas and Tainá Azeredo, Paola Santoscoy (Cuba), Olu Oguibe and Bisi Silva (Nigeria), María Inéz Rodríguez (Colombia), Miguel López (Peru), artist Tania Bruguera (Cuba) and the editors of art magazines Tatuí (Brazil) and Asterisco (Colombia).

The propositions of the guest artist Olafur Eliasson, which, in themselves, manifest as laboratories for cognitive experiences and spatial perception, create ample room for vast and instigating lines of inquiry, which concern the nature of the process of perception and the subject/object relationship. Your Body of Work is a panorama of Eliasson’s phenomenon-creating machines that attain completion as works at the moment they are experienced by the visitors’ bodies. “The public is the issue,” says the artist, “and that’s where the works occur.”

Conjugated in an array of possibilities, all these key lines become triggers for educational actions. Conducted by artists, educators, philosophers, critics, curators, and art specialists, they explore the routes of experience and research in art, education, and formation
that the exhibitions proffer. In addition to the themes that emerge from them, they also investigate their own specificity of action, observing and questioning, in each undertaking, what can be grasped through art; the ways art manifests as a practice that contributes to the formation of citizens by availing of artistic and pedagogical languages, methods, and strategies; and the way art confronts the necessities inherent to traditional politico-educational processes.

Foundations

Comprised by a weft of references taken from artists, educators, curators, and philosophers, some specific definitions of art, education, and formation guide the research upon which the educational curatorship of the Festival rests.

“Art is the terrain for the experimental exercise of freedom,” ⁵ affirms the Brazilian activist, critic, and curator Mario Pedrosa (1900-1981). In line with this conception, artistic endeavor, and its reception are forms of resistance and political activity intent on transforming modern and postmodern social and political contexts.

Aligned with this conception of art as a will to liberty is the idea posed by the artist Robert Filliou, for whom it is the responsibility of art to make life more interesting than the art itself, inviting us to apprehend life in its myriad dimensions and with the greatest possible intensity.

The educational curatorial line is also premised upon the idea of education as the exercise of critical autonomy, learning, and autonomous participation in horizontal social contexts, in which all those involved learn together, even if under specific guidance. In pursuit of this learning, we are driven to transform the conditions and contexts of life, as argued the educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997), who conducted experiments in autonomy-based social education through communication and language:

There is no intelligence ... that is not also communication of the intelligence. ... The coherent task of the educator ... is, whilst pursuing, as a human being, the unshirkable practice of intelligensing, to challenge the learner with whom he communicates to produce his own understanding of what is being communicated. ⁶

This type of educational context can arise from exhibitions through the experimental exploration of four basic operations, applied to values, ideas, concepts, and contexts of life and contemporary art, in accordance with the experiences of the German educator Carmen Mörsch ⁷ (at Documenta 12): affirmation, reproduction, deconstruction, and transformation of artistic and social ideas, contexts, and attitudes. In this sense, to educate encompasses a set of activities, actions, and situations through which we learn and transform our concepts of life and branches of knowledge in critical fashion, drawing our main coordinates from the principle of intellectual emancipation set down by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière ⁸:

Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self‐evident facts that structure the relations of saying, seeing, and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection. It begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions. The spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar. She observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of place. She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before her....

This multifaceted educational process of experiences in pursuit of intellectual emancipation is what we call formation. It consists of the uninterrupted action of learning, through which all individuals pass over the course of their lifetimes, in different communities that “share interests” and meanings. It can be mediated by external agents in informal contexts, and also in institutional contexts (such as schools or cultural institutions).

It entails a constant transformation of ideas and the broadening of previously acquired concepts. It constitutes, according to the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), an evolutional path to social sculpture, political action that transforms and remodels contexts and communities with a view to collective progress and the individual satisfaction of needs for expression, creation, and reflection.

It is precisely in considering the exhibition a living platform for the exercise of creativity, expression, and the shared construction of reflections, interpretations, and meanings of life and art itself that all of the endeavors proposed by the educational curatorship of the 17th Festival strive to empower social exchange and encounters for reflection and experimentation.

The serial seminars and the related conversations, courses, workshops, lectures, guided tours, family activities, and partnerships with research and study groups dealing with art and its languages are an invitation to investigate issues that are pertinent to formation in the arts and in their production, circulation, and criticism.

At the same time, contact with the works and their many possible interpretations promotes learning of the nuanced relations between people of various sorts, life in different communities, forms of social empowerment and action, and modes of interaction between nature and culture.

After all, each and every one of us, as a living being, is in formation, particularly because we are part of communities that distribute the sensible—that which we feel and which makes sense, individually or collectively, in the processes of learning to live.

Notes:

1. Robert Filliou, L’art est ce qui rend la vie plus intéressante que l’art (Quebec: Intervention, 2003).

2. Maurice Merleau- Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” in Sense and Non‐Sense, trans. H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 51.

3. Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. W.P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2010).

4. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Trade, 2005).

5. Mario Pedrosa, Arte, forma e personalidade (São Paulo: Kairós Livraria e Editora Ltda., 1979).

6. Paulo Freire, Pedagogia da autonomia (São Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra, 1996).

7. Carmen Mörsch, Documenta 12 education II. Between Critical Practice and Visitor Services Results of a Research Project (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2009).

8. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, New York: Verso, 2009), 13. See also, from the same author, “The Distribution of the Sensible – Politics and Aesthetics,” in The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2006).

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. 17º Festival Internacional de Arte Contemporânea SESC_Videobrasil. De 30 de setembro de 2011 a 29 de janeiro de 2012. p. 40 a 43. São Paulo, SP, 2011.

Visual Experiments

Art enriches human existence through sensory experience and reinvigorates how we see the times we live in. New media and images invade our everyday lives in various ways, causing cultural and social transformations. The advent of different supports for artistic expression, driven by technological advances, creates an effervescence of visual possibilities that tinker with our modes of seeing and interpreting the world, favoring a relationship and contact between the traditional artistic templates and technological innovations.

It is within this environment that the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil inserts itself, showcasing changes and absorbing the artistic languages that underpin the main concerns within the visual arts today.

With a view to expanding its format, and in response to the urgencies of contemporary discourse, the competitive show Southern Panoramas broadens its traditional remit of video to encompass artistic production in the areas of performance, installation, photography, painting, and artist’s books from across the continents.

The special guest for this edition of the Festival is the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose first-ever exhibition in South America will occupy gallery space at SESC’s Pompeia and Belenzinho units, and at the Pinacoteca do Estado (São Paulo State Gallery).

The elaborate production that went into the new work prepared for this exhibition envisages open dialogue with the public and deals with the exploration of sensations. These aspects are what make Olafur Eliasson’s work paradigmatic, a transformative experience in contemporary art.

In consonance with the institution’s activities, an important aspect of the Festival is the space it devotes to its educational program, which, for this edition, includes seminars, courses for educators, scheduled and walk-in guided tours, and Internet content. The public will also have access to the Festival through SESCTV, widening the scope of artistic fruition and collective participation.

One of the ways in which the institution reinvigorates the essence of its sociocultural endeavors is through partnerships, as these are a perfect means of fostering exchange, the assimilation of new knowledge and unexpected perspectives.

Partners since 1992, SESC and Associação Cultural Videobrasil promote a nexus for a range of expressions and the participation of artists from different territories and cultures by mediating between distinct modes of perceiving and conceiving experience.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. 17º Festival Internacional de Arte Contemporânea SESC_Videobrasil. De 30 de setembro de 2011 a 29 de janeiro de 2012. p. 12 a 13. São Paulo, SP, 2011.