Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Meetings and Confluences

Creating situations propitious to meetings and exchange among artists, articulators, and observers of production from the geopolitical south of the globe - stimulating an exploration of differences and identities that is fundamental to understanding this lively and heterogeneous scene - has always been a core strategy of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, one that is materialised with maximum intensity through the Festival, now entering its 16th edition.

The desire to investigate confluences between cinema, video, and art, which convert this irreversible impulse into new senses for narrative, is what moves this edition. Its curatorial bent translates into a powerful body of works, united by a nature that surpasses limits and knocks down the fences between artistic territories, but diverse in terms of poetics and of what they say about the careers of the artists.

Around these works, the Festival draws hundreds of stakeholders, among artists, curators, critics, and launchers of initiatives, who are reinventing the ways art is produced and circulated in all regions. Beyond the formal debate panels, these will roam a place filled with shared images and intense interchange, favoured and fostered by the architecture of both the programmes and the venue.

Starting with the 16th Videobrasil Festival, and in response to an old demand, the opportunities for interchange generated by the Festival will no longer remain exclusive to it. The more the fundamental partnership with SESC São Paulo deepens and reconfigures, the more it proves possible to create new formats through which to take the results of the Associação’s research in the contemporary art circuit to the public, allowing the “contamination” to proliferate among artists, thinkers, and the public, and bring the Festival’s discussions forward.

The SESC Videobrasil Meetings are a prime example. Since 2006, the programme has been turning the SESC building on Avenida Paulista into a venue for artists who are reshaping the contemporary scene with propositions sourced in the electronic image. One step beyond that, at the same SESC Avenida Paulista premises, is the creation of the Video Library, a fixed space for the enjoyment and study of digitalised works from Videobrasil’s vast collection of electronic art.

Expanding the interface between those who produce, think, and need art - while taking care to ensure that the contact yields lasting results - is also the sense behind the partnerships that have brought Videobrasil’s endeavours closer to those of academia. At the 16th Festival, these can be seen in the Senac São Paulo Specialist Monitoring Programme, the Seminars coordinated by ECA/USP, and in the FAAP Digital Arts Prize -which, in 2007, joined the Videobrasil Residency Programme, another permanent mechanism for promoting meetings and exchange.

The quest for increasingly wider-reaching actions has produced yet another heavyweight result in 2007. For the first time, the 16th Videobrasil Festival will also be held in the Museum of Modern Art in Salvador, Bahia. Our expansion drive is not born solely of the desire to amplify the public that has access to the Festival. The idea is to stimulate artistic production in the Northeast, instilling it with content and propositions that question and update our vision of contemporary art.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16th International Eletronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil", pp.24-25, Edições SESCSP, São Paulo, Brazil, 2007.

CINEMA+VIDEO+ART

AN INFINITE CONVERSATION*

Art is an excuse to have a dialogue

Douglas Gordon, British artist, in interview with the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist

If the last edition of the Festival identified connections between performance and electronic art in contemporary production, the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil embarks on another investigation, this time exploring the convergences between video, cinema, and the visual arts.

Mario Peixoto’s feature film Limite serves as our lighthouse of choice, casting its glow over these relations as they unfold in enlarged images and multiple narratives. The film is taken here as an artwork-happening, responsible for introducing all order of image-related hybridisations and experimental strategies into Brazilian cinema and audiovisual production.

With Limite: Movimentação de imagem e muita estranheza [Limit: moving images and lots of strangeness] as our chosen theme for the Festival, we set out from the unusual frames, the obtuse cuts, the long shots simulating real time, the surrealist montages and arrived at a contemporary videographic language that seems to us largely nourished and encouraged by Mario Peixoto’s founding cinema.

It also struck us as instigating to reflect on the relations between Limite’s aesthetics and its production, the hallmark of which was the artistic freedom of a small, even minimal team absorbed in the task of producing poetry from moving images. A lyrical body armed with a camera, which, regardless of whether cinematographic or videographic, assumes through its movement the intentionality of writing, and its visibility too, like that of a character. These are free cameras that explore other perspectives and flex the beauty produced by the photographic, often pushing it to the brink of visual gesturality.

It was a strangeness that left the audience at the Cine Capitólio in Rio de Janeiro perturbed that evening of March 17, 1931, its complexity ensuring the impossibility of its general release on the commercial film circuit. It was the poetic displacement of Peixoto’s film, so out of step with the standards of commercial cinematic fare, that led the director to question if he would some day make another film: “I had made Limite exactly the way I wanted to. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to repeat that atmosphere”.

The uncertainties of Limite echo throughout the electronic image circuit. How has a film practically unreleased, with no audience, no box-office intake, no “market”, managed to cross the most decisive barrier of all—time, through which it has come down to us like exteriorised thought, plucked from the mental world, from experimentation? Rewatching Limite, we find fragments of installations, entire autonomous sequences, a visual and sonorous map with multiplying figures of language, both current and extemporaneous: surprising montages that go from the infinitely large to the infinitesimally small, visual metaphors, extreme rhythms and speeds, cinetism, pulsations, flow, the camera either crawling or accelerating. Turbulence, reflux, clatter, and calm. The water like a liquid screen that reflects, merges, deforms, and transforms all. Figures of language that go beyond the modernist encyclopaedia and aestheticism and burst forth like full-blown processes of virtualities.

BOUNDARY-IMAGES

After all, how can cinema make its reappearance in a new setting? Certainly not as codified language, but as a space for being in the here and now, “kinema” as a process and potency, as a database and procedure for art on video, media art, the new media. When we think of this deterritorialised cinema, barred from the traditional theatres, becoming installation, nomadic projection, being copied, quoted, recycled, remixed, we reencounter that original “cinematicity”; cinema beyond the limits.

Contemplating the “figures of language” that run through cinema, the electronic image, the tactical media also implies a liberation from ready-made historiographies, from the diasporas and the ghettos, another view of the past, not as what has already been and gone, but in its tomorrows, confronting limits. So why have cinema in a Festival of electronic art? Because the common grounds are many.

In addition to the fact that, today, cinema and video share the same digital environment, cinema likewise sided with video in its experimentation with supports (be they bodies, architectonic, museographic, or urban spaces), assuming the image’s permanent state of transit and nomadism.

Mario Peixoto did not make a plot-driven, story-based film, but a film in which the situations keep time. Peter Greenaway, a special guest at this edition of the Festival, alongside Marcel Odenbach and Kenneth Anger, once said: “I believe that it is possible to express ideas in sequence in cinema without being a slave to narrative”.

These figures of language also appear in the Ci­ne­ma+Video+Art axis in the work of Arthur Omar (flicking, overexposure, cinetism, storyless narrative, disjunction between sound and image, poetic ethnography), as in the procedures of recycling and appropriating of “sundry images” so dear to Omar and Carlos Adriano. An irony and provocation also found in the Bahia-based modernity of Edgard Navarro.

What do the works on show here have in common? We could say they are a boundary experience (not just between cinema, photography, the visual arts, art on video, installations). They are situated on the brink of a mode of thought that unfolds in and between images. They are flow-images, process-images.

Faced with such proposals, the “ex-spectator” is filled with doubt. He/she poses him/herself questions of perception, memory, the body, sensoriality: are these still or moving images? What intermediary states exist between movement and stillness, analogical and digital, eye and hand? Do time and movement leave traces, become visible? Among the thousands of images already produced, what is “new”?

PLATFORM FOR DIALOGUE

In setting the context of this Videobrasil Festival, we established conditions so that the creators could not only express themselves through their production (the works themselves), but also through a highly effective discursive tool: dialogue. Adopting the interview as a support, this publication arranged some one-off encounters to discuss and shed light on the trinomial Cinema+Video+Art, and the artists and curators rose to the challenge.

In an interview with Carlos Adriano, Peter Greenaway states that “cinema can so easily be deconstructed down into its component parts, it never achieves autonomy and now I suspect it is too late—the small animals in the undergrowth have toppled the dinosaur whose arrogant extravagances have made it moribund”. When invited to give an opinion on the issue, Jean-Paul Fargier uses simile: “Consider Art and Cinema as a pair of rivers: into which Ocean do they flow today? The answer is obvious but rarely stated: the ocean in which art and cinema mix their waters is Television”.

Surprising but not improbable resonances emerge between one discourse and another. Kenneth Anger, in conversation with the curator Rodrigo Novaes, says: “Lucifer is my patron saint. The original rebel. Each artist has to find his own Lucifer”. Edgard Navarro speaking to the writer Antonio Risério: “All logic has to be pulverised. Cinema was also a victim of my insertion into that psychedelic world. Because I needed to disassemble it, mess it up, and show how messed up my head was. The words can go fuck themselves. Logic can go fuck itself”.

In some cases, the artists’ responses came in the form of pure image and visual action. Both Peter Greenaway and Detanico and Lain created graphic interventions especially for this catalogue that discuss the expansion of cinema-making into other systems and modes of expression (the British filmmaker) and the idea of “limit” in printed means, the book as support (the Brazilian duo).

This publication does not only aim to serve as a document, but as an object that reflects the clashes, meetings, and decisions that marked the construction of this Videobrasil Festival. In this 16th edition, dialogue functions as a veritable platform—somewhat shaky, but permeable—for exchange and for the construction of a new discourse for the infinite confluences between cinema, video, art, and life.

* The title of this text was inspired upon the book by Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation.

(16th Videobrasil catalogue). ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16th International Eletronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil", pp.32-35 Edições SESCSP, São Paulo, Brazil, 2007.

ZONA DE REFLEXÃO

CONTINUOUS FLOW

The Knowledge zone is where the content of the two thematic veins of the 16th Videobrasil Festival (Southern Panoramas and Cinema+Video+Art) are put in perspective, both in the sense of maturing ideas and positions naturally already touched upon by the Festival’s choices and of laying the ground for an upsurge of wholly new and productive approaches.

This fleshing-out occurs within the model of a forum, in which voices with very different characteristics, generating often unexpected confrontations, are invited to talk and reflect not only on the contemporary production, but especially on the bases upon which it rests today and the factors which determine its desired resonance within the art system on an international level. 

The Meetings of the South and Videobrasil Seminars, both of which take place within the context of the Knowledge zone, ratify Videobrasil’s longest-standing project—which, while structured around the biannual exhibition, does not intend to become restricted to it, but aims to empower its artistic, theoretical, and critical products and achievements. The consolidation of this axis reaffirms the Festival’s standing as a reference not only among artists, critics, curators, and professionals in the art world, but also in academia.

This shift toward academia is manifest in this year’s Festival through the Associação’s partnership with the Universidade de São Paulo’s School of Communications and Arts (ECA/USP) on the Videobrasil Seminars (read more on page 230). Over the period of four months, themes central to an understanding of electronic art today will be discussed from the curatorial perspective of this 16th edition (the fluid boundaries between cinema, video, and art). Namely: hybridisations, media and experimentations, actions and contemplations, and multiple narratives.

MEETINGS OF THE SOUTH

The Meetings of the South series adopts the format of interdisciplinary panels in order to discuss the hinges in the triptych: artistic residencies vs. nomadism vs. self-generated collectives and spaces. Arte e espaço nômade [Art and nomadic space] presents representatives from the Videokaravann (a programme of Arab artists), Circuitos em Vídeo (a group that divulges footage of independent artistic actions), and Capacete Entretenimentos (responsible for an itinerant residency programme). The roundtable Residências artísticas – espaços de criar [Artistic residencies—spaces for creation] discusses the residency programmes of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, Instituto Sacatar, Capacete, FAAP, the Culture Secretariat of Bahia, the British Council, the French Consulate, WBk Vrije Academie (The Netherlands), and gasworks (The United kingdom). Espaços de memórias, referências e articulações [Spaces for memories, references, and articulations) investigates cultural fora run by artists, such as the Cinémathèque de Tanger (Morocco), TEIA, an audiovisual research and creation collective from Minas gerais, and CEIA (Centro de Experimentação e Informação de Arte/Centre for Experimentation and Information in Art), based in Belo Horizonte. Veículos e espaços virtuais (Virtual vehicles and spaces) debates cyberspace and the dissemination of art with guests from the alternative distributor Docfera (Argentina), the antiadvertising collective kontra (Turkey), and the foundation for the development of electronic art la diferencia.co (Colombia).

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil", pp. 224 - 225, Edições SESCSP, São Paulo, Brazil, 2007.

ZONA DE REFLEXAO | Tribute to Príamo Lozada

One Sunday morning I called Príamo: “What are you doing, my love?” “Silicone took over Cartoon Network, I am watching some horrible little dolls with lips injected with silicone; horrible, they look like whores.” That night I went to his house. We had red wine. He was still laughing about the little dolls on Cartoon Network, then we talked banalities, then we gossiped about common friends, then we gossiped about the art world, then we made fun of Mexican politics, then he showed me in his laptop the sketch-books of the young artist Gilberto Esparza, then I told him my sixteen-year-old nephew was making videos: “great, new blood, I want to see it”, then we talked about the large-format paintings at the Louvre, he talked with passion about Delacroix. Príamo had a huge range of interests, he was totally curious about everything, he lived life with endless passion, and life was amusing for him. His voice was melodic. His movements were soft, feline. His figure was lineal. He was a beautiful man who spread passion. To be with him was a celebration of life. Everything was delicious around him. His lips always drew a sweet smile.

Príamo was pure energy, even his tragic death was a highly romantic one; his gorgeous body fell from a balcony in Venice, the most romantic city in the world, not just any city, not just any body, not just any balcony, a perfect image at the end; he flew like an angel drawn by William Blake. The only thing that bored Príamo was mediocrity, and not even his death was mediocre. He went to Venice to make it big, to do the first Mexican Pavilion with the artist Rafael Lozano Hemmer. It was meant to be great. And as far as the critics go, it is great indeed. Príamo formed an association with Barbara Perea called Hélix Curatorial Projects, with whom he made all his last works. He was a generous person always willing to dialogue, and to work in collaboration was for him a way of enriching his knowledge. He had a lot of life to give. Three weeks prior to his trip, I went to his house to say goodbye and to wish him the best in Venice, he was doing an experiment with an open house to show how art coexists with everyday life; he decorated his place with digital works of young artists like Tania Candiani. He wanted to sell art from the intimacy of life. From the truth. Príamo was visionary, he had the eye of an artist, he wasn’t a cold curator based on books, he read a lot but he was first and foremost an emotional curator, who made the curatorial work a major artwork. He had the passion of an artist. He was rebellious, he wasn’t content with the establishment, and he fought for his point of view, even if that left him out of the groups of power.

Príamo encouraged the present generation of electronic artists in Mexico, he gave us his trust, his solidarity, his protection. He deemed visible art on video, sound art, Web art, electronic sculptures, electronic installations, digital graphics... He paved the way for all of us. Now it scares me to realise future generations will not have his eyes and passion. It is usually a cliché to say that when a person dies he/she leaves a hole behind, but the reality is that without Príamo Lozada, electronic art in Mexico has an enormous hole, very hard to fill.

Last year he invited me to work with him on a project, and I said no, I told him I was in a creative crisis. He did not take no as an answer. “Please, we are going to have fun.” And we did, we had lots of fun. Working with him was a constant feedback, a growth. In November 2006 the show opened and, as it turned out, it was Príamo’s last major work of electronic art in Mexico. It was called Plataforma, and it was held in the city of Puebla. The show had been set up in an abandoned 19th-century fabric factory. What he did (in collaboration with Barbara Perea) was just amazing, one of the most wonderful art shows I have ever seen, it was a work of art itself as usual. Now at a distance, it is strange to see Príamo’s discourse was ahead of his own death, all the works were about the presence of the absence or the absence of the presence.

Príamo always had his beautiful eyes wide open to be surprised by life. He had a wonderful sense of humour; he made fun of the arrogance in the art world. “How amusing” was a line he constantly said. He was always generous; his greeting wasn’t “Hi” or “Hello”, he would approach with those soft movements of his and would say, “How are you?”—that was always his greeting. My beloved Príamo, I embrace every moment you shared with me. “How are you?” I miss you terribly, Príamo.

The presence of the absence. Today, those who were lucky to be near Príamo treasure his presence, we have the memory of love, and we should remember from him that life has to be a celebration. I ask Príamo to sprinkle on me his passion of life, and to always be curious even with the most insignificant things in life. Thank you, Príamo, for your joy and vision.

PRIAMO LOzADA (1967-2007), a curator based in Mexico, was di- rector of the Laboratorio Arte Alameda and co-curator of the Mexican Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennial.

XIMENA CUEVAS (1963) is a Mexican new media artist.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16th International Eletronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil", pp. 24 - 25, Edições SESCSP, São Paulo, Brazil, 2007.

ZONA DE REFLEXAO | Tribute to Ricardo Rosas

How can one speak of Ricardo Rosas (1969-2007) without mentioning how sorely missed his presence is amongst us? A difficult task. So before beginning this text, I felt it was my duty to first write about the legacy Ricardo leaves to Brazilian collectives operating on the art circuit and in activism. The vigour and geniality of his career as one of the first theorists to approach this subject with dedication leave us with a challenge as yet unfaced: the constitution of a programme that combines critical reflection, self-generated artistic production, political engagement, and the construction of an ongoing dialogue with social movements.

Born in Fortaleza, Ricardo arrived in São Paulo in the 1990s with the goal of becoming an important writer. He decided against university and embarked on a career as a civil servant. Dividing his time between work and writing, he conducted extensive independent research and broadened his interests to include politics, literature, sexuality, cinema, and cartoons. He found in one of the key concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, created and recreated in A Thousand Plateaus [Mille Plateaux], the inspiration for the name of the e-zine he would launch in 2000: rizoma.

The editorials in rizoma were escape routes that crisscrossed before our eyes, launching plans of textual action in permanent transformation. It is no coincidence that the writings and translations Ricardo published on Rizoma present a transversal thinking that breaks with linearity to compose a diversity of themes and points of discussion. These are texts that deal with art collectives, but also touch upon anarchism, conspiracy theory, esotericism, fringe literature, anarchitecture, net activism, Afro-futurism and, more recently, studies on the use and supports of gambiarra and recombinatory technology in life and art. In fact, in terms of media, we must remember that Ricardo was one of the organisers of the Mídia Tática Brasil festival, a spin-off from the Dutch festival Next Five Minutes. Over the course of four days, the Brazilian festival brought theorists and producers together to discuss and reflect on the political use of the more accessible media tools, digital inclusion, modes of production, and the formation of networks off the circuit of the large markets. In this context, Mídia Tática Brasil was also a real meeting place for artist-activist collectives. Strange to some, provocative to many, the relations between these two autonomous fields of collective production and their actions at the interstices of everyday life created an important theoretical core for Ricardo to develop over the years that followed.

Ricardo saw the recent phenomenon of artistic collectives as a mixture of originality and spontaneity in which the transformations effected by neoliberal and contemporary capitalist policies were producing foci of collective awareness in Brazil through groups that took to producing “performances, urban interventions, parties, pie-flingings, the on-site filming of protests and demonstrations, sitins, work with social movements, culture jamming, and media activism outside the institutional bounds”. The term “spontaneous” here does not exclude strategic thought and action planning, but creates an element lacking in so-called “public art”, which is incremented by a dialogue with the real, the breach of the “serious” protocol of conventional art, public participation, volatile temporality, an emphasis on sensations and interpretation.

Ricardo’s generous exchange with artists through the network and his years of articulation with theorists and activists the world over served to encourage productive reflection on the actions and formats through which the collectives operate. His essays dwelled less on defining what art is in our day and more on renouncing the “status” of art itself, “an indifference and an unconditional abandonment to life”, placing the “artist” (more the artistic practices than the individual genius) as a “thinker, creator of action strategies, architect of acts that will reverberate”, positing conceptual deepening as an exercise for those collectives working with communities in situations of conflict, creating symbolic actions or establishing exchanges of experiences that share the everyday.

I would like to return here to the challenge posed at the beginning of this text. How can we continue with the theoretical/practical programme engendered by the Brazilian collectives? I always say artist-activists should concentrate on constructing a dissident history of their existence, a potentially transformative history that does not corroborate the official and biased version of the art and media system. Or worse: remain attentive to the danger of our being coopted and transformed into cheap labour for the institutions, or instrumentalised through “forced and monitored” collaboration with flexible capitalism. Ricardo showed that the construction of the history of art collectives is plural and autonomous, and should be produced amongst those who see cooperation and self-organisation as true elements of resistance. Ricardo Rosas’ contribution still flourishes, and his example must be followed.

RICARDO ROSAS (1969-2007) was editor of Rizoma.net and organiser of the festival Mídia Tática Brasil (2003). He worked as an activist, writer, translator, and critic.
ANDRÉ MESQUITA edits rizoma and participates in Rede Coro (www.corocoletivo.org), among other activist initiatives.

(16th Videobrasil catalogue). ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16th International Eletronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil", pp.242 - 243, Edições SESCSP, São Paulo, Brazil, 2007.

The Paradox of Culture and Cultural Animation

The International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil arrives at its 16th edition at a new address. Ha­ving been held at the SESC Ipiranga, Vila Mariana, and Pompéia units, the Festival now moves to SESC’s provisional premises in Avenida Paulista, a location being primed to become a cultural centre dedicated to the languages of the body, art, and technology.

Already imbued with this spirit, this SESC unit has been following a diversified programme in unconventional formats, sometimes serving as the space for experimentation, sometimes as the time for moun­ting new works. In the heart of São Paulo, the interior of this SESC building is alive with an architecture in transition; mobile, incomplete, temporary, making itself exist anew with each cultural appropriation. Like an open work, a mirror of the contemporary, the Video­brasil Festival comes to SESC Avenida Paulista.

This year we celebrate fifteen years of partnership between our institution and Associação Cultural Videobrasil. During this time we have expanded the Festival’s dialogue with society by emphasising the circulation of the works; legitimised its political slant by mapping new zones of geographic and cultural contact; consolidated the memory of anthological productions and stretched the aesthetic boundaries of the electronic image to create interfaces with other artistic languages. As such, we could say that the Festival today is not so much the event itself as a set of actions triggered by the event, that is, its sociocultural relevance resides, above all, in what we could call the between-events, the two-year interval dedicated to the production, research, documentation, and dissemination of artistic projects that have arisen from contact with new communications technologies.

In this manner, contributing to the formation of the public, creators, and thinkers of culture, the Festival, in both its acts and between-acts, develops within a cultural dynamic that lives between fits of contraction and expansion, oscillating between crisis and assimilation, between flames and embers, from skyward blaze to grounded earth. Encompassed within SESC’s extensive Cultural Actions programme, the dynamic of this cultural pulse is the very way SESC animates culture, in the original sense of giving it anima (soul).

Culture, in the anthropological sense, is made of tradition and resistance, as of mixture, contact, and innovation: thus is its condition, the paradox of its existence. Any serious programme intending to animate culture must therefore account for this tension. At SESC, alongside the literacy fostered by the Free Internet, which attends 150,000 people/month, our Digital Culture Programme not only serves as a creative initiation through its workshops, but also as an incentive for the consumption of art and for reflection on language. Mobilefest, Game Cultura, the F.A.Q.? seminar, and Pensar Livre – Cultura e Software Livre [Think free – Free culture & software] are just some of our most recent activities in this line.

Videobrasil is therefore a synthesis of our commitment to democratic values, conjugating an insistence on quality with access to the symbolic patrimony produced; in other words, of our commitment to culture and to society. It is this socialising of culture, driven by a commitment to public life, in informal spaces and leisure time, that we call permanent education.

(16th Videobrasil catalogue). ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16th International Eletronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil", pp.18-19, Edições SESCSP, São Paulo, Brazil, 2007.