Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Displacements

Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival is completing 20 years. This age, even in a young nation such as Brazil and in a recent medium such as video, already allows us to talk about the past. Such a time is enough to ask: what are our images for? Whom are they addressed to? In a world that gives privilege to uniformity, we elected the difference as our way.

We reaffirm this belief in the 14th edition of Videobrasil. This is a moment when the curatorship must face the need to make a self-re-reading, re-reading those whom we gave voice to. This is a search for meaning in the origins, in history and, with it, a plunge into national production of the last two decades. This retrospective is connected to a definitely current theme: Displacements, the curatorial axis of this edition. The world in motion, short in terms of distances, fast in the Internet, but much less democratic than expected. With controlled borders, divided into info-rich and info-poor people, with exacerbated nationalisms and a larger number of immigrants and excluded. That is why the idea of Displacements emerges as an attempt to “displace” in the globe to rethink the world and use the movement as a changing propeller.

The voice of the “roleless”, those who have beliefs and opinions divergent from the general consensus, is included in the programming of the Festival. It is part of the plunge “into their own world” offered by nations in South America, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Oceania, for example, in the Southern Competitive Show. This is a revealing trend of the movement of peripheric nations – in terms of latitude and development – of the southern circuit.

It is not by chance that the great honoured in this edition is the poet, songwriter, performer, collaborator and dear friend Waly Salomão. A contesting agent who paid the price of the irreverence and, thanks to this, had a remarkable presence in Brazilian music, video and thinking in its most daring and innovative aspects. Driven by the need to extrapolate the limits of written language and take the poetic practice to other creative fields, Waly approached the electronic language since its origins in Brazil. Less known than his participations in music and plastic arts, the poet’s incursions serve as a reflection on the possibilities of video as an alternative and contesting vehicle. His poetry and personality were absorbed and transformed into works by renowned artists of Brazilian video art. The contamination and intensity of his presence in the video universe is registered in the DVD “Nomadismos: Homenagem a Waly Salomão”, specially produced by Associação Cultural Videobrasil, with the collaboration of many friends, partners and collaborators, for the opening of this special edition of the Festival.

If in these years video established itself in the commercial production of large companies, it also remained as a language of resistance: agile, cheap, almost “free” when compared to bureaucratic and budgetary procedures that imprison the cinematographic language. The trajectory traversed by Brazilian electronic art in 30 years, counted from the first experiences conducted by plastic artists such as Antonio Dias with primitive forms of the electronic support, integrates the historical axis of the Festival, exemplified in the “Made in Brasil, Três Décadas do Vídeo Brasileiro” show. The retrospective “No Ar e Fora”, with programs made for television by performer Marcelo Tas, enlightens the trajectory of one of the main players of the creative offensive of independent video against the conservatism of TV nets.

The historical axis also does the exercise of contemporaneousness, in commissioning performances that re-read and reconstruct key moments of Brazilian video. In “Onde estão os Heróis?”, Tadeu Jungle revisits his video “Heróis da Decadên(s)ia”, winner of the 5th Videobrasil (1987). In “Quem é Ernesto Varela?”, Tas narrates the hilarious incursions of his personage in the political and sporting world in Brazil. And in “Desconstruindo Letícia Parente: Marca Registrada”, Luiz Duva uses the procedures of electronic manipulation to reinterpret the work by that artist, a video pioneer in the nation.

The vocation of Videobrasil for actuating as an articulating agent of a distinguished electronic art makes us look for new mirrors, distant from ways of thinking based on hegemony. This search results in the “Narrativas Possíveis – Práticas Artísticas do Líbano” exhibition, with the art of a nation that preserves its identity and differences before the institutional gaze of the dominating world. Just like us, Lebaneses try to resist the empire of a unified thinking. And it is in electronic art that they maintain their singularity.

For the first time, the focus of Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival is concentrated on the production of the geopolitical south of arts. The Panoramas represent with exclusivity the production of this axis, what allow us to concentrate our efforts on the detection of emergent productions and review solid histories in the field of electronic art in vital zones of that aesthetical geopolitics. The idea is to create an imaginary map which allow us to compare disparate products and correlate achievements, examining similarities and dissimilarities in an attempt to encourage artists and curators from different cultures to the formal and informal debate on our practices, articulations and possible interactions.

As we know, the globalization of information is not carried out for the benefit of those who intend to maintain divergent beliefs, opinions and behaviours. It is in the preservation of our differences that lies the reaffirmation of our identity. Started of this point of view, Videobrasil tries to be a stable space for the debate and exchange of ideas, images and projects among the nations of Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia and Oceania. With the conviction that we have much to say – between us and to the rest of the world.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "Displacements - 14th International Eletronic Art Festival": 22nd September to 19th October 2003, pp. 232-233, São Paulo, Brazil, 2003.

Historical Axis_Presentation: Readings and Re-readings

Reaching its 14th edition and the mark of two decades, the Festival elects as a parallel curatorial axis its own history in a program that re-reads, in the light of contemporaneousness, emblematic figures and key works in the history of Brazilian video. Three performances, in particular, exemplify this updated gaze on the historical matter. In “Onde Estão os Heróis?”, Tadeu Jungle makes the decoupage and enacts his video “Heróis da Decadên(s)ia”, which won the 5th Videobrasil (1987). Luiz Duva uses the procedures of electronic manipulation to deconstruct and reconstruct the work “Marca Registrada”, by pioneer Letícia Parente (1930-1991). And Marcelo Tas revisits the disconcerting reporter Ernesto Varela, personage-symbol of the language contamination of independent production companies in open TV, in “Quem é Ernesto Varela?”. A show maps Tas’ incursions into TV, including “Fora do Ar”, a show he created to Globo but that was never exhibited.

A member of the Consulting Board of Associação Cultural Videobrasil and creator of the personage Waldez, a sort of local Ernesto Varela, Argentinean curator Jorge La Ferla signs the essay “Contra o espetáculo do consenso”, in which he emphasizes the importance of Videobrasil to Latin electronic art – and the need to preserve its existence in a panorama dominated by decadence and entertainment. Gabriel Soucheyre, director of the video art festival of Clermont-Ferrand, in France, signs a selection of works by French artists who participated in Videobrasil, from Robert Cahen to Jérôme Lefdup, and share with the video art from the southern circuit “a renewed inclination for a bit of risk which guide them in a constant search, whether artistic, aesthetic, philosophical or political”.

The course traversed by Brazilian electronic art in 30 years, counted from the first experiences of plastic artists such as Antonio Dias with primitive forms of electronic support, is described and exemplified in the show “Made in Brasil, Três Décadas do Vídeo Brasileiro”. With research and curatorship by critic Arlindo Machado, it gathers 50 works by numerous essential artists, from pioneers (such as Dias, Aguillar and Annabela Geiger) to the independent production companies and the major exponents of the most contemporary forms of video art.

20 years

Videobrasil was created 20 years ago to map the production of artists who began to experiment the electronic support, then recently emerged. In the first ten years, in annual and national editions, it worked as a show window to the independent production which was having a boom – and would come to contaminate the impermeable TV programming with new minds and new languages –, as well to promising experiments in the field of video art, which faced resistance and ignorance in the sacred spaces devoted to arts. Executed until that period by Fotoptica and the State Department of Culture, it reacted to the relative stagnation that followed the initial outbreak of growth in the scene expanding its focus to the production from the geopolitical south of arts, with the conviction that artists from Brazil, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia and Australia would benefit from a permanent platform of contact and exchange.

Biennial and international since 1992, the Festival established a partnership with SESC São Paulo, became definitely devoted to electronic art and got the support of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, which produces it, maintains partnerships with the main media centres in the world and makes documentaries on artists in the circuit, among other products, on the way. An international reference to the production from the southern circuit, the Associação preserves and is in charge of the circulation of the largest electronic art collection in the country, with 4 thousand works that testify two decades of a rich and instigating production – which is more than expected by the creators of Videobrasil 20 years ago.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "Displacements - 14th International Eletronic Art Festival": 22nd September to 19th October 2003, pp.268 and 269, São Paulo, Brazil, 2003.

Historical Axis_Against the consensus spectacle

This anniversary is certainly an important celebration. Since its origins Videobrasil exists as a forum in which the expressions of Brazilian, Latin American and Southern Hemisphere independent audiovisual production are the great panel that exhibits the creative potentiality of independent electronic audiovisual arts. Taking into account the difficult context of this new millennium, the permanence of Videobrasil is a landmark in the world panorama in which the mass media prevail with their sale of consensus and spectacle. The video as a means, and ideology of the alternative and independent, was abandoned by known institutions which now are exclusively devoted to the propaganda of digital nature that still did not prove its power to produce great artistic works and is prominent for a lack of great authors and theoreticians. The theme of independent audiovisual proposes a space and time in conflict, due to changes in the materiality of technological supports, to the pseudoglobalization of the audiovisual market and to the prevalence of digital equipment in all the production processes. Besides a support on the verge of disappearance, such as the electromagnetic, the nominative defense of video implies a clear ideological position which is beyond the support, since it defends the alternative, the authorial and the creative in the audiovisual field. The artistic work involving independent experimentation possesses an important value in a world dominated by few corporations that operate out of the ambit and the laws of decaying states. These organisms, fitting representatives of an empire recognized for the decaying level of its spectacles, have as their only model the economic benefit, the political submission and the global commercial control expressed by an audiovisual flow characterized by its uniformity. Offering alternatives to this magma is an essential mission in opposition to big events and the most important audiovisual festivals. Influent personalities and the most prominent names, famous or unknown, of the world audiovisual creation passed by Videobrasil. This event has also gained repercussion as a forum of relations which meant encounters and contacts for authors from the whole planet. However, I think that the essence of Videobrasil existence and spirit was the national convocation it carried out. Videobrasil emerged devoted to Brazilian video, then immediately came to produce a very productive tension between the local circuit and the international one. In this alchemy it found its largest originality. Brazil, soon after the genesis which implied the Chilean movement in the continent, was a pioneer in the development of independent video and currently is the nation with a larger number of interesting audiovisual artists and producers. During the 1980’s, the will to do and the possibility of access to portable video equipment produced an appearance of authors and production companies, particularly in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. From the typical artistic search of São Paulo, always looking for an individual expression channel, to the undertakings of independent production companies for television, to video groups that pointed out a social and political action, video made history in Brazilian audiovisual field. Another essential characteristic of Videobrasil was that it opened space to all these Brazilian manifestations, in spite of intolerant criticisms by some purists of audiovisual art. The confluence of video artists and authors of TV products with popular video works centralized in the Associação Brasileira de Vídeo Popular (ABVP), or in pirate televisions indicated these characteristics of change and openness. In this way and also through the selection of all Videobrasil editions and its national and international diffusing activities, it is practically one of the few possibilities for a comprehensive vision of Brazilian video. Few institutions in the nation can offer something similar. The problematic institutional situation in our nations, on the periphery of the globalized world, complicates the maintenance of any audiovisual cultural and artistic collection, and this is even more complex when the material is independent. Videobrasil collection is almost certainly the most complete on the subject in Brazil, or at least in Latin America. This archive has an incalculable value and its preservation is imperative. Those young videomakers who showed up in the first Videobrasil editions soon made incursions in the TV ambit, others adopted more profitable and less independent activities, but gradually contaminated various institutions in the system, beginning with a difference in criteria that implied a renewal of the documental and other TV formats, as well as of corporate, institutional and musical videos. This diversity and mix of energies generated a profuse quantity of video works created by artists and authors who found their place in the specification of every means and in the hybridism of their combinations, among which we can easily mention over ten authors who we consider that have marked a creation route and a unique period of remarkable works in the world ambit. The event Videobrasil was one of the institutions in charge of convoking and promoting them. It’s worth remembering that today, more than ever, as the audiovisual market is more impenetrable, monopolistic and cunning, many schools, centres and universities in the whole world launch thousands of students in the market and they end up producing a certain kind of uniform audiovisual product. We think that independent institutions devoted to the audiovisual field are the ones which have the mission to form audiovisual artists, communicators and authors to generate a theory and motivate an experimental practice with the whole range of audiovisual languages, forms, supports and their combination. Diversity is the arm to face the uniformity in the training, provided by means which have adjusted to the situation of an audiovisual market that only conceives products according established parameters. Brazil is also prominent in this sense due to a line of thinkers, professors and theoreticians whose task is to generate an open and experimental practice to audiovisual forms. Perhaps this confluence is among other causes of the change and the high level of Brazilian independent audiovisual which is convoked in the consecutive Videobrasil editions. There can be no great expectations for multimedia corporations, overconcentrated in few head offices with huge financial power and planetary range, regarding the creation of high quality audiovisual products, with an authorial mark of experimental nature and artistic purposes and uses. This is obviously a political issue which will never be changed by present statesmen. Therefore, organizations and events such as Videobrasil are an exemplary assurance of how to generate other spaces for a valuable, original and diverse audiovisual expression.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "Displacements - 14th International Eletronic Art Festival": 22nd September to 19th October 2003, pp. 273-274, São Paulo, Brazil, 2003.

In the Image of the Poet

“The poet works with images”, said the primary teacher to an inattentive class, and also to me, a silent pupil in whose spirit that phrase fell as a ray. A real ray, with a metaphoric thunder and voltage, i.e., also real. I was dizzy.

Still today, in remembering here, I feel a little more of this benign dizziness that was generated by the phrase. “What do you mean, images?”, I thought absorbed in a life environment whose inner side was the gas still liquefied of my new soul and the outer side was the classroom, precisely the classroom, one of the essential sets of the initial stage of the civilizing process, where drills as intelligent as American bombs are launched into our gas for a surgical war mission: to separate the word from the landscape, to extract the name from the image, to definitely dissociate reality from imagination.

“The poet works with images.” I don’t know if the paradox of the phrase and of the situation drew my classmates’ attention. But I was really very confused. In the teacher’s mouth, the poet already seemed to contradict all those things which the teacher herself was there to teach. Perhaps what I still did not understand about this introduction of poetry in the curriculum is that it its above all an official chance given to children to relearn all those things they already knew when they were born. Imagination is landscape. Ground is Dream. Word is Image. Isn’t it?

Out of the dissolutions that poetry applied to my senses, the phrase from the primary school should be the first one. But, with no doubt, the major one was having known Waly Salomão. Not a Waly’s poem, but his own primary person. For a simple reason. Like almost every poet, Waly projected images on paper. Like few of them, Waly projected the immediate poetry on live screen. On the reality set. Modifying it, or, at least, changing me forever.

I remember our first encounter. I was taken by Duncan, our common friend. I remember well. In HDTV, with digital sound and emotional edition, after all, as Waly himself used to say, “memory is an editing island.” It happened 15 years ago. Waly was staying at the most banal flat in São Paulo. I rang the bell. And he opened the door of one of those instantaneous friendships. Of humour at first sight. We talked, in a fair exchange where he offered the verb and I was provided the belly laugh. In a certain moment, the telephone rang. He picked the phone and went to the window, looking at the city outside. Behind him, I looked discreetly for the watch, sideways. That was a mistake. “Are you late, honey?”, he asked coming towards me. Of course, I blushed. The primary teacher did not have warned that poets have an eye on their back.

“It’s not on their back, it’s indeed on their ass.” He did not say this. But it was by chance. Anyone close to Waly knows that he would certainly tell me something like that, even if he had been introduced to me few minutes before. Always in full syntony with those verses by Oswald de Andrade that he loved to cite: “poetry is all: game, anger, geometry/ astonishment, curse and nightmare/ but never/ topper, degree and suit”. Waly’s 24-hour poetry sometimes appeared crossdressed in acid and pedestrian gags, or in agressivities almost always smooth, congregating, well-aimed blows on the existential apartheid in which the good education can be transformed. And no matter where that eye could be located, the impression was that he was really omniscient. In life and on the paper. Waly’s poetry captured/launched ratiocinate cut-ups from/to all sides of time/space. As if he intended to be a kind of total radar, a kind of absolute camera, a completely starved browser, connected to life in wideband.

I don’t know if Waly’s presence turned things more real or unreal. But I’m sure that it certainly gave things a plus. This experience of world, so wide, had a huge impact on my way of thinking. In life and in video. A certain day, walking on the sidewalks in Leblon, going to nowhere, we were once again talking about images. I said that I wanted to see the video very different from the film, not as an achievement project, not as a goal. If the film, the traditional film, always results from a hard and long way to be made, I’d rather want the video was only a document of a life journey, of an experience. Then Waly translated this whole pretension into a simple little poem, dedicated to me, but whose title undoubtedly could be dedicated to his own work as a whole: Pan Permanent Cinema.

Since then we never stop collaborating one with other. He made performances in almost all my videos or installations, in different corners of the planet, always counting on some sort of support by Videobrasil. But in a moment like this, just few days after his death, I must be very sincere and confess that I used to feel a bit of disappointment at the end of each work we have done together. It is not that we didn’t have given our souls. It’s not that we have got no success. On the contrary. We gave. We got. It’s just that, in an inevitable comparison, Waly’s life performance was an unsurpassed masterwork.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "Displacements - 14th International Eletronic Art Festival": 22nd September to 19th October 2003, pp. 275-276, São Paulo, Brazil, 2003.

Ideas and Images in Transit

The partnership between SESC São Paulo and Associação Cultural Videobrasil is becoming stronger since 1992. Displacements, the curatorial axis in the 14th edition of the International Electronic Art Festival, congregates artists from Latin America, Africa, Caribbean, Southeastern Asia, Oceania, Eastern Europe and Middle East.

These artists are engaged in the understanding of their roots, as well as in the questioning of dilemmas and contradictions imposed by ethical, social, political and ideological confrontations; territorial disputes, struggles for survival, maintenance or rupture of values. Artists of a shaken world in crisis, constituted under the optics of globalization, post-modernity and a new order established under the sign of force and war.

If the pungency of the theme under debate, Displacements, is due to its contemporaneousness of the geopolitical view, it also has to do with the flow of ideas in a world of virtual borders with no limits, opposed to the imperative surveillance and control and more and more in extremely high levels observed in the so-called geographical borders, as they are defined today. Displacements opens doors to a potential perception of the distinctness, the ways to see the other and, maybe, to feel other.

In this context, the Videobrasil proves to be a possible vehicle to establish dialogues, conceive and elaborate readings, investigate the artistic production of the involved nations, particularly encouraging the interaction among people from different cultures.

As an essentially multicultural event, the Festival has precise connections with the proposals developed by SESC São Paulo in order to promote the integration of ideas and the conviviality with the differences.

These principles have guided the undertaking of multiple activities in the fields of culture, education, and leisure, being these initiatives often innovative and strongly recognized for the originality, seriousness and high level present in a programming primarily devoted to the workers in the commerce and services, their relatives and the community in general.

As a forum attentive to news languages, open to the avant-garde and the recognizing of expressive voices in video art, the International Electronic Art Festival is a distinguished free space to the diffusion, exchange, analysis, research and experimentation, what helps to strengthen the links between Associação Cultural Videobrasil and SESC São Paulo.

These partnership, which aims the continuous building of knowledge regarding digital arts and new media, represents and gives voice to a significant part of the world production in video art, leading to relevant debates and discussions under process about art, techniques and the imaginary repertoire of modern man.

In 2003, the International Electronic Art Festival is comprised of two axes.

The Contemporary Axis presents the Southern Competitive Show, the Possible Narratives: Lebanon, with curatorship by Christine Tohme in partnership with Akram Zaatari, and the Panoramas, a special program comprised of performances, single-channel and panels with the participation of curators and artists specially invited to represent and discuss the most expressive articulations regarding the contemporary art in nations of the so-called southern circuit.

In the Historical Axis there are Marcelo Tas and Marina Abs retrospectives, the Made in Brasil show, an ample retrospective of Brazilian video production from the 1970’s to these days, with curatorship by Arlindo Machado, and the France–Brazil Panel, a selection made by Gabriel Soucheyre of French videos produced by artists who participated in these 20 years of history of the Festival.

For SESC São Paulo, the Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival reveals a special confluence of purposes with the objectives defined by the institution. Objectives that express the refinement and the pertinence of the foci elected in every new edition of the event, and that is the reason which makes us give our incentive and share its undertaking. Danilo Santos de Miranda Director of SESC’s Regional Department State of São Paulo

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "Displacements - 14th International Eletronic Art Festival": 22nd September to 19th October 2003, p. 232, São Paulo, Brazil, 2003.