Associação Cultural Videobrasil

By invitation of the Festival de la Imagen, held in Manizales, Colombia, Videobrasil will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary at the 12^th edition of the event – one of South America’s leading experimental electronic media festivals. The edition takes place from April 15 to 19, 2013. The festival is linked to the University of Caldas’ Masters and PhD programs and includes exhibits, workshops, research seminars, international conferences, concerts, and residency programs. On the occasion, Videobrasil receives from Manizales mucipality a tribute for its 30 year dedicated to fostering of videoart and fomentation of new artistic circuits.

Videobrasil will participate in three different actions: three pieces from the latest Southern Panoramas competitive show (featuring another segment on show at MAM-BA), a key project of the International Contemporary Art Festival, will be featured. All three pieces share the ability to break down the boundaries between genres and universes: Eder Santos, a leading figure in Brazil video art, reinvents the statute of happenings in Pilgrimage, a review of the nature-culture relationship, as it dislocates the spectator-artwork-industry relationship. Milton Machado, another landmark of art production in media ranging from drawing to video –  featured here in Vermelho, a partnership with video-filmmaker Cacá Vicalvi –, intertwines theoretically stagnant realms such as industrial and artistic, architectural and picturesque, family and politics. Sebastian Diaz Morales is a rising Argentinean artist whose established production includes pieces that deconstruct the limits between documentary and fiction, such as Oracle (pic.).

Solange Farkas will give an address at Festival de la Imagen’s international seminar. The head of Videobrasil for three decades now, the curator was a close observer of video’s incorporation and legitimization process into Brazilian arts: as video art first emerged in the local scene, she created the first festival focused on the language, facilitating its consolidation. Later on, she opened the event up to electronic art, and then embraced performance and mixed practices as well. In her slot at the symposium, Solange Farkas will draw a parallel between the evolution of Brazilian video art and the history of Videobrasil. She will discuss historical, formal and thematic aspects of that history, such as artwork that critically conversed with Brazil’s former military regime, the advent of the Cinema Novo movement, and the growing presence of video in the country’s leading art biennial. Videobrasil was there through these transformations, such as the absorption of video into the wider context of contemporary art forms, reflected by the international Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil’s incorporation of all existing languages and formats.

Videobrasil’s participation rounds off with screenings of Videobrasil Authors Collection documentaries. The thoughts and working processes of outstanding international contemporary artists are depicted in the series, which opened in 2000. With each new edition, a director is invited to give their authorial take on an artist or a collective. The films review and comment on the outputs of key Brazilian and global contemporary artists such as South Africa’s William Kentridge, Lebanon’s Akram Zaatari, Cuba’s Coco Fusco, and Brazil’s Rafael França, Chelpa Ferro, and Mau Wal (Maurício Dias & Walter Riedweg). 

Check out the Festival de la Imagen website.

Find out details about the works featured at the On Tour website.