Associação Cultural Videobrasil

At the final Public Programs event of the 18^th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, held last Saturday (2/01), 4 pm at the Sesc Pompeia Warehouse, Solange Farkas, the founder of Videobrasil and general curator to the ongoing edition, discussed the main cycles of change undergone by the Festival in the past three decades, relating them to developments in the art scenes of Brazil and the Geopolitical South. Alongside Farkas, with mediation from the cultural journalist and Videobrasil’s editorial coordinator Teté Martinho, were the curator Moacir dos Anjos, the professor and curator Eduardo de Jesus, and the journalist Gabriel Priolli Netto.

The meeting, titled 30 years: memories and updates, is part of Focus 8 of the Public Programs, In the Light of 30 Years, the last in a series of 19 debates between artists, curators, researchers, and Festival attendees. It summed up the guest texts written for the book 30 Years, retracing the Videobrasil timeline, outlining new contexts to image in motion, and culminating with the event’s embracing of various art languages, from 2011 on. The book will be released this year.

To Teté Martinho, the process leading up to this publication celebrating the Festival’s three-decade anniversary, has enabled “a better understanding of the Festival’s history, and allowed for it to be updated,” she said. The debate’s mediator started by listing highlight aspects of the event throughout these three decades. “The 1980s acted as a catalyst to the Brazilian audiovisual movement, in the midst of a military regime, she explains. As the visual arts experienced an exciting aesthetic and poetical turn, Videobrasil embraced a movement that was looking to change the critical situation of the early 80s,” said Martinho.

The journalist Gabriel Priolli Neto led off with a retrospective of the changes in Brazil’s TV since the late 70s and early 80s, in order to explain the setting and context into which Videobrasil emerged, in 1983. Priolli recalls the end of press censorship in the late 70s: “As censorship mechanisms became more lax, there was a revival of political debate on TV, which was formerly deemed taboo,” the journalist said.

Priolli explained that at the time, young people were beginning to work and study the audiovisual field, as a few groundbreaking courses appeared at universities. The first VCRs were released in 1972, while Brazil’s TV Tupi began airing the Abertura show, by the anarchical filmmaker Glauber Rocha, who proposed a language unlike that of conventional TV.

According to the journalist, the 80s ushered in a critical take on existing productions. A new political-aesthetical proposal was imprinted onto independent videos, MTV had its debut, fostering a market for audiovisual and music, and Brazilian rock music rose to the forefront, with a generation of young musicians and rockers. Soon, Videobrasil was also born as a stage for debate upon which the regulatory framework for TV was brought into discussion. “It was here that myriad aspects of TV were discussed in depth, including the political debate concerning the drafting of the new Constitution,” says Priolli. This creative setting and space, he says, birthed great shows on TV that bore independent video in their DNA.

The curator Eduardo de Jesus drew a parallel between the idiosyncrasies of video and performance here in Brazil, and discussed the relationship between these two mediums, which are the raw materials with which Videobrasil works. “The performance-video relationship has endowed us with this idea, this clarity of present tense,” says Jesus.

Citing scholars’ reviews of the topic, the curator highlighted the aspect that inaugurates performance in video. According to him, the installation scene was home to the debut of performance, which is connected with time and brings urgency to the present time. Video, in turn, captures image in motion. As video could broadcast and record at once, it could therefore enhance this imminence of the present time (in performance). “It was thus that it began to infiltrate into art, to bring this present-ness vector into the making of art,” explains Jesus, recollecting that Videobrasil first displayed this relationship between video and performance in its 15^th edition.  

The curator Moacir do Anjos spoke on the permanent theme of the show – Southern Panoramas –, commenting on the relationship between the geopolitical south and the north, and on the Festival’s trajectory within the part of the world that has become known as the South. Anjos cites work by artists, such as Torres Garcia and Cildo Meirelles, which brought to the fore the opposing characters of these two “hubs,” in a critique of the standards imposed by the north (basically comprising Europe and the United States). In order to describe the scenario in which the south attempted to define its place in the world, he resorted to the true meaning of historical phenomena, such as globalization, and quoted Eric Hobsbawm, to whom the 20^th century ended before its chronological time was through.

To Anjos, the South - colonized, outcast, the periphery of the world -, after having been submitted to the North – West, center, hegemonic -, must reinvent what has been fractured by Northern domination. By focusing on artists from the world’s Geopolitical South, Videobrasil caused art that was said to be minor to face up to the standards of the global north. “Because artists can be anywhere, since expression has nothing to do with the physical area in which they live.”

The event’s creator, Solange Farkas, wrapped up the debate by explaining that Videobrasil established itself as a working platform that operates on the perspective of inclusion. According Farkas, the first ten editions of the Festival played a role of social change at a critical time for the country. “The TV was designed to serve the military government, so we had to find openings in order to propose a change,” she explains.

Farkas said that upon mapping out the places with low visibility to create a show highlighting art productions from the Geopolitical South, the goal was not to oppose the North, but rather to promote an interchange between Southern countries so they could establish a de facto relationship amongst themselves, and with the North. “The goal was minimizing injustice and putting us (Brazil) in a position of being a player somehow,” she explained.

Since 1992, when the partnership with Sesc São Paulo began, the Festival has turned to art production from countries in the Geopolitical South (Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Oceania). Throughout its three decades, Videobrasil has carved out a history based on pioneering and experimentation in the field of arts. It began with video in 1983, a then-new, questioning language, and continued, from the 1990s on, by its variants, such as video installation and visual poetry. As of the 2000s, as its internationalization process moved further, the Festival opened up to new art forms, like performance ,to which it dedicated the entire 15^th edition, in 2005, until it ultimately embraced all genres and innovations in contemporary art from the Southern Axis, in 2011.