Associação Cultural Videobrasil

How does one fight historical amnesia through art? The question was the starting point for the inaugural Public Programs meeting of the exhibition Unerasable Memories – a historic look at the videobrasil collection. The debate took place last Sunday (31/8) and was attended by an audience of 60-plus people at the Knowledge Zone, an area designed to enhance the experience of artworks on display at Sesc Pompeia’s Galpão.

The understanding of history as a construct of winners in the face of losers and of the mechanisms by which History is revised and reconstructed permeated the debate, which was mediated by the exhibition’s curator, the Spanish-born Agustín Pérez Rubio; and featured the Spanish critic and curator Octavio Zaya; director and scriptwriter Enio Staub, director of Contestado, a Guerra Desconhecida; documentarist Aurélio Michiles, director of O Sangue da Terra; and artists Jonathas de Andrade, author of Projeto Pacífico, and Sebastián Diaz Morales, who made Lucharemos Hasta Anular La Ley; all of the pieces are featured in the exhibition.

Associação Videobrasil curator and director Solange Farkas opened the meeting and explained that the Public Programs activities and the exhibition are part of a “set of actions designed to keep our collection active and in touch with the world.” To the curator of Unerasable Memories, Agustín Pérez Rubio, the current scenario – according to him, a crisis is underway in different parts of the world – “in tandem with the Biennial, is a good time for regaining some political awareness and historical perspective” in a bid to “bring about change in very different ways, while observing the notion of diversity.”

The critic and curator Octavio Zaya calls attention to the historical overtones of the pieces featured in Unerasable Memories. “The subjects of History and memory are traditionally very problematic,” he said; to him, History is written by the victors, and yet is open to new constructs. Zaya mentioned the important influence of images on memory – according to him, History can be rebuilt through images. “The rebuilding of History has been a topic of art ever since its inception.” He cited schools and artists from the 18^th and 20^th that “dealt solely with elements from the present in their artwork.” From the 60s onward, he said, there was a paradigm shift. “Art ceased to be a parallel view of reality. All art made during this period strove to revise, to recreate a new history of reality,” said Zaya, to whom undertakings such as the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil have played a key role in this recreation over the past 30 years.

The view of History as a version of “winners over losers” became evident to Enio Staub while producing his documentary Contestado, a Guerra Desconhecida. “This conflict, an unknown event, is remembered by official History as a war waged by fanatics, not as a war for the right to land,” said the director, who went to live in Santa Catarina in order to shoot the documentary in the 1980s, during Brazil’s re-democratization process. Staub said his intention was to revise History from the perspective of unofficial discourse, based on personal accounts from people who actually took part in the conflict. In order to prevent the official version from overshadowing the facts, the director said he asked interviewees whether they had actually witnessed the events they were recounting. “This was important, because many people repeat what they don’t really know, and that’s just dominant History taking charge,” he claims. Accounts from elders involved in the Contestado War were invaluable to the director, as he believes they were almost forced to forget: “their knowledge was utterly worthless (to official History).”

To Aurélio Michiles, the director of O Sangue da Terra, “we are the outcome of filmic imagery to such an extent that one could say our second skin is made from image. My work relates to a quest for filmic memory”. As an Amazonas native, Michiles explained that he was naturally influenced by Indian issues – at first due to close proximity with said issues, which were part of his daily life, and later on through his personal struggle to understand and fight for these issues. While attending architecture school in Brasília, he was often asked if he was an Indian. “At that particular moment, I was confronted with that truth,” he said. Michiles won a scholarship grant from Brazil’s national art foundation Funarte to document the Sateré-Mawé tribe’s relationship with guaraná farming in Amazonas. By means of Darcy Ribeiro’s book Os índios e a civilização (The Indians and Civilization), he learned that the Sateré-Mawé were “threatened with extinction. “That was exactly the tribe I was studying. It made me want to embark on a new project, one that wasn’t in the plans.” He then began producing another film, addressing the real fears of a tribe victimized by the interests of a French oil company that trespassed into demarcated land, in violation of the Indian Statute, with the connivance of Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobrás and FUNAI – the National Indian Foundation. Indians were killed, victimized by explosions in search for oil, and pumps loaded with chemicals were irresponsibly left behind, contaminating the ground and those who came into contact with the artifacts.

The author of Lucharemos Hasta Anular La Ley, Sebastián Diaz Morales discussed the elements of reality that at times seem fictional or surreal, like his own film, which speaks of the struggle of prostitutes, transvestites and street peddlers against the Argentinian Congress, which voted a bill in 2004 to prohibit them from working certain areas within the city. “I am deeply interested in protest and in protesters. I wanted to unravel the meaning of that protest at that particular time, after the Corralito crisis in Argentina; anger against those in power,” says the artist, who avoided limiting his work to that particular reality only. “I was interested in discussing a situation which exists all around the world: the people against power, trying to tear down the door to the building where law is written,” he says. “There are many surreal elements to this situation, elements that disrupt regular codes. Reality is also a fiction.”

Fiction and its clash with reality are also discussed in Projeto Pacífico, by Jonathas de Andrade. Superimposing the notion of Latinity to his Brazilian identity, de Andrade travelled to Latin American countries, since he believes he is a “cell in a Latin American social body.” On travelling from Chile to Bolivia, the artist became aware of the War of the Pacific: “the struggle for the sea, a historical struggle, has bred many ill feelings,” said the artist, who realized how widespread this historical and geographical resentment was upon seeing schoolbooks in Bolivia. “The schoolbooks called on children to fight for the sea.” For its part, Chile publicized history as written by the conflict’s winners, and yet, from 1970 to 1990, the country struggled with political dilemmas of its own, with the succession of Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet’s regimes. “Those were two completely different stories.” These two distinct, manipulated versions in their respective countries gave the artist “the idea of an earthquake that separated Chile from Bolivia – which also relates to Chile’s isolationism from the remainder of Latin America.” As the project evolved, however, reality superimposed itself onto fiction: an earthquake occurred in Chile. The artist found himself facing an ethical dilemma: “I thought at the time: ‘I am pouring salt in a wound that is not mine,’” he says. “I wound up calling people in Chile to interview them about the first days after the earthquake. The interviews made it into the video, out of guilt and necessity.” As regards Brazil, he believes that after a generation with “historical amnesia,” reality has begun to change. “Look at last year’s demonstrations – the State is taking repressive action again, with pre-World Cup arbitrary arrests, military tension in Rio de Janeiro, the Indian issue...”

The exhibition will remain open from Tuesdays to Sundays until November 30 at Sesc Pompeia.