The role of the audience
The third and final video of the Mixtape: Videobrasil series was shown in the evening of September 18 at Sesc Campinas. As part of the Public Programs activities of the 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, curators and artists were invited to create actions intended to activate the exhibitions. Paulo and Ricardo Miyada created the series to ponder the crucial role played by the audience: that of completing the meaning of the artworks with its own personal repertoires and histories.
Paulo and Ricardo propose to impart greater emphasis to audience participation, positioning the audience member no longer as an extra, but “at least as a co-star” in the artworks and exhibitions. The Mixtape: Videobrasil project considers that often, the audience is not approached in this way, but rather in a “census-” or “population-like” way.
Mixtape: Videobrasil Campinas reflects about the unfinished nature of the artwork, which requires the audience to complete it. It also tackles the identification of this varied audience with an equally heterogeneous set of artworks, the role of mediation and how difficult it is for human beings to make projections for the future.
“Much is said about exhibitions, curating and artist’s careers, and too little is said about the audience,” said the director Paulo Miyada. “Less pages, less texts, less reflections are dedicated to the members of the audience,” who complete the artworks and exhibitions with their multiple readings. “The artwork is a present given to an unknown recipient. The audience’s reading is reciprocal with the artists’ works. Someone must receive and read into [the artworks] in order for them to exist,” the Miyadas say in the video.
Watch both the Public Programs events that featured the films from the Mixtape: Videobrasil series on VB Channel. Footage from the third meeting will be made available soon.
About the Mixtape trilogy: Videobrasil
Paying attention to the diverse set that operates in tandem with the artwork, the Miyadas opted to approach different audiences in each of the videos: the first video tackles what they call “specialized” audience; the second one addresses the “spontaneous” audience, and the third is about the “potential” audience. All three types appear in the final video of the series Mixtape: Videobrasil Campinas – the first and second through characters and scenes introduced previously and this time reinserted into this volume of the trilogy.
The videos are increasingly less specific and scripted, and become progressively broader. In the first one, a fictitious couple already familiar with the environment and aesthetic values of art (a male designer and a female architect) were given keywords that oriented the video, although there was no script to follow. In the second video, with children, the authors did not expect the subjects to be able to sustain a long discourse on certain issues without a stimulus – after all, this was an audience in the midst of its formative process. Thus, the debate was not guided, but fed into by interlocutors.
In the third video, the abstract question “what is life going to be like 30 years from now?” was posed by a young pregnant interviewer to audience members arriving at Sesc Campinas or visiting the show in its opening night. The 30 years, which could just as easily have been another timeframe, were intended to make a connection with the Festival’s 30th anniversary, celebrated in 2013, during the 18th edition. Paulo and Ricardo believe the question may have been asked prematurely. The audience was not duly immersed in the exhibition’s contents, and the subtlety of the interviewer’s pregnancy – to whom the answers or projections would be greatly relevant – did not reverberate in the intended way. Paulo Miyada claimed that precisely because we are experiencing such a surprising present moment, numerous exercises in future projection could have been easily created.