Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Featuring Moacir dos Anjos, Solange Farkas and Siba, the final Southern Observatory session dealt with perspectives of art circulation informed by a critical regionalism and devoted to establishing decentralized axes of local and transnational cooperation. Throughout the debates, there emerged a clear desire for lines of thought that resumed the autobiographical perspectives that marked the three guests’ experiences.

As part of a generation that witnessed major changes in the symbolic place occupied by Northeast Brazil as the 1990s progressed, Moacir dos Anjos and Siba took the Recife music scene and mangue beat movement as starting points from which to understand the transformations undergone by various fields of art production, such as cinema, fashion, and the visual arts. “I would return to Recife after spending time away from Brazil, migrating from the field of economy to the visual arts and culture studies. And that compelled me to understand what was happening around me,” Moacir recalls. According to him, at that point artists were trying to express discord with traditional hegemonic representations of the Northeast, and mangue beat did that through music. On the other hand, Moacir notes, mangue beat was more than simply a proposition for music or culture in Pernambuco; it was a creative stand in the face of the globalized world. How was regionalist culture beginning to fall apart, denouncing conflicts between different symbolic places? How did it express its own forms of contemporaneity that ensued?

Questioning the notions of identity underpinned by rigid cultural practices and fixed traditions, Siba dealt with the issues put forth by Moacir through the prism of his own musical practice. Citing the Zona da Mata area as his training grounds, Siba recalled the complex local art forms that arose there – among them maracatu de baque solto, ciranda, and cavalo marinho –, which do not separate music from performance or dance. According to the musician, his experience working between Recife and the universe of the Mata Norte region led him to problematize terms such as manifestation, folklore, or popular culture when it came to labeling local production. “I returned to Nazaré da Mata in 2001 to sing and experience the Maracatu tradition, and I formed a group, Siba e a Fuloresta. There, I dedicated myself to a very strict school, based on daily practicing sessions that focused on songwriting, memorization, dedication and improvisation.” More than sacralized musical forms, Siba speaks of other cultural experiences that do not oppose tradition and contemporaneity, and which show us how this imagery is shattered for good.

In the second part of the event, the curator Solange Farkas elaborated on her experience in leading Videobrasil, recalling how the institution changed over time, in constant dialogue with international interlocutors. From the Festival’s early editions at the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo to the more recent ones at Sesc Pompeia, Farkas discussed how the perspective of the geopolitical South marked the institution, having video as its unifying thread. “In the early 1990s, I realized that video production had become weakened by a lack of prospects of incorporation into other art platforms. That was when the idea came up to take a hiatus from the Festival in order to do research away from Brazil, so as to create new windows for this production. That led to the proposal of presenting, as part of the Festival, visual production from countries whose conditions were similar to our own – the ones we call the global South countries.”

After Farkas spoke, the final Southern Observatory session wrapped up with closing remarks from all its participants. The researchers went over the main points covered during the four sessions, bringing up issues that arose in connection with their own practices.