Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Videobrasil takes video art to the streets in a new partnership with MAC USP

Screening of Rosângela Rennó's Método básico de assobio gomero-tupi  marks the debut of the Videobrasil Open Air project and unfolds in a virtual exhibition

On the night of September 11, the city of São Paulo will receive a new open-air artistic experience. The result of a partnership between Associação Cultural Videobrasil (VB) and the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP), Videobrasil Open Air occupies public spaces through large-scale projections. The project will debut with a screening of Método básico de assovio gomero-tupi [Basic Method of Gomero-Tupi Whistling], from Rosângela Rennó's series Turista transcendental [Transcendental Tourist], and will expand into a virtual exhibition.

In the Brazilian artist's work, words in the Tupi language are written in the sand, and we hear their translation into Silbo Gomero – a whistled language from the Canary Islands. The video takes us through the study of these grammars, constantly erased by the sea itself. “Rosângela's work provokes reflections on cultural exchanges and the sphere of the untranslatable that exists within them. At the same time, it relates memory, permanence, and ephemerality,” says VB's artistic director, Solange Farkas. 

Shown on a loop on the facade of MAC USP, the work will invite the public to an encounter between art and the city. To broaden access to the work, VB is simultaneously opening a virtual exhibition on the Videobrasil Online platform. With free access, it will present Método básico de assovio gomero-tupi, an unpublished interview with the artist and supporting texts, from September 12 to October 12. 

Videobrasil Open Air is the result of a collaboration between two institutions that have played a fundamental role in the history of video art in Brazil. In the 1970s, under the direction of Walter Zanini, MAC USP pioneered the promotion and institutionalization of this art form, providing a platform for artists such as José Roberto Aguilar, Júlio Plaza, and Regina Silveira, and promoting exhibitions that helped consolidate the medium in the country. In the 1980s, Videobrasil emerged, initially as a festival dedicated to experimentation with video as a language. Over more than four decades, the initiative has become one of the main platforms for the preservation, reflection, and dissemination of video art from the Global South, bringing together the largest collection of its kind in Latin America today. 

MÉTODO BÁSICO DE ASSOVIO GOMERO-TUPI

The work chosen for this debut edition of Videobrasil Open Air is part of the Turista transcendental series. Developed by Rosângela Rennó for 16 years as the artistic activation of an alter ego, the project proposes another way of experiencing the world and documenting travels. 

"It is a wonderful game to mix a little of the practice of the 19th-century traveler with that of the 20th-century tourist. The traveler, for whom the journey was more important than the final destination, who spent weeks or months in one place, writing and dedicating himself to understanding it; and the tourist, an exemplary figure of the hurried consumer, who often spends the entire trip documenting it so that he can later sit on the couch and enjoy the landscape through the images he has produced," explains Rennó. 

Thus, in addition to providing visual documentation of the trip, the series of works articulates historical and cultural aspects. It brings together information relevant to other peoples and places, as if building multidirectional bridges between them, proposing new crossings. "The Turista transcendental writes, documents through video, and edits, and in these editions, she dialogues with other cultures. As if it were possible to see through the landscape," says Rennó. 

It is in this process that the basic Gomero-Tupi whistling method is constructed. On a trip to the Canary Islands, Rosângela Rennó learns about Silbo Gomero, the whistled language of the inhabitants of La Gomera. Considered intangible cultural heritage, the language reproduces Castilian Spanish and distinguishes meanings according to tone and rhythm. It is currently the most established whistled language in the world, practiced by a large community.

Her stay in the Canary Islands also led Rosângela to another narrative, involving a famous figure in Brazilian history who was born in the region: José de Anchieta. "When I was a child, I was fascinated by one of his stories. They say that when he was taken hostage by the Tamoios, he spent entire days on the beach writing the thousand verses of his poem to the Virgin Mary in the sand. He had nowhere to write it down, and so as not to forget the poem he was composing in his head, he wrote and rewrote it in the sand on the beach. I always found this discipline fascinating, and at the same time, the impossibility of recording it, of documenting it. There is a famous painting by Benedito Calixto that depicts this scene". Later in his story, it was also José de Anchieta who wrote—this time on paper—the first grammar of Tupi for Portuguese. It is in this association of writing and languages that the Turista transcendental decided to act.

“I chose words and expressions taken from José de Anchieta’s grammar, as if he—or anyone else—were teaching ancient Tupi to a whistler from La Gomera. So that the whistler could hear the sound of the words, we made a recording of Eduardo de Almeida Navarro, professor of ancient Tupi at the University of São Paulo. That’s how I created the project Método básico de assovio gomero-tupi,” explains Rosângela Rennó. In the work, the Tupi words are written in the sand, like the poems to the Virgin, and at the same time we hear them in Silbo Gomero—freely translated and whistled by Oliver Escuela Hernandes, a collaborator on this work. Thus, the transcendental tourist walks through impossibilities, translations and untranslatability, permanence (of the Gomero whistle) and impermanence (of the writings in the sand). 

SERVIÇO
Videobrasil Open Air: Rosângela Rennó
Sep 11, 2025 - from 7pm to 10pm
MAC USP's facade

Videobrasil Online: Método básico de assovio gomero-tupi | Rosângela Rennó
Sep 12, 2025 - Oct 12, 2025
videobrasil.online
Free admission

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ABOUT THE WORK
Rosângela Rennó, Método básico de assovio gomero-tupi, 2016
Turista transcendental series, 2009-2024
Whistle recorded in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria: Oliver Escuela Hernandez
Sound recording and general assistance: Auguste Trichet
Video and audio editing: Isabel Escobar
Revision and narration in Old Tupi: Eduardo de Almeida Navarro

ABOUT VIDEOBRASIL
Associação Cultural Videobrasil is a non-profit art platform that researches, disseminates, and debates artistic production from the geopolitical South —Africa, the Americas, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania. Over the past 40 years, it has built up a collection of works, publications, documents, interviews, performance recordings, and Videobrasil's own productions. Its archive is a reference for the conservation of videos, video installations, and performance records, and the cultural association works systematically to activate this collection through a network of actions that includes exhibitions, shows, publications, documentaries, meetings, and artistic residencies.

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SOBRE O MAC USP
MAC USP was created in 1963 when the University of São Paulo received the collection of the former Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM SP). In its early years, it focused on preserving, studying, and exhibiting the collection, becoming one of the main centers in the southern hemisphere to collect, study, and exhibit works related to various aspects of conceptual art, new technologies, and works that questioned modern tradition. In recent decades, it has continued to expand its collections and today has a collection of around 10,000 works in various media, becoming a center of reference for Brazilian and international art, which maintains a library and an important documentary archive available to students, specialists, and the general public.

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PRESS INFO
Giulia Garcia | giuliagarcia@videobrasil.org.br 

Production: Associação Cultural Videobrasil
Partnership: MAC USP
Support: Electrica Cinema e Vídeo and On Projeções