Resonance Fields | curatorial text
Campos de ressonância
Campos de ressonância [Resonance Fields] proposes a cartography of video art from the 1970s to the
present day, constructed through the encounter between works from different territories and historical contexts. The exhibition brings together artistic trajectories that developed distinct relationships with the electronic image and, beyond the circuits of the United States and Western Europe, forged alternative paths towards the contemporary.
The exhibition brings three bodies of work into dialogue. The Videobrasil Archive, formed over successive editions of the Festival and Biennial, reflects the transformations of the moving image from the perspectives of the Global South. The selection from MAC USP draws on the core collection assembled during Walter Zanini’s tenure, when the creation of the Video Department in 1977 transformed the museum into a laboratory for producing, experimenting with and circulating the electronic image. Assembled by GES-2 House of Culture, the Soviet and Russian selection surveys the history of experimental film and video from 1970 to the present day. It opens with the pioneering experiments of the Kazan-based Prometheus group and goes on to present selected moments from Moscow Conceptualism, the underground scenes of the late Soviet period, the reorganization of the artistic field after 1991, and contemporary practices.
Placed side by side, these works reveal unexpected resonances: recurrences, deviations and tensions capable of reshaping how each work and context is read. The four fields that give the exhibition its title and structure emerge from these resonances. Understood as persistent questions within the practices and poetics of video, these fields function as attractors that shift over time and bring together works from different periods and geographies within a shared spectrum. Bodies, Gestures and Protocols of Action places the body at the center of the relationship with the camera, through choreographies, rules and deviations; Languages in Experiment approaches the apparatus as a means of contesting the visible and the sayable; Television and Rewritings of History brings together appropriations of television language and interventions in public narratives; and Personal Narratives and the Elaboration of Memory presents video as an essayistic form situated between personal experience, archive and collective memory. These fields propose back and forth movements between periods, geographies and experiences, and are identified by color codes across the exhibition’s two complementary spaces.
In the Exhibition Route, works from all three selections are arranged chronologically, tracing changes in media and image regimes. In the Images and Traces room, four looped programs group works from the Videobrasil Collection around these four thematic vectors, to which further interpretive layers are added: a historical cartography intersects political events, image and communication technologies, as well as exhibitions, movements and collectives, revealing both the exchanges among these circuits and the material and institutional conditions under which the works came into being. Display cases containing archival items from MAC USP and Videobrasil present material fragments of these histories. Objects, catalogues, photographs and documents enrich the appreciation of the works with the memory of the processes, encounters and networks that made their production and circulation possible. The exhibition thus presents itself as an open-ended research proposition that constitutes an exercise in rewriting: a history of video art composed through connections, gaps and reverberations.
Solange Oliveira Farkas · Videobrasil
Alessandra Bergamaschi · Videobrasil
André Pitol (associate curator) · Videobrasil
Esther Hamburger · MAC USP
Heloisa Espada · MAC USP
Andrei Vasilenko · GES-2 House of Culture
Dmitry Belkin · GES-2 House of Culture