Page 85 - ARTE!Brasileiros #46

SEMINAR VERBIER ART SUMMIT | PAGES 14 TO 17 paraphrasing the president of the Sossego samba school: “Art is not for cowards”.
IN VERBIER, INDIGENOUS For her, “the greatest art of indigenous people is to stay alive, it is resistance”.
Resistance was also the theme of Ngcobo’s talk about experiences of anti-apartheid
LEADER ARGUES THAT ART movements in South Africa in the 1970’s, and how young artists are currently

IS NOT FOR COWARDS updating the issues of that period.
Santos, on the second day, in a speech that approached issues related to the
defense of human rights, stated that he is participating in movements against
BRAZILIAN NAINE TERENA PARTICIPATES IN A MEETING OF SWITZERLAND, the indiscriminate use of agrochemicals in Brazil. “There are many more people
ORGANIZED BY JOCHEN VOLZ, WITH A STRONG POLITICAL CHARACTER with cancer in the interior of São Paulo because of the poisons spread by
agribusiness”, he provoked.
BY FABIO CYPRIANO A frequent figure in Verbier, due to a music festival taking place in the city, the
singer Barbara Hendricks, ambassador of Acnur (UN High Commissioner for
CAN A HIGHLY ELITIST CITY, frequented basically by billionaires of the international Refugees) made a defense of art as an empowering element.
circuit, where even the average Swiss citizen has no access, host a meeting of Finally, the Thai artist Tiravanija rethought the space of the meeting in a radical
contemporary art? way: he descended to the audience and suggested that each one change the
The challenge is faced by the Verbier Art Summit (VAS), which had its third organization of the chairs, not being all facing the stage. On the gloom light,
edition held on last February 2 and 3. The event was created by a group of he asked the audience to watch his own breathing for ten minutes. In the end,
residents and owners of chalets of the small town of three thousand inhabitants. he asked everyone to say something from the experiences of the two days in
What not lack there are famous millionaires such as the singer Barbra Streisand, Verbier, generating some tension, after all it was a speaker who chose not to
the businessman Richard Branson, the collector Dakis Joannou and the Prince speak. There were those who, after such political contests, proposed that the
Andrew of England, who three years ago paid no less than R$ 65 million for a group should have some concrete action, while others, like Gabi Ngcobo, instead
seven-bedroom cabin . Exaggeration gives the tone of the place, where a drink of talking, played the song “We don’t need another hero”, famous in the voice of
can cost R$ 25 thousand in the VIP parties of the city. Tina Turner, which was the title of the Berlin Biennial, organized by her last year.
Since 2017, the VAS, led by the Dutch lawyer Anneliek Sijbrandij-Schachtschabel, In this somewhat ironic environment, the silence of an artist like Tiravanija is a
consists of a two-day meeting hosted by a guest curator. The first was Beatrix Ruf, very coherent attitude with an event to discuss art in a city like Verbier. Art, in
then director of the Stedelijk Museum, last year Daniel Birnbaum of the Museum fact, is not for cowards.
of Modern Art in Stockholm, and now Jochen Volz, director of the Pinacoteca
of the State of São Paulo.
For two days in the afternoons, the team he had chosen presented themselves BIENNIAS VENICE | PAGES 18 TO 24
sophisticated wooden chalets of the organizers, selected groups debated with UNDER THE LENS OF
in an auditorium with free entrance for enrollees, while in the morning in the
the guests, meetings where journalists were not allowed. The exhibition of the BÁRBARA WAGNER AND
movie The Midday Red was also included in the program, a movie by Swiss artist
Tobias Madison in São Paulo, in collaboration with Grupo Mexa, which shocked BENJAMIN DE BURCA
the audience by portraying a very decadent city, and the test of mobile sculpture
by the English artist James Capper in the midst of the ski resort. WITH A MULTIDISCIPLINARY AUDIOVISUAL WORK PRODUCED IN UNIVERSES
With the theme We are many. Art, the political and multiple truths and a very AT ONCE POP AND MARGINALIZED FROM DIFFERENT CITIES IN THE WORLD,
radical team, among them, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, the Portuguese THE DUO WINS PROMINENT POSITION AND WILL REPRESENT BRAZIL AT
sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos, the Brazilian indigenous leader Nadine THE VENICE BIENNALE
Terena and the South African curator Gabi Ngcobo, Volz repositioned the elitist
event in an elegant way. “I have been completely free to organize the tables, BY MARCOS GRINSPUM FERRAZ
I have invited people that I greatly admire”, said Volz in Verbier. Some of the
selected artists such as Bruguera, Grada Kilomba and Rirkrit Tiravanija will be FROM THE FIRST WORK DONE together and the present day it has been only six years.
part of the program of the Pinacoteca, now in 2019. On June 22, the book with In this prolific period, Barbara Wagner, 38, and Benjamin de Burca, 43, held about
all the lectures will be released at the Pinacoteca. ten large projects – among photographic series, video installations and short films
“We need to get down from the mountains to get to the mud”, said the Brazilian – and with them they were present in a series of biennials, exhibitions and festivals
curator living in Brazil at the opening of the event, still under the impact of the around the world. They toured the universes of art and cinema and, in 2019, were
Brumadinho dam burst just a few days before the Summit opened. It was a poetic awarded at the Berlin Festival with the short film RISE (2018). Now, they prepare
and direct talk of how the art debate should not be restricted to a mere encounter to represent Brazil in the 58th Venice Biennale, with the unreleased Swinguerra,
but deserves to provoke concrete actions. that has just been shot in Recife.
Following Volz’s departure, many of the guests sought to reconfigure the auditorium In a productive sequence almost without breaths from 2013, the duo developed a
where the meeting took place, as to alter power structures. That was what she coherent and solid line of research both in the themes treated and in the creation
did in the first session Kilomba, who left the pedestal selected for the speakers, of an aesthetic and a language — even with the nuances and peculiarities of each
preferring to talk in a more informal way. “To unlearn is also to change spaces”, project. But, according to them, rarely stopped to analyze this body of work. “I started
defined the Portuguese artist, who participated in the 32nd. Biennial of São Paulo thinking about it just recently. Until recently we could not see a body, because we
in 2016. She presented scenes in Switzerland of her latest work, Illusions 2, a produce a lot in a short time. Now that we build up some works we can look back
deconstruction of the Oedipus myth, created for the 10th Berlin Biennale last year. and understand more clearly the relations between them, “says Wagner, who, next
The general tone followed in political reflections, as did Terena, who approached to Burca, talked for more than one hour with ARTE!Brasileiros.
the threats to the 800 thousand Indians living in Brazil and began hes speech Especially in projects involving films, that now arrives at seven, the duo presents

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