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Primeiro catálogo do MACRS destaca importância de seu acervo

Por
Leonor Amarante
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Catálogo do acervo do MACRS. Foto: Divulgação

Uma arte viva de matriz inspirada no agora, com narrativas incompreensíveis para uma parcela da sociedade mais conservadora, rompia o cenário artístico de Porto Alegre em 1992, com a inauguração do MACRS – Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul. Hoje, quase 30 anos depois, com clima diferente, o museu lança seu primeiro catálogo geral com 1.813 de obras do acervo, de 921 artistas. Dentro desse contexto a publicação pode ser definida como um trabalho in progress porque, com certeza, vai se renovar de tempos em tempos. O projeto foi organizado num período de dois anos e a execução final levou seis meses, trabalhada sob a pressão do tempo. A coordenação é de Vera Pellin, gestora cultural, com orientação de Maria Amélia Bulhões, pesquisadora e curadora do projeto. Essa confluência de esforços realizados praticamente ao mesmo tempo resultou em um livro de mais de 300 páginas, com obras que exemplificam a dissolução das fronteiras e a fase libertária da arte contemporânea, especialmente a partir dos anos de 1970/80. Também oferece ferramentas para discutir contextos e o olhar do museu sobre a contemporaneidade.

Para marcar o evento, uma grande exposição, pensada a partir de um recorte da coleção, exibe 70 obras que introduzem o visitante às expressões reveladoras da contemporaneidade em fotografias, instalações, performances, pinturas, gravuras, vídeos e objetos, com curadoria de Maria Amélia, crítica e presidente da ABCA – Associação Brasileira dos Críticos de Arte. Os dois eventos exploram a simultaneidade de proposições e o desejo de identificar uma coleção que abrange desde os anos de 1970 até os dias de hoje. Editada em português, espanhol e inglês, a publicação pode ser pesquisada no site do projeto www.acervomacrs.com . Para André Venzon, diretor do museu, o catálogo é resultado de um projeto que coloca em evidência a totalidade das obras do acervo, tornando-o acessível de modo permanente.

MACRS
Espaço de museu de Porto Alegre. Foto: Divulgação

A arte move o ser humano em forma comunicante, não há arte isolada, trancada em si mesmo, como diz Hélio Pelegrino, o poeta da psicanálise. A persistência dessas relações faz da arte um ato plural. Um elenco expressivo de artistas brasileiros foi reunido ao longo de três décadas no MACRS.  Entre eles estão Cildo Meirelles, Regina Silveira, Nelson Leirner, Carlos Vergara, Carlos Fajardo, Rosângela Rennó, Paulo Nazaré, Rochelle Costi, Lucia Koch, Jorge Menna Barreto e Nuno Ramos. Algumas obras foram adquiridas pelo museu, outras doadas por artistas e ou particulares e ainda pela Bienal do Mercosul. Uma das características marcantes do conjunto é que 47% dos autores são mulheres, o que evoca um debate interessante que atinge as fronteiras machistas. Esse é um dado raro que se move na contramão do que ocorre em grande parte dos museus pelo mundo. Muito antes de um tipo de “politicamente correto” ocupar o cenário da arte e tentar, obsessivamente, encaixar a arte como função social, “o museu já trazia obras que investigam universos não hegemônicos, como o feminino, o negro, o indígena ou o marginal, procurando instaurar no sistema da arte a crítica e os debates de gênero, etnias e relações sociais conflitantes”, como exemplifica Maria Amélia. A curadora salienta também que o corpo é forte presença, colocando em pauta aspectos reprimidos da sexualidade. “A relação com todas essas problemáticas tem espaço no conjunto da coleção”.    

Catálogo do acervo do MACRS. Foto: Divulgação

Assim como ocorreu com o MAC-USP (São Paulo), criado em 1963, mas que só conseguiu sede principal e definitiva no antigo Detran em 2012, o MACRS também não tem local próprio. Funciona no 6º andar da Casa de Cultura Mario Quintana, sem condições de expor grande parte de seu conjunto. No entanto, Maria Amélia garante que já existe local destinado à sede definitiva no 4º Distrito, antigo bairro fabril de Porto Alegre. “Já tivemos outras tentativas e muitas promessas não cumpridas, agora já saiu a portaria, não tem volta”. O fato de o museu não ter sede, segundo a curadora, deve-se ao fato de que em décadas passadas, parte da sociedade e políticos eram resistentes à arte contemporânea por não compreendê-la, daí a dificuldade de conseguir doações e patrocínios. A cidade é o lugar do saber, da liberdade e da experimentação, portanto não há como deter a efervescência artística na cidade promovida pelos jovens artistas que transitavam nos espaços de arte como o Torreão, comandado por Elida Tessler e Jailton Moreira e que durou de 1993 a 2009. Mas, sem dúvida, a alavanca da arte contemporânea em Porto Alegre foi o surgimento da Bienal do Mercosul em 1997, que ressignificou o espaço e o papel cultural da cidade no contexto internacional. Ao longo das edições expôs centenas de artistas nacionais e estrangeiros que exploram todo tipo de cruzamento interdisciplinar de criação, demonstrando as constantes mutações da arte contemporânea.

Estamos num momento de recuo reflexivo devido à pandemia, com um sistema político caminhando para o abismo e toda sorte de reflexão aflorando sobre a verdadeira função da arte na sociedade. A máxima de que toda a cidade que tem uma Bienal desenvolve um circuito de arte atuante não vale tanto para Porto Alegre. Segundo Maria Amélia, ainda são poucas as galerias dedicadas à arte contemporânea. “Houve sim um crescimento substancial de instituições culturais como a Fundação Bienal do Mercosul, o Farol Santander, a Fundação Iberê Camargo, o Instituto Ling.” Ela cita também a importância do curso de pós-graduação em arte da UFRGS- Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul, onde leciona, e a profissionalização de um corpo técnico de montadores, produtores, curadores, além de uma massa crítica atuante. “Mesmo que o circuito das galerias não seja tão forte como poderia ser, dado o número de artistas estudantes que saem dos cursos de especialização na UFRGS, a cidade está mais bem equipada, mas ainda há muito o que conquistar”, conclui Maria Amélia.

MACRS
Espaço de museu de Porto Alegre. Foto: Divulgação

Serviço: MACRS (Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul) 6º andar da Casa de Cultura Mario Quintana – Rua dos Andradas, 736 – Centro Histórico, Porto Alegre.

The last great modern architect in Brazil

Por
Marcos Grinspum Ferraz
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Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Photo: Luisa Sigulem

On an afternoon in June 2016, a few weeks after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1928-2021) received this reporter in his office, in downtown São Paulo, to give an interview to the magazine Brasileiros. It was one of the many international honors received by the Brazilian architect in recent decades – such as the Pritzker, Mies Van der Rohe, the gold medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) and the Japanese Imperial Prize – that crowned his nearly 60 years of professional career. The award granted by the Italian event, in fact, was just the pretext for a long conversation on the most varied topics, from the architect’s perceptions about cities, art and nature to criticisms of the construction of Brasília, to the concept of “popular housing” or “green architecture” and to the educational system in Brazil. Paulo Mendes da Rocha made no concessions, he was forceful in his statements.

Over an hour and a half of interview, the architect made it clear, once again, that architecture cannot be thought of as something separated from everyday life, from solving people’s problems and from the pursuit of satisfying human needs and desires. The title of the article, published in that month’s edition of Brasileiros – “The broad sense of architecture” – and the headline on the cover – “Paulo Mendes da Rocha: a thinker” – tried, minimally, to account for this breadth of thought by the architect who , at that time, was the last great name alive in Brazilian modern architecture.

Now, five years later, shortly after the death of Paulo Mendes da Rocha, aged 92, as a result of lung cancer, arte!brasileiros recalls some of the most striking parts of that conversation. The architect, born in Vitória and based in São Paulo, was one of the main names of the so-called Escola Paulista de Arquitetura – along with his master João Vilanova Artigas. He designed, among many others, the Gymnasium of the Paulistano club, the MuBE (Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology), the renovation of the Pinacoteca do Estado, the Marquise in Praça do Patriarca, the Coach Museum (Lisbon) and the Sesc 24 de Maio . He was a professor at FAU-USP, persecuted by the civil-military dictatorship at the end of the 1960s, and he had a marked influence on the architectural thinking of the generations that followed him. With an emphasis on the construction technique, the adoption of exposed reinforced concrete and the enhancement of the structures of houses and buildings, his works are an unavoidable reference in Brazilian architecture.

But, in addition to his works, it was his ideas and positions that made him one of the biggest names in national architecture – as happened with Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Artigas and Lina Bo Bardi, among others. Read excerpts from the 2016 interview below.

About architecture and art

“We are here, in any of our activities, to solve problems. There are always problems, as it is very difficult to be any living being in nature. You see what species had to invent, from a dragonfly to a giraffe, the business is very complicated. Viewed in this way, things get to some extent exciting, because we have to solve problems. Or, for this to happen, we need to know how to formulate our problems”.

“You can’t solve problems, architecturally, from a purely functional point of view. Then you create machines at most. Precisely the grace of architecture is to keep the speech alive that, given the urgency to do something, it is already done with high ideals of the vision we have of ourselves. This is what linguists call the concomitance of the emergence of needs and desires. You turn strict need into desire at the same time. In other words, you solve a problem from a practical, almost mechanical point of view, giving an expression that it can still be better solved in the future”.

“Nowadays, I see the expression art as somewhat reductionist. It can’t be just art, and here’s the fun of architecture, which you don’t really know if it’s art, science or technique. In other words, it has to be all of this at the same time. It is a discourse about knowledge. The impression I have is that everything man does has an artistic dimension. Our existence requires a position of what we call art, or artistic attitude. In speech, gesture, expression, concern for the other… Deep down, art means concern for the other”.

“There is a market of so-called architecture, gaudy, frightening, which, like any packaging, the market produces, with a fictitious value, capable of being enacted as a value. Architecture as a commodity is a mistake. Architecture is not merchandise, it is always the result of needs”.

“I think it’s very nice to use this popular expression “to architect”. People say: what are you designing? And that is: to be giving shape to an idea, a will, a desire. We are doomed to transform an idea into a thing, because otherwise nobody knows your idea. If you write lyrics on paper, here’s the poem turned into a thing. When it was just in the poet’s head, it was nothing”.

Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Photo: Luisa Sigulem
About cities and public space

“In fact, the idea of ​​a city is not one of physical support, in the sense of protecting it from the wind and rain. It’s a place where you can talk. The city is man’s laboratory. He needs to be together. And to live together, you need public transport, children’s schools, etc. This does not mean that the city of São Paulo, with 20 million inhabitants, the result of the decadence arising from a colonialist policy, is the ideal city”.

“In these moments of crisis, when the acuteness of the problems becomes explicit, the city transforms itself to say exactly what it intends to be. When spaces are occupied, when the street takes on the character of an assembly, it is also an architectural vision of transformation. Because architecture doesn’t always require building something. It can be carried out with human attitudes simply”.

About man and nature

“Because there is this tendency to think that talking about nature is talking about green. No, nature is even the male and female condition of human beings, and this has never been faced with such evidence as when faced with the issue of the impossibility of an overpopulation on the planet. We are nothing. We always have to imagine what we will be. And when you ask that, here’s the political dimension of our existence. What will we be if we can make decisions about our directions? It’s avoiding disaster. In the end, this is it”.

“You have to face the fact that the planet is a helpless little pebble spinning in the universe, and for the first time man cannot deny it.”

About education and training

“The educational system is all wrong. We should teach physics, elementary mechanics along with literacy. A child plays with a pawn in the palm of his hand, flies a kite, sets off a rocket, plays marbles. In other words, he knows what is a sphere that only touches a surface at one point. You don’t play marbles with parallelepipeds, but with perfect spheres. And you tie a stone to a string and any child will understand what the force of gravity, conservation of energy, etc. are. It is easier to teach elementary physics and mechanics to a child than to teach Mother’s Day. The difficult thing, for a child, is to understand the nonsense they are talking about. And then I’m talking about the whole world, not just Brazil. Education today is made to subject the comrade to the enjoyment of the market and the ideology that is placed there, of a stupid capitalism”.

“It is easier for a child to understand what a heart is if you put him to feel the pulse with his hand, in his own body, than to have him draw a red thing on paper, so abstract. The fisherman’s son knows everything about wind, weather, etc. The confrontation with nature in its set of phenomena educates, even today, in a way that serves a bit of counterpoint to this official education we have”.

“I don’t have much experience, for me the world is always new. I don’t know what was and what will be. All I know is that I’m not afraid of things, much less the present, because it’s all we have.”

Leia em português, clique aqui.

Paiz Art Biennial focuses on cultural diversity and crises in Latin America

Por
Marcos Grinspum Ferraz
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bienal de arte paiz
“Rastros que dejamos sobre la cara de la tierra”, 2021, Edgar Calel. Photo: Hugo Quinto/ Courtesy Alexia Tala

Lost. In the middle. Together was the title of the 22nd Paiz Art Biennial, held in Guatemala City, capital of the Central American country, and in the small city of Antigua Guatemala. Inspired by a publication by Dutch artist Jonas Staal about a group of refugees in Amsterdam, the title gained new meanings when it was moved to the Latin American reality, especially in a country with almost half of its population of indigenous origin.

“What is generally seen in Latin America is not the denial of citizenship to minorities, but the denial of a dignified life”, says the curator-in-chief of the edition, Chilean Alexia Tala, referring to the original peoples who “have been denied their rights to live respecting their cosmovisions, their forms of medicine and community organization”. The title also refers to the many immigrants who leave Latin America for the countries of the North, as a result of unemployment and poverty, and who live as a kind of refugees in these countries.

Raising these and many other questions, the 22nd Paiz Art Biennial, which ended on June 6, brought together works by 40 artists – among them the Brazilians Ayrson Heráclito, Detanico & Lain, Jonathas de Andrade and Vanderlei Lopes – and spread to six institutions of the two Guatemalan cities. In addition to group shows, with a large presence of local artists, two solo shows completed the event: one by Guatemalan artist Aníbal Lopez and the other by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz (which will continue on after the end of the biennal).

In an interview to arte!brasileiros, Alexia spoke about the Biennial’s curatorship – done by her in partnership with assistant curator Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer -, about the Latin American political context, about the pandemic moment and a series of other subjects. Read excerpts from the interview below (the full version is available at artebrasileiros.com.br).

ARTE!✱ –  First of all, I would like you to tell us a little about how the curatorial project for this biennial was conceived and what are the main thematic axes that run through the exhibition. Within that, could also talk a little bit about the title Lost. in the middle. together?

Alexia Tala – I will start answering the second part. The title comes from a publication by Dutch artist Jonas Staal and the BAK project that focuses on a group of 200 refugees who were denied citizenship. This fact seemed to us a mirror of the situation of the indigenous communities of Central America and of the many people who are forced to migrate. People who, on the one hand, are recognized as citizens, but on the other hand, are deprived of their rights to live respecting their cosmovisions, forms of medicine and community organization. Furthermore, we also associate the title with all immigrants who we can also think of as refugees, in the sense that the main reason for migration to the North is unemployment, which is itself a form of economic violence.

“Universos de la materia” exhibition overview. Photo: Hugo Quinto/ Courtesy Alexia Tala

What is generally seen in Latin America is not the denial of citizenship to minorities, but the denial of a dignified life, of being able to live in peace. Then came the pandemic and the title gained strength of its own

Jonas Staal’s work, the way he approaches his research and projects, was an inspiration, a kind of base from which we started to consider the Bienal as a project. Their proposals for political formation, their discussion workshops, the different ways of working at the collective level and their particular ways of problematizing served as a starting point for discussing the local, regional and Southern hemisphere in relation to the North. And, within that, its basis in inequality.

The curatorial project is divided into three thematic axes: Universes of matter; Past. eternal. futures; and Perverse Geography/Damn Geographies. All three address issues that are interconnected and that touch right there, at that point where everything is out of balance both socially and politically, where ancestral history is confronted with contemporary history and where matter and ways of approaching objects and nature are opposed.

ARTE!✱ – In your curatorial text you talk about the concept of “presentism” to refer to a kind of disorientation that we live in the current moment in the world, also related to a difficulty in looking both to the past and to the future. Could you talk a little about this idea, about how it is approached by the curatorship?

This presentism that Reinhart Koselleck talks about led us to think about a question of temporality, of analysis of the capacity and inability to envision futures at a time when – even more so with the pandemic – this false idea of ​​interconnectivity was accentuated, which at the same time bombards us and blinds us. Within this temporality is the Mayan ancestral past, which in a multi-ethnic and multilingual country where 60% of the population is of indigenous origin, assumes crucial importance.

The curatorship sought to approach this, from our place as mestizo whites, speaking from the historical context of an overdose of the present and allowing us to enter into ancestral territories that belong to these artists from the altiplano – and to the other guests. The important thing was to do this through their own voices, the artists Kakchiquel, Tz’utujil, Garífunas and Afro-descendants from different parts of Latin America, as well as artists from Africa.

The works presented at the Bienal dialogue with each other and between the thematic axes. The decision to open a space for indigenous and popular voices, without intending to be a translator of anything, resulted in a collective perception by the Guatemalan public that everything that is exposed there makes sense in their lives. And that’s the biggest reward for the team’s work.

ARTE!✱ – Regarding the selection of artists, there is a predominance of Latin Americans (35 out of 40 participants). Is this look from the Global South, and more specifically from Latin America, the main focus of the exhibition?

Yes, the focus was on Latin America, both for curatorial and logistical reasons. Although many of the works respond to the Guatemalan context, the idea has always been to take Guatemala as the mirror from which we can see all these inequalities that historically afflict the Global South. Therefore, together with Gabriel Rodriguez, my co-curator, we also invited artists such as Nelson Makengo, from Congo, Emo de Medeiros, from Benin, and Heba Y. Amin, from Egypt. The works of these three artists have functioned as a kind of connector for realities often unknown to the Central American public.

bienal de arte paiz
Antonio José Guzmán’s work at Paiz Art Biennial. Photo: Courtesy Silvia de Tres

ARTE!✱ – But even if there is this regional cut, there is a production made within this vast region that is also quite diverse. How does this diversity appear in the show?

Yes, it is a very diverse and also very unknown production, as it is a very marginalized and invisible region for the global circuit of contemporary art. This circuit misses the opportunity to meet a multitude of incredibly interesting and talented artists and, furthermore, misses the chance to get closer to a phenomenon that is taking place with artists from the altiplano and their ways of approaching contemporary art from their own indigeneity – forms that, despite making terribly profound criticisms, are resolved in highly aesthetic and poetic ways.

Diversity also emerges in the exhibition from the moment we decided that 70% of the works would be commissioned, that is, new projects. We carried out previous research in order to provide artists with material that culminated in a publication entitled Paraíso (re)partido, which contains a series of themes relevant to the context, from historical issues to contemporary issues.

Foreign artists traveled to Guatemala, which resulted in a series of collaborations that emerged organically not only with local artists, but also with people from other areas, from spiritual guides and botanical healers, weavers with waist looms, poets, filmmakers, forensic archaeologists and lawyers. Ayrson Heráclito, for example, worked with Wingston González in the work Onagulei: Messenger of the ancestors. Finally, a series of other types of knowledge entered the biennale and, together with art, arrived at aesthetic solutions.

Leia a entrevista completa em português, clique aqui.

A book of many hands, minds and lives

Por
Redação
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Portraits of Benta Maria, Antonio Dutra and Manuel do Sacramento by Igi Ayedun. Courtesy Companhia das Letras and Pinacoteca de São Paulo
*Por Tiago Gualberto

Many will remember the encyclopedias composed of dozens of volumes and many kilos elegantly arranged on the highest point of the room’s bookcase. In addition to an investment in their children’s education, book collection was often interpreted as a sign of good financial condition and an appreciation for knowledge. An object that should be transmitted from generation to generation and consulted by the whole family and even by neighbors and schoolmates. The prints in golden letters on wide spines reinforced its importance and that of its contents. A source of unquestionable information and knowledge and a guarantee of good grades.

Part of the new generations used to Google’s search engine and so many other online platforms available on the internet may be unaware of the role encyclopedias and their Enlightenment tradition played in our way of interpreting the world and knowledge. By bringing together intellectuals and thinkers from the most varied fields such as philosophy, arts, economics, science, politics, among others, the French Enlightenment movement aimed to challenge the obstacles to freedom of thought and expression from the 18th century onwards. It is one of the most efficient Western tools for sharing accumulated knowledge and for formulating a social organization guided by the lighthouse, by the light of reason.

However, we will not need abundant examples to recognize the weaknesses and abuse committed in the name of this project of access to universal knowledge through “enlightenment” over the last few centuries. For now, just remember the hundreds of pictures that illustrated any encyclopedia of luxurious cover, sometimes sold door to door. Hundreds of white men, Europeans and Americans and their great achievements for “humanity”. A few decades ago, copying the contents of these encyclopedias and their indisputable stories were part of a school agenda based on reproduction at the expense of learning.

In this context, prior to the online sales market, bookstores were spaces of intimidation for a wide range of the Brazilian population who historically saw themselves included on their shelves only as research objects. One of the reasons for the success of old encyclopedia sellers.

“Enciclopédia Negra”, organized by Flavio dos Santos Gomes, Jaime Lauriano and Lilia Schwarcz

The book Enciclopédia Negra, by the historian Flávio dos Santos Gomes, the visual artist Jaime Lauriano and the anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, published in March 2021 by Companhia das Letras, presents itself as an alternative to confronting the structural racism present in far-reaching reference materials. It is a survey on the contribution and history of important black personalities in Brazil over the last 400 years, focusing on the broad period of slavery and post-abolition. Based on a collective investigation, marked by the collaboration of different researchers and specialists, the publication brings together 416 biographical entries, individual and collective, based on the Afro-Atlantic experience of around 550 deceased characters. For the authors, “If the criterion for being included in this book was death, the objective is life.”

However, these numbers should not be considered as representative of the scope and diversity of these stories present in Enciclopedia Negra. Instead, the book refuses the use of statistics in favor of affirming the singularities of these characters, highlighting the protagonism through the nomination, recognition of deeds, the updating of the social value and complexity of these actors’ lives in view of the conditions of the Brazilian past and present. The result is an organized, non-exhaustive narrative capable of circulating throughout all regions of the country, affirming an attention to the memory of LGBTQI+ women and people rarely present in publications dedicated to celebrating contributions to the formation of our society.

In this sense, in addition to confronting the colonial historiography responsible for denying visibility to the contributions of black people, the book plays an important role in the re-presentation, organization and dissemination of information usually kept in research centers, libraries and specialized centers. It is about offering this knowledge beyond the university spectrum. Researchers, teachers, students of different ages will find in the Enciclopédia Negra material that is easy to access and handle, in addition to indications of research references integrated into the entries.

For this, the authors are nourished by the fruits of social movements and the pioneering spirit of the intellectual achievements of different generations of black historians, social scientists, artists and researchers. Among the numerous predecessor publications used as a reference for Enciclopédia Negra, Fala, crioulo: depoimentos (1982), by Haroldo Costa, stands out, in which we have access to interviews with names such as Pelé and actor Milton Gonçalves, but also with anonymous characters, housewives, sweepers and hairdressers, sharing their trajectories and perspectives on Brazilian racism. In another significant example, A Mão Afro-Brasileira (1988), a book organized by the plastic artist and director of the Afro Brasil Museum Emanoel Araujo, we find black protagonism in the visual arts, dance, music, poetry and literature of several generations. Among many other titles, Quem é Quem na Negritude Brasileira (1998), by professor and poet Eduardo de Oliveira, and the Dicionário da Escravidão Negra no Brasil  (2004), organized by Clóvis Moura and Soraya Silva Moura, form, alongside the researches and publications by Nei Lopes, Oswaldo de Camargo, Conceição Evaristo, Fernanda Miranda, Lélia Gonzalez, ways to understand the contributions developed from Africa and its diaspora, the impacts of colonialism and the impossibility of understanding the world without this knowledge.

Therefore, Enciclopédia Negra, in dialogue with these intellectual achievements, is not restricted to approaches that associate black participation in Brazilian history with the economic cycles of sugar, mining and coffee during the period of slavery. Nor does it privilege prejudiced narratives that reduce black insurrections to simple rebellion. Added to the authors’ own experience in relation to studies on slavery, post-abolition and reconstruction of black profiles, trajectories and biographies, the book presents sensitivity in the compilation of this multiplicity of references observed here and that, in large part, in other publications on the subject, are observed only in the midst of censorship, inattention and negligence. This situation can, unfortunately, be observed in the restricted selection of authors present in the catalogs of major publishers dedicated only to responding to the demands for materials after the enactment of Law 10.639, of 2003, which makes the teaching of Afro-Brazilian history and culture mandatory in schools.

Thus, the entries about singular and collective characters that describe both individualized and community experiences present themselves as gateways to different philosophies, religiosities, bodily practices, technologies, activism, mobilizations and entrepreneurships. They also seek to describe the daily battles and daily life of each period, as well as its limitations, complexities and contradictions. Soon, Chica da Silva, Madame Satã, Abdias do Nascimento, Anastácia, Geraldo Filme and Heitor dos Prazeres share narratives alongside Claudia Ferreira, Robson Cruz, Rosalina, Francisca Luiz and many other illustrious unknowns.

The exhibition

In this effort to change the imagination of Brazilians on the subject the realization of the Enciclopédia Negra project includes the assembly of the exhibition of the same title at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo museum. The Enciclopédia Negra exhibition, opened to the public from May 1, 2021, features 103 works by 36 contemporary artists. Among the three exhibition rooms, visitors can see mostly two-dimensional works, of small and medium format, including paintings, drawings, watercolors and objects authored by artists Amilton Santos, Antonio Obá, Andressa Monique, Arjan Martins, Ayrson Heráclito, Bruno Baptistelli, Castiel Vitorino, Dalton Paula, Daniel Lima, Desali, Elian Almeida, Hariel Revignet, Heloisa Hariadne, Igi Ayedun, Jackeline Romio, Jaime Lauriano, Juliana dos Santos, Kerolayne Kemblim, Kika Carvalho, Lidia Lisboa, Marcelo D’Salete, Mariana Rodrigues, Micaela Cyrino, Michel Cena, Moisés Patricio, Mônica Ventura, Mulambö, Nadia Taquary, Nathalia Ferreira, Oga Mendonça, Panmela Castro, Rebeca Carapiá, Renata Felinto, Rodrigo Bueno, Sonia Gomes and Tiago Sant’Ana.

Although all the commissioned works are not included in the publication, as only one work by each of the 36 artists is present in the image book of the Enciclopédia Negra, the set stands out as a collective portrait of the various propositions and attempts to compose an institutional presence of the black in the arts. Therefore, the donation of these works, mostly figurative portraits of the biographed characters, constitutes an intervention in search of representation.

Therefore, by recovering lives marked by death, the book Enciclopédia Negra aims to extrapolate the view of blacks as synonymous with enslaved, subaltern, where racism constitutes a mechanism for refusing their humanity and legitimizing their exploitation and extermination, both physical , political and symbolic. Philosopher and professor Achille Mbembe informs us that the recognition and repair of this violence takes place as we deconstruct colonial thinking and begin to identify black people in their universal, human and multiple dimension, far from a categorical dimension, responsible for the yoke that keeps black bodies as commodities. So it must be said: Black Lives Matter!

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Editorial: In mourning I fight

Por
Patricia Rousseaux
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"O mundo é nosso", 2018-2019, from "Pardo é papel", Maxwell Alexandre. Image: Gabi Carrera/ Divulgação

We mourn. In the past months, several thinkers of Brazilian culture died, after years of building a great work. The photographer German Lorca, the architect and urban planner Paulo Mendes da Rocha, almost centenarians, were part of the nobility of modern thought.

But, not enough, we are also crossed by the loss of friends, colleagues and family members, crossed by the death of close to half a million Brazilian citizens. Victims of Covid-19, a fierce virus poorly and wrongly fought in Brazil.

We are traversed by the inevitable awareness of the loss of values ​​in our society, which is collapsing. Divided in such a way, where violence only escalates.

It is no exaggeration to say, quoting the words of the writer Bernardo Carvalho, that we are living in a moment in which barbarism is insufflated. Large sectors of the population mobilized to deny the advance that research, study and science have brought us over the last few centuries only collaborated with the advance of diseases. Provocations against necessary care! Explicit provocations, in favor of “individual freedom” and, preferably, armed.

Public institutions razed by professional puppets, a gang in which everyone lies and defends each other. A country surrendered to a perverse project, where large sectors of the population still believe in a model of power, the power of exclusion. The punishment. Religious, political, physical, gender. People who kill people. Yes, with stray bullets and directed bullets… Aimed at women, at blacks, at those who resist.

We are naturally fragile. But this fragility is accentuated as large sectors of society are abandoned by this power project, which makes them increasingly dispossessed. The basics are being denied: food, education, health, culture.

In these, where is ART left? Where is it? Since it didn’t die. But not because what dies over time are movements, styles, avant-gardes; but because today, here, not all of us are dead. Or because, as the artist Jota Mombaça would say in one of her works, which was already on the cover of this magazine, “Us agreed not to die”.

We are in mourning, yes, but this, as in the history of all cultures, is a necessary process to honor what we have lost and, despite the pain, to be able to reinvest our energy and psychic strength to move forward.

Taking care of us and taking care of each other, being alive, listening and following where it is taking place, in the midst of this debacle. It is necessary to read, write, think, paint, install. It is necessary to produce art, to guarantee an instinctual body that, affected by its surroundings, is capable of screaming, affecting the other and the social body.

Thus, in our pages, the way to mourn is honoring the artists, researchers and editors of Enciclopédia Negra (Cia. Das Letras), who worked exhaustively to repair, in response to the classic Encyclopedias of the Enlightenment – which for more than 200 years only they reproduced and advocated white and European models of domination – the absence of hundreds of invisible black men and women.

We also deal with several exhibitions put on by artists and social groups who never stopped meeting virtually. Fabio Cypriano pays tribute to the centenary of Joseph Beuys, a central artist in the history of contemporary art, and observes how traditional exhibitions such as Kassel’s Documenta prepare to completely change their exhibition strategies.

There is also the report that is in the hands of the young journalist Miguel Groisman dedicated to researching artists who document conflicts.

Anyway, we are here and, in our mourning, we fight.

Leia em português, clique aqui.

Artist collectives reflect the spirit of the time

Por
Fabio Cypriano
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Jardim Miriam Arte Clube's atelier. Photo: Courtesy JAMAC

Both the choice of five collectives as nominees for the Turner Prize, in 2021, and the announcement of 14 collectives as the first participants in documenta fifteen indicate an important moment of inflection in artistic practice, which reveals the spirit of the time: the passage of isolation from the called the plastic artist in his atelier for an action of solidary and sustainable character, which aims at new forms of action in the world. Finally.

In other artistic areas, such as theater, dance and music, for example, the collective experience has always been present. In the visual arts, very little, despite several isolated historical cases. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, initiatives have been growing that have not ceased to be mapped in important exhibitions such as the Panorama of Brazilian Art in 2001, curated by Paulo Reis, Ricardo Basbaum and Ricardo Resende, at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM-SP).

Among the groups selected there were Atrocidades Maravilhosas, Mico and Clube da Lata, who for twenty years had already sought a new form of agency in the artistic scene. Artist Mônica Nador also participated in that edition of Panorama, with the project Paredes Pinturas, the origin of Jamac – Jardim Miriam Arte Clube, which five years later participated in the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, in 2006.

With general curatorship by Lisette Lagnado, the edition, entitled Como Viver Junto, actually brought more collectives besides Jamac itself, such as the Argentine Eloisa Cartonera and the Chinese Long March Project. Eight years later, in the 31st edition, a group of curators selected by Charles Esche again focused on collectives, such as ruangrupa itself, who now directs documenta fifteen, but also Bolivian Mujeres Creando, Russian Chto Delat or Argentinean Etcetera and the Brazilian Contrafilé Group.

ruangrupa cura a documenta quinze
ruangrupa, 2019. Photo: Jin Panji

It is ironic that this growth of collectives has emerged during the phenomenon of the expansion of art fairs which, due to its essentially commercial profile, brought back a somewhat fetishistic character of the artist and his work, in addition to elevating the figure of the collector as the main legitimator of the circuit – only what sells should be considered.

As a sort of antidote to this system, which had already shown decay for some years, these collectives sought new practices, often far from fairs and collectors’ homes. They are either in institutions or universities, such as Forensic Architecture, based on the Goldsmiths of the University of London, which, incidentally, was nominated for the Turner in 2018, or they are just informal groups of artists, such as #coleraalegria, in Brazil, who have been contributing to relevant political manifestations with the creation of innovative visual material, far from the serious clichés of conventional militancy, in addition to having a strong presence in social networks.

Not by chance, in his recent book What Comes After Farce, American critic Hal Foster points out that many artists have been working on the key of “reconstruction”, that is, they are looking for systems that serve as alternative possibilities to the collapsing world.
The case of #coleraalegria is exemplary, because it is a grouping of militancy, where each one continues with their individual work, but in the collective there is an energy that is multiplied by singularities.

Thus, contrary to what is conventionally stated that documenta sets trends, the next edition of the event will enshrine practices under construction for more than two decades, which are repositioning the arts system.

Leia em português, clique aqui.

José Damasceno and Mona Lisa’s smile

Por
Fabio Cypriano
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"Moto-contínuo", José Damasceno's exhibition. Photo: Isabella Matheus/Pinacoteca de São Paulo

It gives a certain relief to enter José Damasceno’s exhibition, Moto-continuo, at Estação Pinacoteca, in such an unfavorable context, when a CPI unveils all the preposterous acts of a government that contributed to the nearly 500,000 deaths as a result of Covid-19 in the country.

The diversity of procedures, from magnanimous installations to delicate designs, the disparity between the materials used, from the noble marble to the decaying and perishable cigarettes, and the absence of an explicit theme, can point to an exhibition that deals at its limit with art as an “experimental exercise of freedom”, as defined by art critic Mário Pedrosa (1900-1981). In times of pandemic, freedom can be everything.

As the North American curator Lynn Zelevansky points out in the exhibition’s catalog to describe one of the artist’s works, but which serves for the exhibition as a whole, Damasceno creates “a world of its own, inhabited by strange creatures”.

Among the more than 70 pieces exhibited, made between 1989 and 2021, some of the works that help in this feeling of disconnection from the context are those that, due to their size and seriality, create strange landscapes, such as Trilha Sonora, with hundreds of hanging hammers in nails create the representation of mountains, and Snooker, a pool table covered with woolen threads that come out of the lamps arranged above it. The same principle is seen in Paisagem crescendo, where hundreds of cigarettes that look like dots on the wall create images of trees.

It is a set of works that seduce because of the tricks of their compositions and provoke that Mona Lisa smile, for their ingenuity and originality. In his text, Zelevansky seeks to value this strategy by pointing out that there is a “psychological dimension in Damasceno’s work that borders on the surreal” and cites the artist’s favorite authors such as William James, Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges as possible dialogues with his work.

In fact, the aforementioned works have surreal dimensions, as their unusual construction processes, from mountains made by nails and hammers to lights made from woolen threads, result in images that resemble collages of contradictory elements. However, unlike the multiple possible meanings of surrealist works, there is nothing much more than the elements of the works themselves. Hammers follow hammers, wool threads follow wool threads, which takes contemporary art to a mere formalist exercise.

Another set of Moto-contínuo that points to this superficiality are the so-called Esculturas Borracha, made in marble that oversize common everyday objects, such as the school material that gives the title to the works.

When the viewer becomes aware of this lack of depth, relief turns to irritation, because the virtuosity of the show points to a total lack of connection to any context, other than that of art itself, and the only possible lens to observe the set is thinking about categories of the art itself. It is not by chance that Zelevansky’s text in the catalog revolves around the technique of drawing.

In a society so polarized, conflicted, prejudiced, and one can say so many other terms that point to the failure of any humanist thought, the exhibition curated by José Augusto Ribeiro brings a selection and disposition of highly aestheticized works, a set that reveals a cold and distant beauty, full of puns like Can you hear me? (você consegue me escutar?), with two trumpets joined at the mouth.

Interestingly, the exhibition’s catalog goes in the opposite direction, practically an artist’s book, since most of it is composed of photos of a lambe-lambe with the image of the effigy of the Republic – that illustrates the Brazilian Real notes – pasted on the walls of the city, mostly in decaying and impoverished places, and in some of them political demonstrations such as “Fora Temer” can be read, giving a sense of the context and becoming a documentation of a powerful public installation.

It is this vitality that is lacking in Moto-contínuo itself, which proves to be too monotonous because it is so beautiful and perfect. Leaving the building in the cracolândia area is a shocking contrast, but it ends up being a relief to return to the ugliness and difficulties of the real world, with all its dynamism and potential.

Leia a crítica de Moto-contínuo em português, clique aqui.

Letter to Sidney Amaral

Por
Redação
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"Gargalheira ou quem falará por nós", Sidney Amaral, 2014. Foto: Coleção particular/Cortesia Sesc Jundiaí
"Gargalheira ou quem falará por nós", Sidney Amaral, 2014. Foto: Coleção particular/Cortesia Sesc Jundiaí
“Gargalheira ou quem falará por nós”, Sidney Amaral, 2014. Photo: Private collection/Courtesy Sesc Jundiaí

*By Daniel Lima

I never met You, Sidney. Although we are two plastic artists from the same generation, from the same city, we have not met while you were alive. This mismatch is even rarer if we consider that we are two black artists, an exception in the world of contemporary art – even more so in the early 2000s, when we started our careers.

In my first exhibitions, my path forked to a distance away from the art galleries. I was part of this generation that opted for an encounter with the city, with the contradictions of urban space. A battleground for poetic creations in a clash of scale, languages and social-political contexts.

While you were developing these powerful works that are part of the exhibition Viver até o fim o que me cabe! – Sidney Amaral: aproximação, curated by Claudinei Roberto da Silva, I was also dealing with poetic works with different plastic and conceptual solutions. But the crossings are the same, Sidney…

I realized these transversalities in my encounter with your work when I was conducting the exhibition Agora Somos Todxs Negrxs?, at Galpão Videobrasil in 2018. With the help of Claudinei Roberto – who had been a colleague at USP and who can certainly agree to be black in these spaces of exception – I was able to find your works in their natural habitat: the studio where golden snakes with fork teeth lay down; headless barbies in solid bronze; eating trap spoons. The drawings and paintings of a virtuosity of technique meet this double of identity: the contradiction of blackness.

Being part of a huge minority in contemporary art and a majority in the population gives us this certainty of the importance of inscribing this so invisible Afro-Brazilian perspective. At the same time, the identity trap that we have to transcend is certain. A double challenge to bring the unique context that forged us, but also to cross the limits of what is considered as a denunciation of social ills in our world. A contradiction to be elaborated in two senses: in relation to the identity trap and another, connected to identity, in the articulation of social denunciation and the announcement of other future perspectives.

The traps are similar insofar as they pose the problem of how to escape from the frames created for a poetic political making. In other words, Sidney, we were faced with the challenge of speaking from the place of black individuals – and in this operation of looking at oneself it is almost impossible to ignore the violence that goes through us – but, at the same time, to undress black identity because they were created to bind us and hinder potentials of life. As Achille Mbembe puts it in Critique of Black Reason:

Does the Black Man not insist, still, on seeing himself through and within difference? Is he not convinced that he is inhabited by a double, a foreign entity that prevents him from knowing himself? Does he not live in a world shaped by loss and separation, cultivating a dream of returning to an identity founded on pure essentialism and therefore, often, on alterity?

This double in your work, Sidney, comes up in attack on himself. Asserting oneself black in image, plenitude, struggle, dignity, in a reverse sense to the historical animalization of blacks in the colonized world. Simultaneously struck by the certainty that something bury us in a rhetoric of death:

(…) the fear felt by the millions trapped in the ruts of racial domination, the anguish at seeing their bodies and minds controlled from the outside, at being transformed into spectators watching something that was, but also was not, their true existence (Mbembe)

Sidney, when I went to Africa, I could understand that “black” was created here in the Americas to define, dominate and diminish us. A term that, as I put it in the provocative question title of our exhibition Agora somos todxs negrxs?, was created to “signify exclusion, brutishment and degradation, that is, a limit that is always conjured and abhorred”, writes Mbembe. But which, due to the need for survival, was redefined by a path of struggle in the same history of violence and resistance. Being black has come to mean that we are brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. And since then, this black being “has become the symbol of a conscious desire for life, a thriving, floating and plastic force, fully engaged in the act of creation and even in the act of living in several times and several stories simultaneously”.

I believe that this double that we reenact together with so many others in this generation redefines meanings of consolidated images and consolidating stereotypes. The black boy in the mask T-shirt; the soldier angel; the woman who smiles with a wreath of flowers… Ways of replacing images in the world – and, in this way, we replace ourselves.

These movements are aware of the limitation in “simply setting up new symbols of identity, new ‘positive images’ that fuel an unreflective ‘identity politics‘’’, as Homi Bhabha writes in The Location of Culture. By wearing out and provoking this double identity, we build a labyrinth that leads, after all, to the multiplex identity: not fluid, amorphous or slippery, but solid on many sides defined by negation, by what we are not.

Thus, the themes, whether slavery in Gargalheira ou quem falará por nós?, whether the colonial Catholic religion in Demiurgo or O Pão Nosso, but also recent history in Diálogos/ Encontro return as this “disjunctive present”, a present broken into conflicting, contradictory interpretations. This shift bothers many because it deconstructs worlds of stable beliefs. Only racial displacement, the black figure in the canonical context of art, displaces the world around them.

These myth images, memory images, time images that invade and colonize subjectivities, Sidney, are being reinscribed by us not as heroic symbols of a politics of identity. They are reinscribed in “the very textuality of the present that determines both the identification with, and the interrogation of, modernity: what is the ‘we’ that defines the prerogative of my present?”, points out Bhabha.

DIÁLOGOS/ENCONTRO, de Sidney Amaral. Exposta em VIVER ATÉ O FIM O QUE ME CABE - SIDNEY AMARAL: UMA APROXIMAÇÃO
“Diálogos/Encontro”, Sidney Amaral, 2015. Private collection/Courtesy Sesc Jundiaí.

It is true that this “we” of the Brazilian nation never included us. And at this stage of capitalism, many are beginning to realize that it doesn’t include them anymore either. The current stage of exploration, whether material or cognitive, places a vast majority side by side in a fractal of segregation. “Shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks”, affirmed the Haitian Constitution of 1805, the result of the only black revolt to take definitive power and the first American nation to abolish slavery. “Now we are all blacks!”

We agree, between fits and starts, between battles and wars, between deconstructions and decolonizations, that we will not succumb to the kidnapping of the future. We re-enact the past with the delusions of the present. I see in your work, Sidney, a force nothing close to the surreal oneiric, but bordering on delirium: a power of fascination and hallucination.

…

Sidney, I had a shot of the vaccine that immunizes against the virus that causes Covid-19 the day I went to visit your exhibition Viver até o fim o que me cabe! In the morning, I had prepared my documents. The doctor who greeted me after the short wait in line was sitting in the disabled drive-thru. Some people passed by asking which vaccine was being applied and what day the Pfizer vaccine would arrive. The doctor’s green eyes examined the PUC diploma filled with gold writing. Then she filled out a form and asked me about my self-determination: black. I remember that I manage to escape the statistic that places the black population among the least vaccinated in the country. Brazil vaccinates twice as many white people as black people (data from Agência Pública). I escaped because I am in the ranks of those who have a degree in Clinical Psychology. This is a type of measure that underground opens the way for a white portion – which does not necessarily have a greater risk – to get vaccinated first. “Accepting only the diploma is a measure made for whites to get vaccinated”, the doctor agrees. And I see myself here. Yes, we were always the exception, Sidney.

Leia em português, clique aqui.

The transitory character of things

Por
Maria Hirszman
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"Sum of days", at MoMA (2011). Photo: Courtesy the artist and Nara Roesler Gallery
Carlito Carvalhosa at his solo exibithion at Galeria Nara Roesler (2017). Courtesy the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler

The untimely death of Carlito Carvalhosa last May, at the age of 59, aroused a strong feeling of sadness and impotence, strongly expressed in the social networks of admirers, artists, critics, collectors, dealers and all those categories that make up the diffuse group known as the “arts scene”. The impossibility of holding a farewell ceremony and collectively elaborating the mourning added to the feeling of hopelessness experienced in the country as a result of the health, social and political tragedy in which we are immersed. It is known that the artist did not die from Covid-19 and that he had been fighting cancer for many years, but there is still a feeling that losses like this sum up the fraying and destruction of a civilizing project in which art would play a fundamental role. Object of intense expressions of affection and admiration, Carlito Carvalhosa and his work ended up embodying this notion of art as an element of reflection and transformation, so violently threatened today.

If there is something that characterizes the artist’s work in a more general way, it is his desire to act on the perceptive frontiers, transforming our apprehension of the world and reaffirming the transitory character of things. His career began in the 1980s, linked to a project with a collective approach, together with a group that included Fábio Miguez, Nuno Ramos, Paulo Monteiro and Rodrigo Andrade. The group, known as Casa 7 (referring to the number of the studio they shared), shared common interests such as the link with neo-expressionism and the use of non-noble materials such as Kraft paper and industrial paint. Carlito’s initial experiences with drawing and painting, little by little, also gave way to research of a more sculptural nature, for a growing interest in the occupation of the surroundings. He began to explore the environment, incorporating simple and crude elements, but with a strong symbolic charge, such as light, translucent fabrics, wood and plaster, materials that became frequent in his production.

“I wanted to tie a knot in this space”, he confessed during the assembly of his first large site-specific installation, held at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology (MuBE), in 1999. In this work, entitled Duas Águas, Carlito Carvalhosa literally transferred his studio to the museum and clashed with the rigorous and straight architecture of Paulo Mendes da Rocha (another big loss in recent weeks), creating in loco a series of monumental plaster structures, with organic forms, which inverted the notion of interior and exterior. With a light appearance, but weighing eight tons, these pieces kept that paradoxical, inscrutable aspect that the artist claimed to seek in his work.

This work inaugurates a series of dialogues he engages with museum environments of great institutional and architectural importance, considered as milestones both in his production and in the growing importance of large installations in Brazilian contemporary art. This is the case, for example, of the Sala de Espera, which inaugurated in 2013 the annex of the new headquarters of the Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo (MAC-USP), of the installations Sum of days, with similar versions presented in the the octagon of the Pinacoteca do Estado (2010) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2011), or even of the monumental sculpture It was already like this when I arrived. The piece, originally exhibited at MAM Rio in a temporary exhibition held in 2006 and later incorporated into the Sesc Guarulhos collection, refers to the image of Sugar Loaf Mountain in reverse, a voluminous mountain that floats inverted in the air, provoking the visitor with its unstable and precarious. A secondary but intriguing aspect of Carlito’s work is the attention he pays to the word. His titles always bring a poetic dimension, a temporal or narrative suggestion that adheres to the work, adding to the formal aspect and generating another layer of meaning.

There is in common in all these projects, which play with light, balance, volume, depth and transparency, a permanent desire to subtly transform our apprehension of what surrounds us. By activating these spaces through small interventions (such as when he raised the Eva Klabin Foundation’s mobile heraldics, placing fragile glass cups under them) or actions with greater visual or sensory impact (such as the large spirals of translucent fabric that make up the scene in Sum of days), it creates a kind of place outside time, in which the sensations of belonging and absence overlap. Something that Lorenzo Mammì defined as a “non-place”. Or, in the words of Marta Mestre, a situation that is extremely ambiguous, “because it permanently vacillates between contemplation and experience, between distance and approximation, between optical and haptic”. In other words, Carlito Carvalhosa’s work goes beyond challenging the viewer with thought-provoking temporal and spatial provocations. Over more than three decades, he problematizes the relationship between the work of art and the public, incorporating himself into the best tradition of contemporary Brazilian art.

Leia o texto em português clicando aqui.

A triennial in progress

Por
Giulia Garcia
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Thiago de Paula Souza, Diane Lima e Beatriz Lemos, the triennial’s curators. Photo: Indiara Duarte

In the midst of a pandemic and political crisis context, what are the curatorial and exhibition possibilities? This was one of the questions that guided months of work in The river is a serpent, third edition of Frestas – Art Triennial. Organized by Sesc São Paulo, based at its Sorocaba unit, it is curated by Beatriz Lemos, Diane Lima and Thiago de Paula Souza.

The invitation to the trio came before the pandemic, enabling the first activities in the construction of the project. On a trip across Brazil, the curators visited locations in the North and Northeast: “The most important thing for us was to create a curatorial body from this moving body in conflict with other territories”, explains Beatriz. It was in this movement that The river is a serpent began to take shape, not as a theme – which would be insufficient for the current moment -, but as a cosmovision that brings together the learnings of its process and aims to discuss the contemporaries movements, their geographies and colonial structures.

But how does Frestas ended up happening in Sorocaba? From a sequence of listening meetings with local artists, producers, managers and educators, the team sought to understand the region’s needs and made education one of the central axes of curatorial thinking. “It has always been a great concern for us not to be like a spaceship that lands in the city ‘bringing knowledge’ and then leaving”, explains Renata Sampaio, educational coordinator. If the general context seemed so vertical, the proposal here was to change this dynamic. “We didn’t want to reproduce the colonial vision of those who just want to teach and not build together”, she adds.

With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, the entire art world saw the need to rethink their programming. With the triennial it was no different. The exhibition was postponed several times and is currently scheduled for August 2021. For the curators, this decision brings up a discussion about their professional functions: “perhaps the curatorial practice is not limited to an exhibition organization”, explains Thiago de Paula. With that in mind, they changed the direction of the project and decided to focus even more on educational practices. If “the river is a serpent because it hides and camouflages, and between the unpredictable and the mystery it creates strategies for its own movement”, as the curatorial text summarizes, it is with a focus on the course and curves of this river – and on the dialogues that these promote – that Frestas decides to build itself. “This image has helped us to think about this cosmovision and has enabled us to find strategies and possibilities to face what it means to cure an exhibition of contemporary art at this moment in Brazil”, explains Diane Lima.

“Nhíromi”, Denilson Baniwa. Photo: Courtesy Sesc Sorocaba

The affluents

It was in this context that the idea of ​​the Study Program took shape. Fifteen artists whose lives and practices are directly connected to colonial violence were invited to participate in a series of virtual meetings with the triennial’s curatorship, production and educational teams. “We had intense meetings discussing projects, poetics, practices and life”, says Thiago. In this meetings, the artists were able to elaborate their own artistic projects, which will make up the exhibition.

Based on the experiences and ideas of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Davi de Jesus do Nascimento, Denilson Baniwa, Denise Alves-Rodrigues, Ella Vieira, Gê Viana, Iagor Peres, Jonas Van Holanda, Juliana dos Santos, Laís Machado, Luana Vitra, Pedro Victor Brandão, Rebeca Carapiá, Sallisa Rosa and Ventura Profana, the meetings brought focus to several of the discussions that permeated curatorial thinking. With this, not only did the artists leave video calls with new provocations, but the curators could rethink the exhibition possibilities.
The river is a serpent: topics for difference and social justice, an online teacher training program, held in weekly meetings between October and November 2020, was also taken in this direction. “The approval was so great that the training became an county official course, offering career progression to the participating teachers”, says Renata Sampaio, who led the program.

At each meeting, one or more speakers would join the group to discuss strategies for working in the classroom. “The idea was not to show the teacher how to teach, but to raise awareness about issues that we think are of paramount importance, so that the debate can continue, in a horizontal way, at school”, explains Renata. “The educational in this edition of Frestas is working from non-hegemonic perspectives, agents and concepts, seeking to build relationships with other areas of knowledge”, she adds.

Online, however, expanded Frestas’ geographic borders. In the Training Program, it enabled the participation of educators and guests from different places in Brazil and the availability of this material online so that more people could be impacted. In general terms, it allowed for an even more intense exchange with the international scene, based on the partnership established with the Ayllu collective, a group of artistic-political action and collaborative research formed by migrant, racialized and gender and sexual dissidents from the former Spanish colonies, headquartered in Madrid.

Seeking a critical space for collective thinking and creation, Ayllu developed the Program Oriented to Subaltern Practices (POPS), which brought together around 40 people from eight Latin American countries to question rationalism, scientism and the false objectivity of Eurocentric thinking. The discussions generated a collective fanzine that will be part of the show The river is a serpent and added another discussion to the project, bringing the debate to migration issues.

The participation of people from 25 of the 27 federative units in Brazil in the expography course also sets the tone for this expansion of Frestas. Conducted by Tiago Guimarães, exhibition architect of the triennial itself, the course aimed to contribute so that more people had access to information about the area. Anti-analysis, a mentoring project by Pêdra Costa, assisted 45 artists from all over Brazil when it happened online, which would not have been possible if it had tooken place in Sorocaba, as they had initially thought.

“Os Parixaras”, de Jaider Esbell. Courtesy Sesc Sorocaba

Reaching the mouth of the river

If the initial objective of The river is a serpent was to take the discussions of the Brazilian and world contemporary art circuit to Sorocaba, finding less violent paths, it seems that the educational practices not only created these points of dialogue with the city, through the Training Program , but proposed discussions at other points in the circuit. These discussions will flow into Sorocaba in the face-to-face and virtual exhibition proposed for the second half of 2021.

Along this river, not only were artists and educators able to rethink their processes and the absences and possibilities around them, but so did the Triennial team and Sesc itself. “I’m rooting for the institution to review itself in some practices, because it is still very white and this is something that needs to be thought about”, points out Thiago. The focus on the process, education as the main pillar of the project and the joint construction of knowledge seem to have been important tools for this, because, as Renata Sampaio concludes: “The path of this river was made in the meetings, and the meeting is a two way street, everyone leaves modified after it”.

Leia a reportagem em português clicando aqui.

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