Witnessing the Agency of Cultural Diplomacy

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This is a recount from the 18th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil in 2014 and is a mishmash of travelogue, diary and critical reflection. This first instalment situates itself in the immense physical & cultural landscape that is São Paulo—a city simultaneously worlds away from the Caribbean, yet sharing an undeniable South-South connection—and begins to unravel the deep-rooted impacts of exchange.

Grounding

It’s quite illogical to travel 1,600 miles North to reach a destination 2,700 miles South of your locale, but as a citizen of the Small Island Developing States and the wider Caribbean, access to the Geopolitical South hasn’t been thought about or considered as something valuable/viable/possible. So I had to make an incomplete circle of approximately 270º, which included a trip through the United States, before finding myself in the wild cultural landscape of São Paulo, Brazil.

If you look at it as a system of exchange, access to the Geopolitical South has been and is being relegated to the ‘big boys’; the investors of the United States and Europe who have had a foothold in South America for decades. With Brazil on everyone’s mind as the economic focal point of the South and with its status as an emerging BRICS country, it seems like social and economic development is expanding at an ever rapid pace with no end in sight.

Before I headed in for my visit, I heard that most Brazilians have no formal understanding of the Caribbean. I would say that this is reciprocated, and most Caribbean people know little about Brazil and many South American countries; their diversity, political history and the organically existing parallels between both regions, given their cultural history.

Nonetheless, landing at Guarulhos International Airport could cause panic and ensue existential crises in the heart of any small island folk. Why was the futuristic graveyard of skyscrapers making my chest collapse/flutter? Was it that Gilliam’s Sam Lowry as Icarus somehow battered on my brain, and I couldn’t help but descend into a surreal apocalyptic dreamscape? My love for cinema has capitalised on overtaking my brain when something powerful is being felt. Or was it the fact that it immediately reduced my concept of first world centres like New York, Toronto and London to tiny blotches? Immediately I had to renegotiate my thoughts on utopic/dystopic futures as the massive expanse of the city rose under me, around me and then parallel to me before its verticalness dropped away.

Almost immediately a couple of things came to my mind.

Firstly, why do Caribbean people mostly travel to the North? It seemed that within seconds it was also recognised as a metropolitan space, one which shares so much in common with the islands of the Caribbean—from its history of slavery and the resemblances within the context of indigeneity, agriculture, colonialism and religious practices—and core values and realisations that are often amiss in America and Europe. There was also the matter of influence, and how our cultural uniqueness has been co-opted by the United States and to a lesser extent Europe; another reason to consider other sites as equally important, and as having the potential to expose hidden dialogues.

Secondly, why is this spectacular city almost never factored as a practical place or as a model of future sustainability, especially when the creative economy of the Caribbean is now more than ever reaching out to the typical centres of New York, Miami, Toronto and London to make significant strides in its practices? Are the commonplace excuses of language creating walls in the minds of people still valid? Haven’t the Anglophone islands already practised such exclusion with our French, Spanish and Dutch speaking neighbours? Have we not yet understood that if there is an important need, work and exchange will be facilitated?

Thirdly, how can I know all of this and come out with something meaningful, not only from my time at Videobrasil but holistically thinking about a creative future that in some way can be adapted for the SIDS and the wider Caribbean region? How can we make all of this work worthwhile for partners, clients, artists and cultural professionals? How can we have these experiences transcend words and images, falling into an energized recess where we all start to work actively to engage with our needs in a more fearless way? How can we apply pressure where pressure is most needed, and how can we finally turn our backs to complacency and negligence? In mere minutes I reduced/deduced this place to be active and bureaucratic—after all, it is a Federation forged by socialism and dictatorship which lasted for more than two decades. Maybe this is the way to think about why a country like Brazil has risen from the ashes of poverty to become one of the most important in the Geopolitical South, eclipsing the rise of other nations.

After all, no one does it quite like Brazil. They export 25% of the world’s supply of refined and raw sugar products (sugarcane & beets); lead in soybean production and export; are the 5th largest producer of cellulose in the world; have a very diverse market offering services not limited to banking and the manufacture of petrochemicals; and have the 8th largest GDP in the world. Not that this income generated is distributed equally; quite the contrary, its distribution is anything but fair.

So, bearing all of this in mind, I had to ask: how and why did I get here?

Last April while on my way back home, I had a short stop in Barbados where the Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. team was giving a presentation to a Brazilian delegation that included Videobrasil’s programming director, Thereza Farkas. As a means of building profitable ways to engage with the South, Barbados had invested in opening lines of communication with Brazil, and as such the National Cultural Foundation of Barbados developed the e-CREATE Cultural Industries Symposium as a starting point to circulate ideas and foster collaborative exchanges. From that meeting, Fresh Milk’s director Annalee Davis reached out and put Thereza and I in touch, and the rest we would say is grant-writing history.

Nothing forms bonds like creative minds sweating it out together for funds, and trying to develop new avenues of collaboration.

A vision and a method

Striving to understand the creative economy, sustainability and cultural value in the Caribbean is taxing work. It leads to questions and theories that are unrelated to studied data from accessible research pockets, herein citing the festival and creative industry work that Keith Nurse has been committed to over the last 20 years.

Without a way for us to ground a non-profit working model in a more feasible way and understand that it is so very different from how NGOs are considered in the first world, it is becoming clearer to me that ARC is not only deeply embedded in identifying new ways to advocate and fight for fairness and visibility, but as a mediator/medium for shaping the tone and nature of intercultural relations. It is now even more important to think about expanding the boundaries and dialogues that comprise our cultural conversations.

ARC is in itself an act of resistance, and the promotion of different cultures in order to examine similarities and differences, engaging in a mirroring of self, is paramount. So for this creative assessment, there has to be a practical assessment of aspirations. This included:

• Opening up the creative Caribbean and its diaspora’s production to São Paulo, and vice versa.

• Questioning what it would mean to capitalise on our creative collaboration; how would that change our vision of ourselves? What would the new mirrors of duality be in our consciousness?

• Seeking different futures; what would our creative economies look like if we are willing to be open and treat them without certain geographic confinements?

• Studying new paradigmatic shifts and models occurring in NGOs. If we are serious about the establishment of a holistic foundation, the development of arts education and securing a livelihood, then how do we critically think about adaptations to the models that do work and function in creative non-western arenas?

This civil goal of outreach, scholarship and exchange were anchored during my entry into Videobrasil. The Associação Cultural Videobrasil was founded by Solange Farkas, and is dedicated to the fostering, disseminating and mapping of contemporary art, as well as the public cultural promotion and interchange of ideas between artists, curators and researchers. Its special attention is directed to the production of the geopolitical South, and it supports an active network of international cooperation.

Videobrasil has a longstanding partnership with SESC Pompeia, and over the last 20 years this has led to increasing public access to the festival. It helps that the major site for Videobrasil in São Paulo is located at SESC Pompeia, a project undertaken by famed Italian/Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. SESC Pompeia is a site that engages with a wide audience. By nature, it is a social gathering place that houses cafes, an indoor recreation area for children, exhibition and concert halls, a theatre, outdoor alcoves, a public swimming pool and a tremendous boardwalk that was littered with hundreds of bare bodies tanning upon my first visit.

The style of SESC Pompeia is reminiscent of the birth of Modernism in Brazil where Concretism/Neoconcretism and Geometric Abstraction played a heavy role in the birth of an independent identity in Brazilian art that looked at the west critically. This utilitarian manifestation is impressive and straight out of a scene from Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. Bo Bardi saw SESC Pompeia as a respite from the machine of capitalism, and at the centre, you can simultaneously see one of the largest video festivals in the Geopolitical South, while participating in numerous social activities. The heart of SESC is this feeling of a great community, of lifeblood that is strong, potent and full of possibility.

Hit the ground running, or sweating in this case

Everything in São Paulo runs late. Not that we were late, but with the doomsday traffic and the fact that they are having the hottest summer on record in 70 years, my first full day on the ground was off to a swinging, sweaty start. Our first stop was at Galeria Vermelho. I was accompanied by Israeli-born, US-based artist Irit Batsry, and communications director of Videobrasil Ana Paula Vargas. Galeria Vermelho is one of the more established blue-chip galleries in São Paulo and they boast of representing a cadre of artists who have been attracting more attention on the international market over the last 5 years, including Cinthia Marcelle, Cadu, Ana Maria Tavares and Rodrigo Braga.

With a very modern setting, Galeria Vermelho was a prime example of a carefully considered space. The use of nature and severity in views and thoroughfare—cutting, chunking, peeping—gives it a very special edge and appeal. From most of the galleries and walkways, you were allowed to contemplate the exterior, seeing fractions of the day and snippets of light that add a reflective and freeing quality when viewing work. They have an extensive collection of monographs by Brazilian artists and the history of Brazilian art, along with several alcoves. The roof and backyard garden allow for loitering, reiterating its location in the South (picture a lovely Stag Horn fern spanning 5 feet in diameter adorning the back wall). On view were the works of Andreas Fogarasi, Maurício Ianės and Carmela Gross.

At lunch, we were joined by Portuguese producer and founder of FUSO, Antonio Câmaram who organises the roving video festival that goes on during August across various museum gardens in Lisbon, Portugal.

Another industry stronghold, Galeria Luisa Strina is the oldest contemporary art gallery in São Paulo. Established in 1974, it has gone on to develop the careers of major Brazilian artists like Tunga, Cildo Meireles, Antonio Dias and Edgard de Souza. On view was ‘Secret Codes’ organised by Spanish curator Agustín Pérez Rubio. The group show provided an overview of the history of conceptual art, bringing together thirty-two artists from Brazil and abroad, and almost forty different artworks dating from the 1960s to the present. The show was divided into 7 segments that took into consideration the evasion of language and meaning through various concerns of poetics, space, social relations, time etc. Stand out features included ‘Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project’, 1970 by Cildo Meireles, Luigi Serafini’s ‘Codex Seraphinianus’, 1981, and ‘Quad I & II’ by Samuel Beckett.

Mendes Wood was closed for installation, but we were able to see some of the collection, which included works by David Salle, Tunga, and a collection of modest-sized photographs by Francesca Woodman. What was outstanding about the layout (and most of the places visited) was the way these galleries were treated as an antithesis to the formal white cubes that are the norm in western counterparts. As a revolt against sterile, minimal environments and the fact that concrete features heavily in an oppressive way in this city, these galleries are thinking about new ways to incorporate nature, while reflecting on how Modernism and Concretism have shaped the design. They use this methodology to subvert the notion of seeing work in typical ways; from having walkways lined with vines, ferns and palms to having glass and the exterior provide respite while critically engaging with objects—the structures inform the language and reading of the works.

This was predominant at our visit to Galeria Nara Roesler where we saw a strong selection of work by several emerging, mid-career and established artists from Vik Muniz, Isaac Julien, Tomie Ohtake, and Laura Vinci. The gallery formally represents approximately 36 artists and has been around for 25 years. On view was a group exhibition entitled ‘Prática Portátil’ showcasing the collection of the gallery, and it honed in on the poetics of practice in each of the artists’ works.

Virginia de Medeiros (Bahia, Brazil) presented ‘Fala dos Confins’, which documented the artist’s twenty-day journey in Bacia do Jacupie in the drylands of Bahia while journeying through five cities in a Volkswagen Kombi. This work explores the nature of speech and observation that lends itself to legend, fable, folklore and the rich tradition of oral history that are intrinsic human qualities in the rural landscape of northern Brazil. In this haunting piece of storytelling, de Medeiros has a dialogue with the landscape and with the past in a quiet but sprawling manner.

Columbian artist Alberto Baraya’s continuous project ‘The Herbarium of Artificial Plants’, 2001-ongoing, sets out to question the nature of empirical objectivity in research, science and botany. It re-elaborates royal scientific journeys of the 18th and 19th centuries to the Americas which collected, dissected, classified and framed non-European nature. Following the work of Carl Linnaeus (father of Taxonomy), Baraya’s aim with this project is to collect, identify and classify every artificial plant possible. Baraya has stated: “By picking up some plastic flowers on the street, I behave like the scientists that Western education expects us to become. By changing the goals of this simple task, I resist this ‘destiny’.”[1]

Our final stop for the day was the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, a private institution that has been around for 12 years, whose programming and projects are largely based on public education and, more specifically, education for teachers. They host up to 20 temporary exhibitions every year and are specifically interested in the work emerging out of Brazil after World War II through today. The institute has seven exhibition halls spanning over two floors, one of which houses an education sector with four studios, rooms for seminars, and a hall with a restaurant,   bookstore and merchandise store.

Paulo Miyada, contemporary art curator, researcher and head of the Centre for Research and Curatorship at the institute introduced us to the programming and gave us a brief history on the current collection. 

First, we visited the exhibition of sculptor, designer and teacher Nelson Felix’s ‘Verse (my gold, I leave it here)’ which factored heavily in a study on note-taking, geography and the imagination. Nelson presented over 100 drawings which observe the city of São Paulo as a main economic and cultural location, lying in equal distance across an imaginary line that connects two small islands in the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean. We then saw two rooms that paid homage to the centenary of Tomie Ohtake, namesake and founder of the institution, who moved to Brazil from Japan at the age of 21 and is still a staple component of the creative climate of São Paulo. São Paulo is home to the largest population of Japanese outside of the mainland of Japan.

As the day drew to a close, we piled up in our taxi, exhausted, and were whisked to our various abodes. My stop was last, and for an elated instant, I considered going to see Lars Von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’. Instead, I opted to float in the warm rooftop pool, staring at the opaque orange sky while skyscrapers rose beside me with their glass, concrete and people in fervour.

SOUTHERN PANORAMAS
Exchange and Interference: In Search of the Other

In the curatorial essay welcoming the public to the Festival, curators Eduardo de Jesus, Fernando Oliva and Júlia Rebouças, in collaboration with main curator and founder of Videobrasil Solange Farkas, state the raison d’être and schematic of the Southern Panoramas collection:

“This diagram’s perspectives build multiple approximations, favouring intense dialogue between distinct forms of artistic expression, divergent world views, appropriations and re-articulation of tradition and history. Between its points—with retraining fragments of their context of origin—lines of dialogue are drawn that share a search for new narratives and ways of living with and assimilating the Other.”

The quest for new narratives is something that I keep encountering in my studies and quest across the Caribbean. Opening lines of dialogue between the geopolitical South, which is the main objective of Videobrasil, reveals the seriousness of their effort in determining new politics, articulations and subjectivities that plague and, in a broader sense, co-opt the artists whose works have been selected for this showcase.

After previewing the collection and being so uninformed of the work emerging out of these territories, I was left with questions about our placement in the Caribbean and the way we have decided to establish our institutions, ideas and organisations’ schematics to support creative works:

• Do we have the cultural vision, infrastructure and foresight to carry the visual arts industries forward?

• The Caribbean functions as a truly national space given our policies and the way in which we have relegated our borders. Can an adapted model working in an Intra-Caribbean and autonomous way function to counteract the ways that we have set up support systems?

• If in the wider system of operations, governmental and informally, artists are left sterile and vulnerable without support or with limited support, then why are we, as independent artist-led initiatives, struggling to define our creativity? Is this environment and its health a moot concern, only valuable to a handful of people?

The role of print publications then becomes significant as a cultural repository for ideas and presence, their manifestation creating a critical outlet for new ways of thinking about independent action and crafting autonomy, which works against systems of defining our collectivity. ARC acts as a think tank, where new philosophies can arise and be promoted out of cultural diplomacy. Existing as a brand and an action identified by the outer world as pioneering a type of previously unmatched visibility, how can we define our motions in these terms? By navigating across Caribbean cultures and highlighting what unites us rather than divisive traits, ARC seeks to rise above social, political and cultural factions that often operate in unnecessary opposition to one another, in order to direct the way in which we are perceived by those looking in. Artists like Tania Bruguera and her ‘Immigrant Movement International’ project and assorted social interdisciplinary acts are prime examples of this redirection and re-presentation of perceptions on culture and community. They suggest ways of functioning within the bureaucracy, obtaining power and visibility and, in effect, controlling how the international public views our spaces.

Non-profit models, therefore, need to be revised as they take effect in developing countries. There is a belief of them being impractical in ways that factor and impact directly on our creative health and survival. Finally, this Videobrasil collection and its reach into Oceania, Asia and the Middle East left me thinking about ways in which we can develop our legislation to battle the vagaries of nationalism that threaten to hold us in one place, with one circular, limiting narrative that is incapable of progress.

I have been asked to contribute to Videobrasil’s mapping project, Platform VB. Report forthcoming, I will give a glimpse into the experience which ties into my practice as a fine artist and includes poignant indicators as to the way the curators have decided to map out the space. Some mistakenly consider that the platform only supports media and video arts, however, the show is greater in its wealth and diversity, supporting various photographic series, installations, graphic art and optical projects that extend intricacies of human conflicts—internal and external—in very subtle ways.

The layout of this show moves along visual nuances, formal cinematic inventions and narratives that defy easy representation. They challenge tropes and intensify our understanding of the ways that artists are reinforcing language and dimensionality. To be explicit, Lais Myrrha laid out a broad line of granite that buttressed two panels, thus creating a walkway. This dust mound, ‘Theory of the Edges’, was roughly 2 metres wide and 7 metres long, split in two by a colour divide. Half of its composition was jet black sparkling grains, meeting a dull white counterpart. Viewers are left to troll over this sand, and as they roam the space, this clear line of black/white becomes confused. At the centre of this meeting point and disruption, the sand has turned grey.

In its poetics, this clash speaks heavily towards personal mobility; towards action and consequence, and within the larger framework of the exhibition, asks us to consider the nature of greyness and dualities in our personal lives. This quickly extends to a politicised reading of self, as boundaries, limitations and greater conflicts are referenced when exploring this showcase of vulnerability and complexity.

This specific installation recalled Robert Smithson’s ‘A Tour of the Monuments along the Passaic’, where he left NYC in 1967 and revisited spaces that once upon a time were familiar to him. He takes very mundane photographs and juxtaposes them with words that reference his personal and political being, and at the end of this essay, he conjures a playground for the reader, a sandbox in which, over the passage of time, a child is left to circle clockwise and anticlockwise. This time that Smithson conjures is cyclic and non-linear; the sandbox becomes a confused mass of white sand—mixing with lower grades of black sand turning a confused grey. In this grey, Smithson reflects on his conceptual practice, on the poetics of cinema and the false sense of immortality that it provokes in the viewer. I too witness the mixture as the exhibition draws to a close, providing a similar instance for me to reflect on as I think about this city, its mega-structures and all the falsities that give it stability.

Re-entering the work, I consider the narratives of ambiguity rising out of the works of Bakary Diallo, Leticia Ramos, Lorraine Heller Nicholas, Tao Hui, the stellar Virginia de Medeiros—the stand out artist in my São Paulo visit—Gianfranco Foschino, Aryson Heraclito and Turkish artist Zafer Topaloglu. Topaloglu’s 5-channel epic ‘Waved’ dealt with confession, memory, isolating identities and images that tried desperately to fill in the gaps that exist psychologically through the fluidity of influence and culture. I conclude that the curators of the Southern Panoramas showcase were thinking about ideologies and a specific type of manifestation of presence.

Through all of these subjectivities, I am keenly aware of context, action and the way that human collectivism is now drawing from smaller, and at the same time larger, pools within a distinct culture. The words that tie all of these things together directly reference collectivity, vestiges, memory, love, transgression and dualities. These are the words that provide me with the keys to unlock the content, which I will further explore through the works of the artists mentioned.

That evening, we visited a library to attend a screening of the Egyptian film The Square and an artist talk by Shady El Noshokaty, who decided to drop into Galpão earlier that day. The thing about being in a creative community like Videobrasil and around SESC Pompei is that spontaneous things happen all the time. I was lucky to have a first-hand account from an artist/activist about his memories of the Arab Spring in 2011, and the failure of said attempt to bring reformation to his native land. The talk became political, charged and loud. I had questions about the role of documentary photography in relation to Susan Sontag’s seminal work in ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, and how to work in an objective way when entrenched in various traumas. How do photographers occupy a space that breeds or facilitates a truer encouragement of reading both the surface and the inside of these tragedies? My questions, however, weren’t in the realm of being discussed or considered, as supporters, most of Jewish and Middle Eastern descent, dominated the dialogue for the evening and the declaration of an artist as ‘an artist only’ couldn’t’ save El Noshokaty from the polarities, truths and dilemmas expressed during the debate.

Wanderlust

The Edifício Copan is a 140-meter, 38-story building designed by famed architect Oscar Niemeyer during 1957-1966 and is the largest residential building in the world, housing upwards of 5,000 people. Its sinuous space and concrete gridding make its presence one that is optical and disorienting, modelled after Le Corbusier’s Unite d’habitation. Erected to bring São Paulo into a modern city centre, its façade 50+ years later is one that is rugged, grey and monstrous. In a city of skyscrapers, it is easy to feel inconsequential. However the Copan, with its busy alphabetised blocks and dirtiness, left me with the idea that I was walking through a modern ruin—and this ruin, even though occupied, was projecting its own demise. I felt that way about a lot of things in São Paulo, a lot of ends and romance towards greater demises.

Through the floating streams of people, I find myself a little lost; in São Paulo, one is always a little lost. I am making my way to Pivô, a 12,000 square feet cultural non-profit art platform founded in 2012 which acts as a point of exchange and experimentation for local artists to answer critical questions relating to contemporary art and urbanism.

The founder of Pivô, artist and cultural activist Fernanda Brenner, greets me with her staff, two young women busy plugging away at computers and managing workflow. Pivô, previously a hospital, is now a collection of many cavernous spaces, and I was taken through three magnificent floors to see its infrastructural wealth and learn about Brenner’s plans for its development.

It was clear that as the founder of a young non-profit space, she was still coming to terms with understanding what that meant for the future; its sustainability through the development of applicable, timely and consistent programming. In order to activate the full project, Brenner and her team have some considerable work before them. They are attempting to deal with education, curatorial refinement, an ongoing residency programme, keeping studios open and available, developing a strict research hub that expands on the current dynamics of production, pedagogy and circulation of national and international theorists and educators. Thankfully they have very rich and diverse ideas regarding raising substantial support, and Pivô as a political act works against the current system of market and institutional support in São Paulo, giving them an edge and a kind of visibility that is absent from other independent enterprises.

Brenner spoke in definite(s) against the current tendencies of support and the lack of private sector buy-in, which continues to negatively affect artists and their ability to enter into the market, incubate and experiment. Pivô’s directing team has ideas of developing and opening up its mission to a wider audience, hinting at the development of a communal area that would reconsider assembly within a very hectic and driven urban setting, while revolving around keeping up with the ongoing dialogue that is essential to the context and relevance of existing within the walls of the Copan. This shapes the initiative’s presence and efforts.

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In this city, it is best to walk with directions written down so that cabbies can assist you without wading through rudimentary English. I have no rudimentary Portuguese, but I am not completely lost as it is in some ways relatively close to Spanish. We pull up to the outskirts of Jardim da Luz and move through the gates of my next stop, the Pinacoteca, which was established in 1905 and still today is one of the most important museums in Brazil. It used to be the headquarters of the Lyceum of Arts and Crafts, and in the 1990s its focus shifted to develop a history of supporting international exhibitions, a growing documentation centre and a wide collection of 19th-century Brazilian art. It also has a significant collection of work from the Modernist era.

Here I viewed works by Moussia, and the beautiful photographic installation  ‘Segmentos’ by Luzia Simons consisting of 4 large panels of segmented tulips which referenced the Garden of Eden and enveloped the circumference of the museum’s atrium. After a trip to the bookstore to see what monographs they had in English, I emerged with a guide that helped me through the historical exhibition, lending a better appreciation of important works developed in the 19th and 20th centuries while giving room to understand the nature of colonisation, the effects of Brazilian independence and globalisation on the works that I was viewing.

At lunch, a group of middle-aged women met me in the café and asked to sit with me. They were surprised that I was visiting from the Caribbean, so naturally, they had a round of 20 questions for me. The spirit of these women, as artists, educators and scholars left an impression on me, and I was determined now more than ever to wander through this city to find other treasures, other means of unlocking the histories, secrets and determinants of São Paulo.

And I think perhaps at the Terraço Itália later in the evening as I watched the pink sunset, hued by the city’s pollution, with its tender eruption of buildings, I found it. I found it, in a certain type of glassed quietude; with patterned flocks around me and in the silent way in which a city so full of tension can wrap itself around you and cradle you in insignificance and penetrating resonance. I felt some meaning and resolve for why I move back and forth across these boundaries, and why at times the troughs and waves are far less and more than the highs and lows.

A lesson learnt

Being on time in São Paulo is a struggle, even if you know the city; its barrage of traffic works against you. I am heading to Phosphorus, an emerging experimental art initiative directed by Maria Montero, located on Rua Roberto Simonsen, the oldest street in São Paulo and the centre of the historical district. Gentrification is now leaving the older parts of the city run-down and abandoned. However, there is a new movement to fortify the core of the city and its cultural history.  Phosphorus, established in partnership with Casa Juisi, a vintage clothing store and rental facility, is housed in a building from 1890 and is also used for collaborative projects with a convivial message at the core. The space hosts an open kitchen and library with a homely vibe, seeking to go against the institutionalisation of art.

Maria is late because of the same traffic that I was stuck in on my way to the centre, so I spent time with Simone, the director of Casa Juisi, and her dog, telling her about my current focus and partnership with Videobrasil and our hopes of collaboration with the festival. Arriving late with Gustavo Ferro, the current artist on view, Maria quickly brings me up to speed with the development of the project, the lack of support that various startups receive, and the severe gap that exists between the commercial endeavours and independent artist-led initiatives, which oddly enough feels very familiar.

This gap is enormous and harkens back to the support structures that have been available to artists who want to enact change in their creative communities. Maria has a committed career linked to arts administration and worked for a long time in the blue-chip paradigm, and then became sick of it. She started to feel dehumanised, and that is where the idea of PH (15) started to brew.

Phosphorus housed ‘Remains a Remnant’ by Ferro, and it focuses on the urban space of the city and its relationship to danger, security, play and proximity. What I think is the most successful component of this exhibit is the artist’s take on the body and its relation to the space that the viewer must force through. His use of video and juxtaposing banal scenes of a city almost at a standstill gives pause to the ennui of everyday living in a city that is at times threatening. As an installation artist, the use of repurposed aluminium caps and geometric shapes on the wall discreetly references Gustavo’s relationship to the history of Concretism in Brazil. 

The surfaces play with the room, bodies and other works, and even in some way the eeriness of the sound of the city. All of these things flicker to the periphery of my sight where the danger is more evident and visceral, as the motion doesn’t stop due to the collapse and emergence of a new scene seemingly simultaneously out of each cap.

Phosphorus houses care and freedom that I hadn’t experienced, and feels informal, laid back and open. Most importantly it works in direct contradiction to the first gallery visits, and I feel at total ease within this arena, enough so that I share my experiences so far of the city and openly critique observations that are disquieting. I can easily compare the Phosphorus/Casa Juisi pairing to a space like Fresh Milk, Barbados and or the now deceased Roktowa, Kingston where the delineation of paths, spaces, galleries, kitchens, rooms and studios existed in a cacophony of other ideas linked to holistic artistic development.

In 2012, the space developed its outdoor kitchen, which is nestled around an installation done by Rodrigo Bueno, an artist in their collective. Plants sprout out of chairs, rusted metal is in full collusion with concrete, soil and clay. Makeshift sculptures, logs and mirrors fill the bare gaps in the wall and ferns threaten to take over the grey verticalness. This kitchen excites my senses as it brings relief and softness to the abundance of hard surfaces.

Before I leave, I choose two dresses from Casa Juisi, one a French 50s frock that echoes my overtly modest, Christian upbringing, and something a little more youthful and floral. Simone has packaged them in a flour bag with an 18th-century compass wind rose as its signage. If São Paulo, its energy and inhabitants deliver another message of synchronicity, the officials might have to kick me out.

I race across town, very late to meet Paulo Miyada, the curator at the Tomie Ohtake Institute. From our first meeting, I could sense an ardent inquiry, and with a meeting so short it is hard to imagine that he transferred as much as he could. His status as a teacher is legendary, and after hearing about Katherine Kennedy’s visit earlier in 2013 I was determined to make time to sit and share.

Our timeline starts from slavery; he defines the ports of entry, crops, how Brazil was divided up, along with its political history. His words and drawings enter my notebook in scribble; the maps, outlines, diagrams and timelines give me a sense of the history of this space. We speak about the emergence of Modernism in the 20s and 30s and Concretism in the 50s and 60s. About the rise of the military regime, the birth of neo-liberalism, the economic downturn in the 80s and finally the rise of the super economic powerhouse of Brazil, the BRICS country in the early 2000s.

I get a crash course in Bossa nova, Trotskyism, Le Corbusier, European migration during the 1st, 2nd and 3rd waves, and most importantly,  Lévi-Strauss. French Anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss spent 4 years, 1935-1939 conducting research and teaching Sociology at the University of São Paulo, which factored heavily into his seminal book ‘Tristes Tropiques’, now central to structuralist thought. He was able to conduct research on the natives of Brazil and other areas which yielded pertinent information that has affected and influenced a Western view of the South, the Tropics and Indigeneity; in effect the Caribbean, since he was also stationed in Puerto Rico and Martinique during the mass exile from Europe prior to World War II.

In chapter 4 of ‘Tristies Tropiques’ titled ‘The Quest for Power’, Lévi-Strauss writes:

“Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield you their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our designers and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories.”

Miyada connected the growth of the metropolis of São Paulo to the way in which the city continues to erase itself through the development of its surface. This layering started at two rivers that converged at the point of a significant site, the ‘Estação da Luz’. Its site, previously a river-cum-swamp, merged into a tea plantation in the 1890-1910s, then into a French garden, then into a road, then into what stands today: a transportation terminal. This layering and covering up of history renders the foundation of this cityscape barren. It excludes any hope of it fulfilling any other action but its erasure. Lévi-Strauss’ comment resonates even more clearly as I puzzle over the vision that has been created for this city, and the human scar of ambition has left very permanent marks in wake of concrete, money and glut.

The political history of Brazil is in fact even more involved and can only be available through prolonged study and numerous visits; its complexity as a federation/republic and its political traumas through the rise of the militarised regime in the ’60s through the mid-1980s crippled the growth of the country, scavenging and stifling the creativity of the city with its right-wing militia.

I wanted to get some time with Solange in order to make the experience of Videobrasil more relatable to our audience. I crafted careful questions around the issue of the festival’s growth versus what it used to be 30 years ago, comparatively analyzing a trajectory of why the Southern Panoramas platform was important along with its collective curatorial support. I wondered about the founder’s experience with defining the South as a mercurial construct with shifting geography, and what her innermost revelations were so far. I also wondered about private sector support and VB’s visibility on an international level, about keeping VB relevant and what this would mean for artists within our networks to see the potential of a show like this, and more so an idea like Videobrasil.

How would the Caribbean as a location factor into Southern Panoramas or other types of exhibitions? São Paulo has one of the more renowned biennales on earth, the second oldest to Venice. Why then are we mostly exempt from it? Why is the Caribbean such a blind spot, and why are we only ever defined and supported through Cuba? Olivia McGilchrist was the only artist from the Caribbean showcased in this year’s exhibition, and blindly I could list another 20 who can be as competitive and relevant. Are Caribbean artists only looking to the North or Europe for career validation? If so, we/they need to stop. For me, one of the most substantial realisations is the fact that we have to increase our competency, professionalism and circulatory points so that we can identify ways to have channels remain open, ensuring that we can be considered in this conversation and secure our positions there.

Sitting with Solange isn’t an easy thing; her reputation precedes her and I am a little shaken. It is clear on a too-hot evening that concentration spans are haywire, and we retired to the boardwalk flanked by almost nude figures and shaded from the evening sun by an umbrella. Moving between translation, rapid-fire note taking and wondering why I didn’t have a recording device, I see the emergence of the sharp, genial thinker and mentor. The figurehead who has been running this festival for three decades and the stalwart nurturer who leads a team of 30 odd young men and women through the foundational years of their careers, surfaced.

My first question is returned with pages and pages of notes, and out of it all I gather the following:

What is always clear about Videobrasil is the fact that it was and still is a political act—a social incident in the world, securing visibility for those who previously had no platform. It is a space to provide transformation while highlighting sociopolitical issues in Brazil. During the 1980s at the end of the military regime, Video Art and Media Arts found a way into the social and political spheres of Brazil. Local productions and locally owned stations started showcasing content that directly fed into artists’ psyches, unleashing the medium to them.

This automatically impacted on artists like Cildo Meireles and reinforced the political change and landscape, spawning experimentation with language and innovations in the medium, changing aesthetic values. This led to new ways or unconsidered possibilities of using a specified language to encapsulate a theoretical moment, which essentially took Videobrasil out of its first phase of development into a more globalised field of actions.

The second phase legitimised the language of Video and Media Arts, supporting different poetics and didactic relationships to the construction of the visual, breaking barriers and putting the medium of Video into a field of scholarship and exchange; maturing into something with cultural value.

The development of Videobrasil’s archive becomes another substantial addition to this dialogue. The assemblage of collectors and the development of dynamic public programming kept and increased steady support within a local context, thereby retaining its social relevance across Brazil.

In the end, Solange remains generous, strong and adamant about the development of a platform founded on a holistic sensibility within the context of the cultural atmosphere. Videobrasil today is putting artists in different realities by offering various residency programmes to those who participate in the festival. This acts as a stimulant to the artists, strengthening their capacity to improve their practices, livelihoods, skills and professionalism, along with impacting on their institutions; personal and otherwise. These opportunities give artists the time, tools, references and support to create, think, educate and share a wealth of knowledge with colleagues, communities and cultural institutions. This further invests in creating the freedom that we must exist in as creators and cultural facilitators.

Solange is an advocate, a soldier and a mentor of agency. She represents an idea that has gained exponential value as time passed, and the networks that Videobrasil are exploring through her joie de vivre, awareness and keen sensibilities culminate in one of the more profound experiences: the careful curation of a team of young, clear, vital and sharp professionals. This will surely work to bolster the future of this movement with clarity and vehemence.

The Grand Marquis

Isabella Lenzi, VB’s Public Programmes Assistant, replaced Paula as the main tour guide on our institution tour, and joining us was Michel van Dartel, curator at V2: Institute for Unstable Media out of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Michel is on a working tour across South America, with São Paulo being the first of three stops. We met briefly the day prior at the panel and started sharing our views on Media Arts and its changing field. The day was already off to a positive start as Isabella mentioned that we may, in fact, be able to see a little more than what was on the agenda.

First up was the Centro Maria Antônia, which has been operational since 1999 and attempts to provide different poetic ways for artists to showcase techniques of how they are reevaluating their current conditions. Another core objective of these spaces is to have an exhibition programme, which factors in research and mediation, meaning the programming developed includes conversations and visits with curators, critics, theorists and artists. There are also free workshops where you can learn about the history of the city and its relationship to Visual Arts, Architecture, Design, Literature, and Philosophy.

On view in the three modest-sized galleries is work by Restiffe Mauro, Gregori Warchavchik, and the highlight of my morning, Cildo Meireles’ 4/4.  At first, it seems to be nothing, an empty room with polished wooden floors. There is anticipation as one expects something profound given the name on the door, and as you float around and get to the first corner, you experience your first taste of vertigo. The dimensionality of the room has been altered, and in a state of giddiness, I have a flashback to a memory of seeing Vito Acconci’s 1972 action ‘Seedbed’ and wondered if anything strange and perverted is lying beneath these floorboards. Floorboards—Poe surfaces with his ‘Tell-Tale Heart’, the eye, the heartbeat, the pounding, the incessant motion that my body has been shoved in as I view the piece. I walk from corner to corner, adding, subtracting and finding divisions in the math and principle of this space.

4/4 does what any good conceptual project should. It invites you to participate, it challenges you and it doesn’t discredit your experience. Curator John Flag comments on the illusion of the experience of this work:

“A room is perceived from the inside. Not only by the eye. Not only because it surrounds us. Inside our bodies as well. Its existence turns into being as long as we feel ours in it. If it’s any kind of empty room, in principle, not much can be done. But if it’s the case of a space of exhibitions, in which one expects to find art, then everything changes. And if it really looks like there’s nothing in there, it’s quite likely that our mind, in this very moment, shall deny it. But what if, while moving throughout this space, we find some strange alterations, in ourselves as in its architecture?”

We anticipated a longer stay at the first gallery, which meant that we had some time and made an unscheduled stop at Casa da Imagem/ Museu da Cidade de São Paulo, which had several exhibitions on view by photographers exploring urban dwellings, remains and psychological spaces as surfaces to suspend or enter disbelief. Works by Flavio de Carvalho, Edu Marin, Cristiano Mascaro, Felipe Bertarelli were on display, as well as Wagner Malta Tavares’ stellar installation ‘Princess Perfume’, a metal tube some 300 meters long which snakes through and along two buildings and a passageway that once connected the Sé and the Tamandutei Rivers; the rivers in the aforementioned cover-up. The artist has affixed several external fans, which emitted different smells at various points along with this tubing. Diluted aromas of roses, Angelica, lavender and at times even body scents were siphoned through these ducts and released into the city’s centre. The project’s origin is one that mixes folklore and research into the life of the Marquesa de Santos.  Another stand out segment of work was Felipe Bertarelli’s investigation into the urban typology of São Paulo through night photography. The cityscapes and tunnel spaces were transformed into large-scale pristine prints that were sharp, detailed, indexical and aesthetically challenging in their formalism.

There isn’t anything a neophyte can say that would give any real weight to the type of work that Oscar Niemeyer did in Brazil during the Modernist era, so when I got to Ibirapuera Park, at first I thought that time reversed a few decades and pitched me into this realm of stark urbanism.

It is impossible for me to translate the experience I had walking the length of the Grand Marquis, but this cultural park by sheer imagination and manifestation left me crippled and in awe of the vision of the creative minds that existed in this mecca during the 1920s-50s, the cultural hay day of São Paulo.

The Grande Marquise’s location dictates the beginning of the MAM, (Museu de Arte Moderna) and the supporting structures on the brim of this futuristic (even in the present) space include: The Cicillo Matarazzo Pavilion, home to the São Paulo Biennial; The Afro Brazil Museum; the Oca or hut which houses the Air Force Museum and the Folklore Museum; The Planetarium and Astrophysics School; The Japanese Pavilion; and the obelisk—yes, they even have an obelisk, which is a mausoleum containing 713 members of the Constitutionalist Revolution of the 1930s.  Today the park is filled with children, teens and young men skateboarding, biking and rollerblading, performing tricks and grating the concrete.

First up for the evening is the ‘140 characters’ exhibition at the MAM. This exhibition brought together 140 works from MAM’s collection that commented on the theme of political mobilisation. In June 2013 there were numerous public demonstrations across Brazil that targeted public mobility and transportation. What started as a very simple issue grew into comments and attacks on the rise of government corruption and police brutality. Being in the dark about these demonstrations, the works displayed didn’t really give me the context of the uprising or have any instructive language, so often I was left wondering and moving into the works of photographers that used the body and the archive to engage with broader social issues. Lia Chaia’s ‘Folíngua’ series and Rosângela Rennó’s ‘Bibliotheca’, while both simple projects, extended a poetic language linking to feminism, censorship and repurposing the archive into a manner that allows for reflection and political engagement with self, knowledge and cultural awareness.

As Isabella, Michel and I walked briskly under the Marquis, we arrive at the Afrobrasil Museum and our guide gives us a swift tour of the permanent collection, which includes numerous objects linking Brazil’s history, populace, agriculture and everyday syncretism to Africa. There are thousands of objects, and clearly it is difficult to see through to a solid curatorial structure.

One thing is very visible and pronounced: the rituals that have remained via religion and the way that people who live outside of São Paulo are less Westernised, and driven by strong vestigial connections to Africa. The Northern and Northeast regions of Bahia and Salvador have been repeated throughout my trip as important in being better equipped to grasp this Afro-Brazilian sensibility and the idea of a space that is less homogenous culturally than the components of the metropolis. Simple things like having a formidable connection to the land and sea can revamp perspectives and dynamism in very minute ways, and the work that I have seen from Northern artists or artists studying the North like de Medeiros and Heraclito cement my interest in the use of ethnography, fiction, sociology and religion as new lenses that we need to occupy in a proactive way to engage with fraught and traumatic histories.

Aryson Heraclito‘s work shows up again within another medium, this time in large-scale photography. Several large, richly coloured photographs inspired by the practice of offering food to the twelve major deities of Candomblé are presented, and they immediately assume a godlike figuration as the heads and the offerings take up the entire vista of the print. Beans, corn, yams, okra, peanuts and various mixtures of food have a sheath of faces, and these subjects are moulded into peaceful worshipers who have given over their bodies and heads, again, as a sacrifice.

The sweltering heat gave us resignation, and we left feeling that there should be a more thoughtful edit of the permanent collection or a way to view the work that made thematic sense. It may be unfair to criticise this type of exhibit, as their mandate and mission are so very dense. However, I am certain that if we had more time, beyond the 90 minutes of speaking about slavery, crop production (mainly sugar), the eroded landscape of Brazil, its entry into industrialism, Carnival, the pantheon of Orishas, Yoruba, the richness of Candomblé and the current structures of neo-colonisation, then it would have been so much more. And perhaps the objects were just a part of a larger conversation that I have had with many people, and it was nice to find some strong parallels here. It was the first time since being here that I forgot about the market and its implications; it felt familiar, chaotic and frantic to come to terms with its resolve.

We walked across the Marquis and took a turn across a field littered with trees to the amphitheatre to see the Oca or the hut. They were in the process of installing ‘The Cartography of Power to Know Itineraries’ and we were able to wiggle our way in due to the charm of Isabella. We were allowed to walk leisurely through to see the installation of an upcoming show by a famed choreographer. The current installation, which will remain on view through April, reflects on Portuguese scientific knowledge and its relationship to former overseas territories like Brazil and Angola.

The beginning is the end is the beginning

The agenda for the next day was considerably uneventful when stacked up against the last seven days of seeing the inner workings of the visual culture of São Paulo. But it didn’t pull any fewer punches, and being the official last day of programming, it meant that a collision of minds was before us. Videobrasil’s editorial coordinator Teté Martin moderated the final panel ‘30 years of Memories and Updates’ which featured journalist Gabriel Priolli Netto, Solange Farkas, co-curator of Southern Panoramas Eduardo de Jesus and esteemed educator, critic, cultural facilitator and curator Moacir dos Anjos.

The Galpao was scorching; it turns out that today was the hottest day of all, a stagnant temperature nearing 40 degrees celsius. The oppression of the heat, coupled with our translator making a near-flawless attempt at keeping up, my brain could only hold bits and pieces, and they went like this:

• Gabriel spoke widely about the rise and transformation of TV in the 1970s and early 80s that culminated in the birthing of Videobrasil. He focused on the political act of seeing self within the local arena, and the significance it held in giving artists the power to appreciate the legitimacy of their voices.

• Eduardo de Jesus established the connection between video art and performance, and the support mechanisms that Videobrasil put in place to herald its emergence from the inception of its 15th festival.

• Moacir dos Anjos began with a very polemic and lyrical comparative study of the relationship between the North and the Geopolitical South. He spoke about the existing paradigms that tend to exclude work from the South as peripheral and as such marginalised. After this fracturing, the securing of support and frameworks for festivals like Videobrasil becomes important as they fight and rally against hegemonic systems that threaten to mute the South.

• Finally, Solange spoke towards the continuation and the evolving discourse around Videobrasil’s programme. She reiterated that it was not an act of seclusion or favour, but the growth of the project to finally showcase the true rigours of exchange. Within the formative years of Videobrasil there was a national agenda, but that quickly deviated upon the realisation that other Southern territories were facing the same problem and that structures and larger ideas of democratic support needed to react to enlist and encourage these limitations of thinking and doing.

Nearing the end of the discussion, Eduardo took Michel and I through Southern Panoramas one last time to show us mentionable work, some of which I missed during my comprehensive view including Argentine Gabriela Golder‘s triptych ‘Conversation Piece’, which depicts two young girls reading Marx and Engles’ ‘The Communist Manifesto’ with their grandmother. The conversation is energetic and funny. The grandmother becomes a mediator, engaging with the youngsters who are precocious and inquisitive, to interpret the text and the transmission of ideologies connected to freedom, labour, oppression and capitalism.

Another stand out piece Eduardo mentioned that informed the curatorial framework was Claudia Joskowicz‘s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, a two channel video that reflects on the complexities of space, this time the internal relationship of two families and their surrounding living spaces, and the view before us of the hills of Illimani in the Bolivian Andes Mountain rage. The formalism of this diptych is rigorous and introduces us to two families, both on the cusp of exile; one a Polish Jewish refugee who arrived in Bolivia during the Second World War, and former Nazi Klaus Barbie, who was living in an affluent neighborhood. The infamous Rolling Stones song is the accompanying soundtrack, and the tension mounts as the tracking and slow motion increases in tenor and pitch while we wait for an encounter. This is staged as a paused moment in the elevator, where the two families meet, poignant as it showcases Latin America as a site for asylum to both victim and oppressor, and the subsequent social and cultural ramifications.

Our site visit ended at SESC Pompeia’s open courtyard, and Solange and I shared a few words that held the promise towards continuing our dialogue and partnership. I hope these chapters are a testament to that start.

There was mention of a party, and we arrive to find it bustling with energy, youth and release. Ruy Luduvice and I speak about Louise Bourgeois, the constructs of Caribbean politics, the University of São Paulo and the contradictions of the city. Tonight, in the open air, with warm bodies crossing Samba vibes and loud conversation, I finally get an epiphany as to why Videobrasil feels so different.

It is because it is.

With the constant circulation of young intellectual minds and advancing methodologies, there is little room for stagnation and newness is always in play. I think perhaps this is the secret weapon that Solange continues to deploy year after year, to keep things challenging and to always look outwards and inwards to dictate the future and the progression of this project. In the end, it is not only a valiant attempt at keeping a creative community alive and rich; what it does is provide artists from the South with a platform to practice solidarity that holds a firm hand out to everything around it. In this gesture, we find resonance and fundamental methods intertwined with the act of fostering individual freedom, and with this, anything’s possible.

[1] Interview with the author in Como Viver Junto, Fundaçao Bienal, São Paulo, 2006, p. 24