In the port of ouidah, Benin, one of the main departure points of African slaves to the American continent, seven laps clockwise around a tree made up for the ritual to erase the past, before embarking to a new land. In 2014, Paulo Nazareth travelled to the site to re-enact this journey, establishing with the opposite direction (anti-clockwise and from Brazil to Africa) the duty to relive the colonial history to free the present of a legacy of physical and symbolic subservience.
The audiovisual records of the steps taken on the artist’s journey was installed on monitors that surround a pillar of Living Area of SESC Pompeia, main space of the Panoramas do Sul show, which is the result of the 19th Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil. Discreet in relation to the numerous large projection screens, but located in the most central part of the building, the project organises a protest march emanating to the surroundings, creating a key to the interpretation of the exhibited works. Standing up against all kinds of dogmas, this show gathers different accents and subjectivities in absentia of official State monuments, drifts to reinventing identities and watertight territories, fictions and suspensions that silence the pretentious claims of the truth and objectivity commonly associated with files of the collective memory.
The number of participating artists is significantly smaller than those in the previous edition of the festival. Instead of a line up of 110 items, now the curatorial committee formed by Bernardo de Souza, Bitu Cassundé, Joao Laia and Julia Rebouças, besides the Director Solange Farkas, has selected 48 artists via international call (43 with ready works and five with unpublished projects) and five on invitation. The downsizing was key to improving the quality of visitation of the shows (which can be slowly covered in about four hours, at Sesc Pompeia, and one more hour, in the Galpão VB newly opened in Vila Leopoldina) and to consolidating its profile within the local and international art circuit.
Along with many other initiatives currently taking place in São Paulo, the show doesn’t need to fill in the spaces between the alternating years of the Biennials and become necessarily an extensive show. Instead, it needs to embrace the specificity of a platform and a lexicon of selection from the “geopolitical south” of the world, which in practical terms excludes from its scope the art of North America and European hegemonic countries. The conceptual grounds of this criterion – which, despite guiding the editions of the show since the 90s had not yet been addressed in depth – win a relevant publication this year, the book entitled Panoramas do Sul – Perspectivas para Outras Geografias de Pensamento, organised by Sabrina Moura.
Based on the idea of giving prominence and articulating the peripheral circuits of international art, the 19th edition of Sesc Videobrasil focuses its attention on selection of works and projects and not on the qualification of these works in curatorial essays. This year the selection presents a remarkable quality and seems to ponder on both critical and probate motivations in face of the dynamics of the art circuit. Among the Brazilian artists, the show features works of the young and prominent, as Clara Ianni, João Castillo, Waléria Américo and Cristiano Lenhardt, whereas among the ones who have been on the road for a while, we encounter the Solon Ribeiro and Vera Chaves Barcellos, whose work ends up as less seen, maybe because they do not fit in most of the programmes focused on beginning artists. Among the international artists, the local public is presented with unprecedented works of artists as Enrique Ramirez (Chile), Roy Dib (Libya), Hui tao (China), Köken Ergun (Turkey) and Mihai Grecu (Russia), who do miss the change to address current issues of their countries.
Another highlight is Gabriel Abrantes from Portugal. In Liberty, film displayed on the invitation-only show, the artist narrates the love of an Angolan boy for a Chinese immigrant, which never materialises due to the boy’s sexual impotence. The impossibility expands as a metaphor of the frustrations and complexities inherent to the experience of a postcolonial and globalized world, where the opening of borders does not guarantee a definite or easy renovation of otherness narratives. We must repeat, as Nazareth and Daniel Frota did in It’s a Perpetual Way – sound work that echoes in the corridor outside SESC – one of the famous verses of Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso: “It’s a long way, it’s a long way”. An infinite loop transforms the pathway, which before was only seen from afar, in a place to actually be. Among marches that are sometimes aggressive, sometimes tentative, with more hits than misses, Panoramas do Sul makes its way.
19 Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc_Videobrasil
Through December 6
Sesc Pompeia – Rua Clélia, 93 – Pompeia – São Paulo/SP
11 3871-7700
sescsp.org.br/pompeia
Galpão VB – Av. Imperatriz Leopoldina, 1.150 – São Paulo/SP
55 11 3645-0516
videobrasil.org.br / 19festival.com
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