Undertaking |
  • Associação Cultural Videobrasil
  • SESC São Paulo
General Curator |

As of October 3, the city of São Paulo will be hosting debates on the cultural production of the Global South as part of the 20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, in an edition that mirrors both comprehensively and poetically the countless crises that have lately challenged contemporary society. Besides exhibiting the selected works, the Festival will also feature performances and public programs which will jointly occupy several spaces at Sesc Pompeia up to January 2018.

For the regional director of Sesc São Paulo, Danilo Santos de Miranda, “the 20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, with proposals by artists from different nations in the geopolitical South, lies at a crossroads where the specific meets the general. Based on this premise, Sesc presents a cultural initiative akin to experiences dedicated to casting off shackles inherited from the colonial past and imposed by a peripheral geopolitical condition.” Miranda mentions the importance of the partnership between Sesc and Associação Cultural Videobrasil, which, since the 1990s, “has enabled such intersections between local and international forces to create new nodes originating in the South.”

“In these unstable times, as narrative disputes escalate and local and global sociopolitical rearrangements are relentlessly driven by the permanent specter of crisis – whether economic, ecological or cultural – the group of selected artists brings out art’s desire to expand our worldviews, encompassing the study of life, of our origins, of the evolution of the universe and of the dynamics of social groups throughout history, as well as the invention of new ways of doing politics,” affirms Solange Farkas, chief curator of the Festival and director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, one of the presenting entities of the event, alongside Sesc São Paulo.

“These are artistic practices that blur the boundaries between sciences and take us on a journey of the origin of history, of societies and of Earth,” adds Solange. 


Visual identity and graphic design | Vitor César and Felipe Kaizer

Photographic record | Everton Ballardin and Pedro N. Prata

Video record | Marco del Fiol and Jasmin Pinho / Mão Direita

Programme

exhibition

Southern Panoramas | 20th Festival

Also focused on the geopolitical representation of art, the 20th Festival exhibition features videos, paintings, installations, sculptures, photographs and engravings that reveal a multiplicity of worldviews.

performance

Here and there - São Paulo edition

In Aleppo, those who have no shelter protect themselves behind curtains and carpets stitched together. In the performance, a similar curtain-wall is set up in the Festival space by an actress who sews a patchwork of Eastern fabrics with a tapestry needle while reciting a text.

Histórias minerais extraordinárias

Drawing on three characters in Swiss history the work overlays boundaries between geography, ufology, and fiction, and takes on the format of a lecture and debate event.

Kaleta/Kaleta

At the end of the year, Benin’s youth celebrate Kaleta, a festivity with local masks that resembles a mixture of Carnival and Halloween. Drawing on the festivity elements, the artist creates an immersive environment that invites the audience to confront their own personas.

LUTA CA CABA INDA

Titled with a Creole expression that means “the struggle is not over yet,” the action is based on the restoration, research, and dissemination, of the collection of the country’s National Cinema and Audiovisual Institute, with films produced by the liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s. 

Satellite Musique

The haitian musical group Satellite Musique plays its set list of compas (or kompa), a traditional Haitian music style that comprises elements of zouk, Congolese rumba, and reggae. 

Tau Tau

In an environment featuring musical instruments—bass drum, cymbal, bagpipes—and inflatable, hanging objects, the artists and a musician put on a scenic-sonorous concert. 

The Black Mamba

Pairing up with the Indian singer, songwriter, actress, and performer Suman Sridhar, Mendonca proposes a live act involving video and live music which draws on the atmosphere of the Indian popular film industry.

Tristes selvagens

A text that deconstructs the performance’s title and involves news related to the current historical moment is the basis of the action.

public programs

Aula aberta: Cosmovisões Com Beatriz Lemos e Wilbert Villca López

The meeting draws parallels between subjective and community perceptions in the relationships between human, nature and spirituality in Amerindian traditions in Latin America.

Aula aberta: Da arte de hoje ao espaço construído: outras formas e práticas para além do moderno Com Diego Matos e Guilherme Wisnik

The meeting discusses how constructed space is renewed and behaves under constraints other than those verifiable in environments that faithfully echoed the modern paradigm. 

Aula aberta: Reinvenção e resistência com Ana Pato e Márcio Seligmann-Silva

The meeting will address processes of perpetuation of violence, the production of a counter-discourse to “official” historical narratives, the issue of representation, and the desire to create memory by restoring, in the present, exterminated histories. 

Conversa com o artista Vitor Cesar e o designer Felipe Kaizer

The designers of the Festival’s graphic and spatial identity discuss the experience of working with curatorial concepts.

launch

COINCIDÊNCIA - Programa Pro Helvetia para a América do Sul

The Swiss cultural foundation Pro Helvetia announces the beginning of COINCIDÊNCIA, a triennial cultural exchange program between Switzerland and South American countries which offers a new residency award for the 20th Festival.