Maria Thereza Alves

/in , ,

São Paulo, 1961. Lives in Berlin

Through a series of collaborations, Um vazio pleno [A Full Void] (2017) discusses the whitewashing of the indigenous presence from the history of the construction of Sorocaba. Tracing relations between the past and the present, the project throws light on the colonial practices still in use in the present day, and articulates visibilities and narratives of resistance.

For the Triennial, the artist collaborated with the Guarani ceramicist Maximino Rodrigues to produce replicas of funereal urns, water jars and pottery shards on display at the Sorocaba History Museum. The material was distributed strategically throughout the town centre in a bid to reinsert the indigenous presence in the local public space and symbolic repertoire.

In dialogue with the family of the Guarani leader Joaquim Augusto Martim, founder of the Yyty Village on Jaraguá Peak, in São Paulo, the artist invited the Guarani educators Eunice Martim and Poty Poran to hold a conference on the social reality of the state’s Guarani indians. The event got underway at São Bento Square in downtown Sorocaba, more precisely at the foot of the monument to Baltasar Fernandes, the Bandeirante explorer who founded the town, and proceeded to Dr. Arthur Fajardo Square, home to the monument to Rafael Tobias Aguiar, the founder of the Military Police.

At the Triennial, Alves exhibits a set of videos recorded by indigenous students at the Sorocaba campus of the São Carlos Federal University. Recorded on cellphones during an indigenous contemporary art workshop delivered by the artist, the videos feature interviews with non-indigenous students answering questions put to them by their indigenous peers.

[Y.R.]

Obras

Um vazio pleno, 2017
técnica mista
FABRICAÇÃO DE CERÂMICA Maximino Rodrigues, Michely Aquino Vargas, Aldeia Jaguapirú
WORKSHOP DE CERÂMICA Giselda Pires de Lima Jera, Aldeia Tekoa Kalipety
PALESTRA Poty Poran Turiba Carlos, Aldeia Tekoa Tenode Porã e Eunice Augusto Martim, Aldeia Tekoa Yyty
FOTOGRAFIAS Michely Aquino Vargas
ASSISTENTE DE PROJETO Wilma Lukatsch
POSTER Valeria Hasse
EDIÇÃO DE VÍDEOS Bruno Lotelli
AGRADECIMENTO Universidade Federal de São Carlos – Campus Sorocaba (UFSCar); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Sorocaba (MACS); Associação Bethel; Capela Senhor do Bonfim João de Camargo

Fábio Noronha

/in ,

Curitiba, 1970

An artist and lecturer, Fábio Noronha uses the university context as his field of artistic activity and investigation. Interested in the “trash” of computer programming and in Internet lingo, with its links, pop-ups and banners, the artist’s work combines writing, digital images, video, sound, installation and editorial projects. The appropriation of internet content serves as a method for building a repertoire that frequently develops out of editing and assemblage. Noronha’s platform of choice is the digital environment, and his works are available for free, online and for download.

At the Triennial, the artist presents three issues of the magazine Arminha, an editorial project that is part of his research at the university, and a set of four videos that marshal some of the poetic vocabulary he has amassed over the years.

In AUDIO 65a (2002), a computerized reading of William S. Burroughs’ Electronic Revolution (1970) is illustrated with a picture of an audiocassette, evoking experiments with recording and also ideas on the relationship between the written and spoken word. In the video MEGAFONE [MEGAPHONE] (2016), a montage set to a soundtrack composed by the artist runs through a list, in the form of subtitles, of 198 methods of non-violent action compiled by the American Gene Sharp, who published a series of studies on resistance strategies in contexts of dictatorship, oppression and war.

[Y. R.]

Obras

Megafone, 2016
vídeo digital, cor, som estéreo, 16’50”

Audio 65 a, 2002
vídeo digital, cor, som mono, 66’8”

Barba eXistenz, 2012
vídeo digital, cor, som estéreo, 54”

Vídeo-anúncio SCC_var_
Bouguereau, 2013
vídeo digital, cor, som estéreo, 9’2”

Cabeça, da série Insônia
valeriana, 2000/2002
vídeo, 1’38”

Banho personal 1950, 2006
vídeo, 5’30”

Revista Arminha V1: Insônia
Valeriana, 2015
Revista Arminha V2: Motosserra,
2016
Revista Arminha V3: Coded
Meaning, 2017

Fabiano Marques

/in , ,

Santos, 1970. Lives in Berlin

Between 1976 and 1978, during the final years of Institutional Act no 5 (AI-5), known as the most draconian instrument of repression during Brazil’s military dictatorship, Fabiano Marques was living in Sorocaba. At the time, his father was a judge and his mother, a geometry teacher. His memory of the town and his desire to reflect on the role the Judiciary is playing in the current political situation, seen in the light of a critical reading of past events, converged in the chance to work with a group of local law students interested in studying the court rulings issued during those years of his childhood.

In Os processos [The Cases] (2017), Marques worked with students and teachers from Paulista University (UNIP) in Sorocaba to select and summarize rulings for the town’s municipal court records. The aim was to annex the material to the official archives so it could be made available for public consultation. In the late 70s, court records contained only the information needed to locate cases in the archives. Since then, despite changes in the regulations, these documents have not been updated.

Libra (2017) consists of a metal sculpture which, seen against a backdrop of sky, points straight to the constellation that bears its name. In it, the stars become points connected by lines scaled to represent their individual distances from the Earth. Seen from a certain perspective, the sculpture takes on a long, conical form reminiscent of a telescope, underscoring the fact that vision is always partial and conditioned by a particular viewpoint.

[Y.R.]

Obras

Libra, 2017
ferro
CONSULTORIA DE ASTRONOMIA Martha Terenzzo e Axel Jaccobs
AUTOCAD Gabriela Lessa

Os processos, 2017
WORKSHOP COORDENAÇÃO JURÍDICA Elisa Rosa
PARTICIPANTES alunos do curso de Direito da Faculdade Unip de Sorocaba

Raul Mourão

/in ,

Rio de Janeiro, 1967. Lives between Rio de Janeiro and New York

Active on the Rio art circuit since the early 90s, cultural agitator Raul Mourão’s diverse repertoire includes the creation of Item magazine and co-directorial credits on numerous music videos. He studied at the Visual Arts School at Parque Lage while simultaneously doing degrees in communication and architecture. At the Triennial, Mourão presents Passagem [Passage] (2010), an installation that relates two objects that are recurrent fixtures in his research: cages and swings (kinetic objects), in the most varied scales and forms. This work consists of a metal cage that visitors can enter in order to play with elaborate swing structures.

In addition to Passagem, Mourão also presents a showcase containing samples from a numerous photography series that documents the presence of railings in the urban space as a sort of “appendix” or afterthought to urban architecture. On the Sesc Sorocaba terrace, the artist installed the piece Playground, one of his kinetic works. These Corten steel sculptures (the material confers them a certain rusty rugosity) create intercalated, overlapping forms that acquire their meaning through handling by the viewer. This interactivity is intended to evoke the sensation of walking through the city streets, where there are none of the prohibitions imposed in a gallery/museum.

[D.M]

Obras

Passagem, 2010
aço e resina sintética

Sem título, 1998-2002
aço, fotografias, madeira e vidro

Nunca

/in ,

São Paulo, 1983

Since the mid-2000s, Francisco Rodrigues da Silva, better known as Nunca, has been executing large-scale drawings and paintings on the urban space. Part of a celebrated generation of graffiti artists, including Os Gêmeos, Spetto and Ninca Pandolfo, Nunca started working in São Paulo before taking his art to other major cities worldwide. His presence on the institutional scene and contemporary art market has helped strengthen the debate, reception and public appreciation of urban art.

His striking figurative interventions evoke aspects of Brazil’s past and a graphic repertoire in which the regional collides with a current cosmopolitan imaginary. Traditional populations, people of mixed race and a diversity of customs and traditions are blended with references to pop and mass culture, everyday life, racial and class conflicts, competing interests and clashing territories.

The artist’s emphasis on diversity extends to his use of form. A visual polyphony of vibrant colors fills fields juxtaposed with black-rimmed and hatched drawings that lend scale and volume to the theme in hand. Based on a preliminary sketch, the works tend to be adapted in loco, where they reach their final form. For Frestas, Sorocaba provided the inspiration for a new work. Inaugurated at the Triennial, the conditions and permanence of the enormous mural in Colonel Fernando Prestes Square are submitted to the dynamic of the city, both during and after the exhibition.

[D.M]

Obras

Fundadores, 2017
acrílica e spray
AGRADECIMENTO Edifício Francisco Paula Simone
e Sorocred

Letícia Ramos

/in ,

Santo Antônio da Patrulha, 1976. Lives in São Paulo

The expanded possibilities video, photography, machines and installations bring to the image fascinate Letícia Ramos. Her art stands out for numerous aspects: complete mastery of photographic and filmic craft, artisanal creation of image-capture devices, the constructive capacity that runs through her synthetic and holistic production of the artwork, and, last but not least, her own trademark manner of weaving in an ambiguous fictional narrative that becomes camouflaged among the so-called “truths” of science and history. Her training in architecture and cinema, as well as her vast repertoire in science fiction, help determine her poetic universe.

In Grão [Grain] (2016), for example, the artist transports the viewer into a future in which a catastrophe is about to send a human colony set up on another planet into meltdown. A ruptured silo triggers the rampant proliferation of an apparently unstoppable weed. The story is told in a scaled model, conjuring an inhospitable miniature environment intercalated with details of biological phenomena obtained through macrophotography. As in other works, here the artist subverts the logic behind the production of scientific documents and proof in order to create new narratives that evoke some distant past or future. At the Triennial, Ramos uses holography and drawing to represent a meteorite that seems to come from Sorocaba’s remotest history. Like a piece in an archeological or ethnographical museum, this celestial body is a throwback to a past that has returned to disturb our reality and deconstruct the present.

This work dialogues with another project developed especially for Frestas, but not carried through: a large hologram of a meteorite in the hall of the old Sorocaba Railway Station.

[D.M.]

Obras

Meteorito em suspensão, 2017
Desenho, colagem e maquete holográfica

Grão, 2016
16 mm transferido para vídeo, full HD, 8’

Deborah Engel

/in ,

Palo Alto, 1977. Lives in Rio de Janeiro

Observing the architectonic phenomena that permeate our experience of the city is a staple of Deborah Engel’s work. Collaging photographs printed in various scales and applied in varying thicknesses, the artist creates three-dimensionality and illusionism in order to discuss the nature of space, as much in poetic as in conceptual terms.

At Frestas, Engel presents works that play with relief, scale and composition. The pieces are large and give the viewer the impression of standing before different architectonic spaces, with passages, anterooms and circulations trailing into the distance as the works jut seductively into the exhibition space. Consisting of various copies of the same image layered one upon the other, the collages suggest movement and potentize the duality between finitude and infinity.


Obras

Escada escala, 2017
colagem

Equinócio, 2017
colagem

André Komatsu

/in , ,

São Paulo, 1978

Part of a generation of São Paulo-based artists who, since the turn of the millennium, have been investigating modes of thinking the public sphere, André Komatsu conceives of works with strong material and constructive appeal that decode, in time and through action, the stock notions of space that have become second-nature to us. The artist also deploys a vast and heterogeneous conceptual and formal vocabulary that tensions the power relations and negotiations inherent to cohabitation in urban environments.

From early on in his career, Oeste ou até onde o sol pode alcançar [West, or as Far as the Sun Can Reach] (2006) is a performance recorded on video. Komatsu follows the sun on a Herculean crow’s flight voyage across São Paulo, from its easternmost rim to its farthest western perimeter. Armed with a compass, the artist made his way across the sprawling metropolis, attempting to surmount obstacles as they arose. This instrument for reading technoscientific data helps him engage with his environment, drawing an analogy between the real world and the geographical reference data we rarely ever question.

At the Triennial, Komatsu also presents a previously unseen project intended for a wasteland near the highway in Sorocaba. The artist built a structure in iron tubing, glass and mirror capable of generating a range of conflicting spatial sensations, both in virtue of the form and the materials used. The work conjugates containment and openness, landscape and impediment, view and opacity, public and private.

Bruno Baptistelli

/in ,

São Paulo, 1985. Lives in São Paulo and Budapeste

The Sesc Sorocaba car park, which hosts Frestas’ main exhibition, is the starting point for a site-specific work by Bruno Baptistelli. In order to create an installation that reflects the local architecture, the artist appropriates some of the staple elements of large commercial buildings, such as ramps, railings and flights of steps.

Bruno Baptistelli’s process involves occupying and interfering with contexts, often in a subtle, near-imperceptible way. From the very beginning, Baptistelli has been interested in rearranging the city’s everyday elements as an aesthetic exercise. In the series Reorganizações urbanas [Urban Re-organizations] (2008-2010), he spent nearly three years composing geometries out of detritus and rubble found piled up in the streets. Behind this was a desire to render his artistic intent visible on the cityscape. In the series Narrativas cotidianas [Everyday Narratives], underway since 2011, the artist keeps a photo record of his wanderings in the city and the formal curiosities that tend to go unnoticed to the walker, such as randomly repeated figures and compositions.

Considering the highly diverse nature of the public Sesc’s art events tend to attract (many visitors are already at Sesc for other sporting, cultural or health events), Baptistelli built his sculptures using materials and procedures not usually associated with the art world.

[L.B.]

Obras

Sem título, da série Tolos, 2017
concreto e metal
PRODUÇÃO Ricardo Donadio (fibra Arte & Produções)