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

Reynier Leyva Novo

/in ,

Havana, 1983

In sculptures, installations and videos, Reynier Leyva Novo problematizes the history of Cuba without losing sight of its relation with global geopolitics. In his audiovisual output, such as the trilogy El país que soñó ser continente [The Country that Dreamed of Being a Continent], the artist examined his homeland from other perspectives that allowed him to think in terms of a global South—not so much a geopolitical region as a concept under dispute in terms of identities, territories and memories.

At the Triennial, Leyva Novo revisits two installations from his back catalogue that here acquire specific contours. In Arqueologia de una sonrisa [Archaeology of a Smile] (2015/2017) some two and a half thousand toothbrushes were collected through new-for-old trade-ins with the population of Sorocaba. Arranged on a wall, the collection reveals variations of color, size and wear. In El beso de cristal [Crystal Kiss] (2015), seventy wine glasses are laser-etched with the portraits, names and mandates of the 24 Cuban and 44 American presidents (prior to Donald Trump, the 45th). Completing the set are two blank glasses waiting for the nations’ future leaders (in the US, Trump). While in Arqueologia… the artist evokes subjectivities in the name of collective memory, in El beso… he refers to the maximum symbols of power in Cuba and the US in order to underscore their history of ideological conflict.

[D.M]

Obras

The Crystal Kiss [O beijo de cristal], 2015
globos de vidros gravados a laser

Archeology of a smile [Arquelogia de um sorriso], 2017
escovas de dente, retratos e informações pessoais
FOTOGRAFIAS Camila Fontenele
AGRADECIMENTO Pastoral do Menor de Sorocaba
Centro Educacional Comunitário Habiteto

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

Marko Lulić

/in ,

Vienna, 1972

Bearing in mind the European historical context since World War I, which saw the consolidation of modernism in its most varied forms, Marko Lulic produces videos that register performances in spaces with monumental works of sculpture or architecture. These elements evoke the ideological and aesthetic diversity of progressive forms of the modern found in distinct ways in socialist and capitalist nations.

The artist investigates this repertoire in Eastern Europe and presents some largely uncelebrated and little photographed samples. Kosmaj Monument (2015) and Proposal for a Workers’ Monument (2014) are two films that promote, each in its own way, intersections between monument and dance, a static memory and an attempt to understand it through the body and movement. Shot on Kosmaj mountain, Serbia (former Yugoslavia), and in Berne, Switzerland, the works show how dancers, sometimes improvising and sometimes performing choreographies, can activate spaces and bring to light their historical, architectonic and social particularities. The body can conjure up possible responses to what collective memory chooses to forget or remember.

[D.M.]

Obras

Model of Relations (The Circle)
[Modelos de relação (o círculo)], 2015
vídeo, 11’
CORTESIA da Gabriele Senn Gallery e do artista.
PRODUZIDO em colaboração com Kuehn Malvezzi e seu
projeto Models of the House of One, Bienal de Arquitetura de
Chicago, 2015

Kosmaj Monument [Monumento
Kosmaj], 2015
vídeo, 9’48”
CORTESIA da Gabriele Senn Gallery e
do artista

Proposal for a Workers’ Monument
[Proposta de um monumento
para os trabalhadores], 2014
vídeo, 10’25”
CORTESIA da A da Gabriele Senn Gallery e do artista

Space-Girl Dance [Dança da
garota-espacial], 2009
vídeo, 3’
Coleção da Aksenov Family Foundation
CORTESIA da Gabriele Senn Gallery e
do artista

Jasenovac, 2010
vídeo, 9’
CORTESIA da Gabriele Senn Gallery e do artista

MARKO LULIĆ
Model of Relations (The Circle)
[Modelos de relação (o círculo)], 2015
vídeo, 11’
CORTESIA da Gabriele Senn Gallery e do artista.
PRODUZIDO em colaboração com Kuehn Malvezzi
e seu projeto Models of the House of One, Bienal
de Arquitetura de Chicago, 2015

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’

Héctor Zamora

/in ,

Mexico City, 1974. Lives in Lisbon

Allying a background in graphic design with an interest in architecture and the visual arts, Héctor Zamora began in his career in the early 2000s, and spent much of it in São Paulo. His work looks at the social and economic reality of countries on the outlying rim of capitalism. In his performances, which are usually recorded on video, he plays with the archaisms, unbalances, dissensions and vulnerabilities common to Brazil and Mexico, achieving a deeper perception of the facts through the lens of direct experience.

Memorándum [Memorandum] (2017) is a video record featuring a multistorey u-shaped scaffold on which uniformed women sit and type. The completed sheets are pulled from their typewriters and sent wafting into the patio below. It doesn’t take long for a situation to emerge that decries the violence to which women are submitted in a patriarchal productive system that has long limited them to subservient, secondary roles. In Ordre et progrès [Order and Progress] (2016), a three-channel video installation, workers in hardhats destroy traditional fishing boats with sledgehammers, reducing them to mounds of broken wood. In the name of technical fine-tuning, work, repetition, disposal and waste seem to take hold as unquestionable elements of labor and its order. In this tug of war between preserving what exists and the imperative to create the new, Zamora underscores the impasse of the capitalist system, which tends to overwrite the collective memory. The trashed remains of the performance attest to a knowledge or material production of which we should never lose sight.

Obras

Memorándum [Memorando], 2017
videoinstalação, 4’14”, 48 datilógrafas, 48 máquinas de escrever,
48 escrivaninhas, papel, andaime
CORTESIA do artista e da Galeria Luciana Brito
EDIÇÃO Visual Mates

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.