Deyson Gilbert

/in

São José do Egito, 1985. Lives in São Paulo

“Mrs. D., housewife, 74, was diagnosed with an unusual psychosis because of her belief that her husband had been replaced by another man. She refused to sleep with the ‘impostor’, locked her bedroom door at night, asked her son to get her a gun, and fought with the police when they attempted to commit her. She recognized all the other members of her family, but not her husband.” Based on his analysis of this strange case from 1923, the French psychiatrist Jean Marie Joseph Capgras recognized the illness that he called “illusion of the doubles”, which was latter named after him, as Capgras delusion, a disorder in which a rupture between the visual and emotional memories makes people believe that someone close to them has been replaced by an impostor.

What do the Capgras delusion, Apotemnophobia, Velázquez’s Las meninas, David Carradine and Chelsea Manning have in common? Apparently disconnected, these themes and figures are mixed together in the performance Plums of Chelsea Manning. Alone on the darkened stage of the Sesc Sorocaba theater, Deyson Gilbert speaks an invented Germanic language, sends WhatsApp messages to the audience and exhibits slides with the help of a complete stranger handpicked at the start of the presentation. Organized as a five-part play, the presentation invokes themes of sensory experience of the world, of lack, of unconscious actions, and of the end of history. Major, complex and unsolvable, these concepts are sewn together with a thread of associative logic and a dose of uncanniness, producing the fascination of proximity to some unfathomable mystery. After all, certain processes are visible and present, but then something happens and we can no longer recognize them, just like Mrs. D and her husband.

[J. A]

Gala Berger

/in ,

Villa Gesell, 1983

A tea room open for conversations, where each artist created their own special flavor for sale; a gallery called Inmigrant, to provoke the Argentineans who don’t consider themselves locals, but “European immigrants”; a museum allocated to a tiny space whose entire collection is saved on a HD, complete with instructions on how to assemble each work. These are the spaces created in conjunction with fellow artists and curators by Gala Berger, an artist who allies art with public, political and collective actions of ambiance-building. Her projects aim to support the work of contemporary artists in Argentina and obtain a poetic that is more engaged with political issues.

The possibilities of moving between art and institutional criticism are the conceptual basis of Berger’s projects, certain that there is no real difference between the alternative and the mainstream. In practices geared towards the organization of spaces and works, she presented Cipher (2014), a curatorial proposal for the collection at the Ruth Benzacar Gallery in Buenos Aires, unveiled in the gallery’s car park. In the performance La montaña que come hombres [The man-eating mountain] (2017), held at the Museo Histórico de Villa Gesell, she incremented the institution’s history with some documents on the city’s Bolivian population, fundamental to its construction and yet invisible in its “imaginary”.

In this second edition, the Triennial takes one further step toward building its identity and stating its presence on the Brazilian and international contemporary art scene. As a recent creation with a brief history, the event did not yet have an entry on Wikipedia, something Berger was able to rectify with a fictional but perfectly credible Frestas—Arts Triennial page with links to and direct mentions of key issues from the fateful year of 2017, in which the Left and human and civil rights found themselves under threat from an ascendent Right. By inventing story-fictions for four editions (not just two, as happened so far), Berger identified possible encounters and conflicts between art and politics in an uncertain present and future under (de)construction.

[J.A.]

Bruno Mendonça

/in ,

São Paulo, 1987

Mutant identities, the fragmented “I” and loosened roles in the workplace are subjects that have become increasingly present in our everyday lives. These still disputed concepts tend to align with the biopower through which the current phase of capitalism chips away at our rights and worms into our digital lives, or “second life”, in order to generate more capital. On the other hand, certain distortions point toward experiments and accruals that create situations that would have been unimaginable before. At the start of the 2000s, the artist Ricardo Basbaum invested in the “etc.” concept as a way of elasticizing the conventional categories of work in the visual arts system: “When the artist questions the nature and function of his/her role, we should write ‘etc.-artist’ (so we can imagine several categories: curator-artist, writer-artist, activist-artist etc.)”.

Etc.-artist (etc.-curator, etc.-singer, etc.-clubber) Bruno Mendonça positions himself as an agent who operates inside and outside this system. Through zines, exhibitions or mic-sessions, he creates environments and platforms—often temporary—in order to discuss and problematize not only the artistic metier, but also sexuality, gender, or any other fixed cultural or urban category. The internet is another medium he works through, and this was the environment on which he developed his work-fronts for Frestas, involving posts, spoken-word exercises, collages, and after-party testimonials that, after circulating for a while on the social media, were transformed into an online publication to be launched with a mic-stand performance at Sesc Sorocaba.

[J.A.]

Ricardo Càstro

/in , , ,

São Roque, 1972. Lives between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro

Abravanar is a verb invented to designate modes of unleashing vital energy through interaction with elements of cultural memory, sometimes abstract and sometimes clearly harnessed to popular festivities, religious cults and the mass media. The abravaner may expand the self through the sensory experience of colors and light, musical chants, and the receptive, perspiring, connected body. Ricardo Càstro has been abravaning since the early 2000s, and this has yielded artistic and spiritual manifestations, both his own (and often privately so) and of others, be they partners or publics, to whom he offers beauty in return for empathy and exchange.

Wava consists of three portals: Platinum song, Stair lip and Coffee table. In silver, gold and crystal, respectively, the three works propose meditation rituals. Once activated in their totality (as the artist intends), they heighten our perception of an invisible, high-frequency wave that spreads and intensifies. The stirred wave spills into Sorocaba, where Ricardo spent a month as a resident, and out over the internet, where he has amplified this presence and possible interactions on Google Maps and Instagram, scattering clues and creating routes of access in the form of invitations. From geometries to gypsy drift, through tarot cards in a town square, a performance at the foot of a public monument, and a lot of face-pulling, all frugal and exuberant, onwards it goes, but lest we forget: exuberance is just an abravanist pretext.

Obras

Wava, 2017
técnica mista
PARTICIPAÇÃO André Bragança, Gabriel Junqueira e Marcelo Fagge

WAVA is an invisible wave that can emanate from the three elements (portals) arranged here in a triangle.

In this space, any individual can trigger the wave. The sequence of interaction with the elements and the rhythm of the experience should be decided by each participant. We recommend that participants enter barefoot.

Suggested interactions:

Canto platina (Platinum song)_RECEIVE
Lie down and stay in that position until you can tune into the platinum wavelength. Here the key is one of rest, meditation, attention to one’s breathing, the internalization of energy—attuning.

Naco de escada (Stair lip)_SHOUT
Ratchet up the volume, concentrate on something you want to break with and holler as loud as you can. Here the key is one of radicalization as a way of jolting energy into flux; of the possibility of bringing buried inner questions into the outer realm—liberation.

Mesa de centro (Coffee table)_DIALOGUE
Talk to a crystal ball in your mind’s eye, without touching it. See your future, visualize. Here the key is one of understanding, reformulation and the possibility of redirecting your ideas—redesign.

Escola da Floresta

/in ,

São Paulo, 2016

Like a geopolitics invented from the outside-in, Latin America lacks cohesion among its members—its people and its nations—, a connectedness that could enable them to recognize and cultivate something shared, both historically and in the present. Begun by the artist and educator Fábio Tremonte, the Escola da Floresta [Forest School] attempts to lay the groundwork for this and other discussions. With no fixed headquarters or even a website, the project, created in 2016, has fostered networks of interlocutors from different countries across the continent and promoted horizontal dynamics of knowledge. Shared journeys, walks, texts, films and shared kitchens are just some of the project’s triggers.

At Frestas, the School staged a series of performative readings via live feed on Facebook. The idea was to throw some light on the indigenous situation in Brazil by resurrecting a hard-hitting and long-forgotten document. Spanning 30 volumes and some seven thousand pages, the Figueiredo Report was the result of an investigation completed during the military dictatorship about human rights abuses against indigenous populations between 1946 and 1968. Packed full of documental evidence of torture, slave labor and genocide, as well as environmental devastation, the report was left gathering dust until 2013, when it was found at the Museu do Índio and sent to the National Truth Commission, an organ created to investigate human rights abuses during the dictatorship. Read by the Escola da Floresta on consecutive days as part of a multi-voice vigil, excerpts from the report bring to light facts that urgently need to be assimilated into memory.

[A.M.M]

Obras

  • Escola da Floresta [Leitura pública do Relatório Figueiredo] mídia: Facebook, transmissão ao vivo postagem: 11/9

Angélica Freitas e Juliana Perdigão

/in ,

As in a dialogue moderated by invisible rules, perhaps probability, frequency, telepathy or espionage, Google likes to complete our searches for us. Typing in “ways to”, the search engine promptly suggests a number of options: “be wicked”, “be richer”, “save money”, “make money”. If you look up “things that fly” in Portuguese, the Brazilian version will throw up links to UFOs and drones. No helicopters, no airplanes, not even the Brazilian-made Super Tucano, the jet fighter which, after transporting large quantities of drugs at the behest of serving and as yet unpunished government ministers and members of Congress, became a flying emblem of the political crisis Brazil has been mired in since the bribery and graft scandals involving politicians and state-run companies, like Petrobras, first exploded in 2014. Paraphrasing this sort of arbitrary and apparently automatic associative writing, Angélica Freitas began a series of poems dedicated to tying up the loose ends of the scandal—of the laugh-so-as-not-to-cry variety—, some of them handwritten, seeing as they are doomed to be forgotten anyway.

Across the pages of the author’s notebook fly a priest tied to helium balloons, verses by the 1980s girlband As frenéticas, the unpublishable nicknames given to a senator embroiled in the corruption scandal and some beautiful, faithful buzzards. For the soiree Macrofonia, held at Casa da Luz in São Paulo in June 2017, the texts were given new associations in sound and image. Armed with some prerecorded soundtracks, the musician and actress Juliana Perdigão probes Angelica’s live readings with sounds ranging from the rhythmical to the ambient, sometimes existing solely to underscore what the flux of things allows to slip by. Like an exercise in co-creation between two interlocutors from different fields, both equipped with the discursive apparatuses of their time, Coisas que voam [Things that Fly] continues after this initial event. Invited by the Triennial, the series takes up a two-month residence on Facebook and YouTube.

[A.M.M.]

Guerrilla Girls

/in , ,

1985, live in the United States

In 1985, in dialogue with the feminist and civil rights movements in the US, a group of women artists and activists started promoting actions designed to expose the art world’s sexism and racism. The women adopted gorilla masks and pseudonyms like Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz as a strategy to denounce the erasure of women from history and contemporary art. Using basic statistics as a weapon, the Guerrilla Girls obtained precise information about the skewed gender balance at exhibitions and in museum collections. With this data, and using circulation strategies that combined the discursiveness of the modern vanguards and conceptual art with the didacticism of political militancy, the collective produces humorous and persuasive posters they paste all over town.

One of their most emblematic posters, from 1984, featured a female nude with a gorilla head on a yellow background. Next to the figure we read the provocative caption “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”, followed by some facts and figures: “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female”.

After decades operating outside the art circuit and market, the Guerrilla Girls started exhibiting at major institutions, which included their posters in their collections. This move by no means weakened the group’s critical discourse. Quite the contrary, it broadened its reach and plugged it into networks, with some compelling results, such as Complaints Department (2016-). Initially created for the Tate Modern in London, a new version has been prepared for the second edition of Frestas, with a website (departamentodereclamacoes.com) and desk at the Sesc Sorocaba Recreational Center, where visitors can register their gripes, pet hates and criticisms on pretty much any topic they wish. This openness makes the “department” a soapbox for multiple voices and a gauge for the collective and institutional limits of listening.

[F.J.]

Obras

The Guerrilla Girls Complaints Department
[Departamento de reclamações das Guerrilla Girs], 2017
instalação
AGRADECIMENTO Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP)

Do Women Have to be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?
[As mulheres precisam estar nuas para entrar no Met. Museum?],
1989-2017
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Free The Women Artists [Libertem as mulheres artistas], 2006-2017
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Disturbing the Peace [Perturbando a paz], 2009-2017
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Dear Billionaire Collector [Querido colecionador bilionário], 2015
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