DIVERSITY OF STRATEGIES

Solange Oliveira Farkas
President and curator

The desire to understand the limits of contemporary experimentation in the field of electronic art was the curatorial thrust behind the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil. With the theme Limit: moving images and lots of strangeness and Mario Peixoto’s classic film to serve as a beacon, the Festival shone its light across a diverse range of investigations into narrative, drawing up a cartography in which cinema, art, and the electronic image were no longer separated by borders.

Videobrasil on Tour 2008-2009 is a possible synthesis of the map of routes and trails in image experimentation sketched by the Festival’s competitive show, Southern Panoramas. This synthesis is built around the selections of the international jury (Programme 1) and the Committee charged with awarding the six residency prizes on the recently-created Videobrasil Residency Programme (Programme 2 Sydney only see “Mori Gallery” ).

The programmes not only testify to the liberty with which languages converge and recombine, but, above all, to the diversity of strategies involving video in contemporary production. Amongst these we could mention the reinvention of the documentary, which breaks with the idea of an objective, excluded subject in order to attain the state of art (Juksa, Revolving Door); the incorporation of the image into processes of urban intervention and experiential construction (Várzea, Canto doce pequeno labirinto); and the confirmation of the video essay as a form of audiovisual thought that broaches environmental and social transformations (Untitled..., Canto de aves pampeanas 1) and produces sensitive chronicles of subjectivity (Weekend, Rawane’s Song, Abismos virtuais).

Created under such diverse circumstances, in different regions, and at distinct junctures in their authors’ careers, these works are instigating examples of contemporary production in the geopolitical south.