(Sorocaba, Brazil)
From October 2014 through May 2015, the Arts Triennial “Frestas” [“Fissures”] gathers artists from around the world in several venues across Sorocaba, where are carried out exhibitions, drama and music shows, interventions in city sights and museums, film screenings, as well as artistic actions and performances.
About the event, according to curator Josué Mattos:
What can fissures do to an urban surface, in social-political or symbolic sense? At first sight, their cracks redefine the experimenting of space. They divide, reset, rename things and places inside its borders. On the other hand, there are fissures that, apart from breaking a certain surface and stopping the fluidity and they way it is perceived, filled and experienced, these fissures evoke, by breaking space-time paradigms, the “invention of memories”, in the same way they are capable of questioning the norm, potencialising disorder, redefining obsolescence and ruin.
Fissures can also redesign traces that widen or reprehend citizenship, the subjective taking of action and one’s consequent emancipation when facing unexpected situations. Because, how can we deal with the unforeseen, the unknown other than crossing them, which is no different from building fissures in their truths? Fissures also appear in human relations to break masks and tear apart crystalised values related to failure and success in the contemporary world; from profit to loss, to order and disorder in collectiveness.
Learn a bit on the the artworks some of the featured artists present at “Frestas”:
Afonso Tostes – “Contingente”
In “Contingente”, Afonso Tostes reinterprets “Sala de Trabalho”, an installation he presented first in a solo exhibition, earlier this year. Wood-bone, wood-hand, wood-our daily bread. Working tools, anonymous, seedings, with bare bones. A kind of memento through which the artist evokes the primary division between artist and artisan, and what Tostes himself overcomes through this object synthesis.
Bárbara Wagner – “Crentes e Pregadores”
In the series “Crentes e Pregadores”, Bárbara sought to depict less-known figures of this phenomena in photographs using advertising techniques to point out a silent existence. Personal habits, taste and subjectivities are condensed in ways of dressing, gestures, poses and expressions; believers and preachers are many and different. These portraits are not presented as ethnographic examples of a distant culture, but rather demonstrate the presence of regular people, living their faith, distant from social and political interests, increasingly more influent, country-wise.
Bruno Vilela – “Erga-se”
Carrying a certain mystery, Bruno Vilela’s figures seem to deprive themselves from our look; they hide in thick woods and observe us from afar. As in the canvas “Erga-se”, in which a face and other elements that constitute physical characteristics seem to have been torn, giving way to a darkness that reminds us the colors of a nocturnal trail: dark green, cobalt blue, shy red tones, washed out by the night light.
Caetano Dias – “Bicho geográfico”
Colonization is retold by Caetano Dias in a dreamlike way. Heavy with symbols, his narratives are made of emotional, collective and individual memories. “Bicho Geográfico” was shot at the Palácio da Aclamação – a construction from colonial times, former residence of Bahia governors – going back to the affair of a Portuguese man to a Native.
Cao Guimarães, Beto Magalhães & Lucas Bambozzi – “O fim do sem fim”
This is the story of Brazil told in the end of endless. There where nothing stops being absence and becomes the main character of personal stories, necessarily creating a contrary effect of rescue and loss. The documentary called “O fim do sem fim” presents the viewer with direct images from an uncommon reality nowadays. It brings closer, through an artistic and historical register, the extinction of occupations such as witchdoctor, midwife, cordel writers, scribers, watchmaker, lift attendant, candlestick craftsman, etc.
Lenora de Barros – “Utopy”
Like a ghost, the voice we hear in “Uotpy” whispers, shouts and echoes the fragments of two negative sentences, shuffling them in space: There is no place like utopy, There is no utopy like a place. Fragmented, these sentences dissolve in works that share and rub in juxtapositions and antagonisms, creating breaches in meanings from possible connections. Thus, this voice that spreads across the space seems to announce another place in the gaps of the unsaid.
Malu Saddi – “O segundo evento de qualquer série”
The seemingly ordinary process of dislodging shapes and paraphernalia, linked to norms of representation permeates the body of work Malu Saddi presents in the Triennial. I have the privilege of not knowing it all. Drawings and objects on view refer to “unknowing” and understand it as motto in thinking how things that do not exist can be organized and the boundaries of life that curb spontaneity. This is because while processing the figuration of death, unstabilizing situations, places that create balance, accident and vertigo simultaneously, this body of works transports muteness into “pulse of death” as something interrupting the indescribably the flow of joy.
Raquel Stolf – “Assonância de silêncios”
Is it possible that, in the absolute silence that is inside “Assonância die Silêncios (Sala de Escuta)”, to hear molecules clashing that, still powered by the Big Bang, makes up matter inside my ears? But when entering the hearing room, all I seem to listen to is the sound of my brain echoing questions: Brazil was raised over political silences that numbed our critical capacity and, at the same time, we are citizens who cannot bear staying in silence. More than calm or peace, Raquel creates the uncomfortable feeling of being in a silent country.
Trienal de Artes “Frestas”, featuring Afonso Tostes, Bárbara Wagner, Bruno Vilela, Caetano Dias, Cao Guimarães, Lenora de Barros, Malu Saddi and Raquel Stolf
On view through 3rd May 2015
Em cartaz até 3 de maio de 2015
Locais:
Sesc Sorocaba
Rua Barão de Piratininga, 555 – Jd. Faculdade. Sorocaba/SP
Museu da Estrada de Ferro Sorocabana
Rua Álvaro Soares, 553, Centro. Sorocaba/SP
Palacete Scarpa
Rua Souza Pereira, 448, Centro. Sorocaba/SP
Barracão Cultural
Av. Afonso Vergueiro S/N, ao lado da estação ferroviária, Centro. Sorocaba/SP
Pátio Cianê Shopping – Loja 118-1
Av. Doutor Afonso Vergueiro, 823 – Loja 118-1, Centro. Sorocaba/SP