From October 15th to the 29th, Jonathas de Andrade‘s Online Viewing Room (OVR) is available on Galeria Vermelho‘s website. On the virtual environment, the Sala Antonio projection room presents “Jogos Dirigidos” (Directed Games), the artist’s new film that is set in the arid backlands of Várzea Queimada, an off-the-grid town in Brazil’s northeast, in Piauí. Among the town’s nine hundred inhabitants is an unusually large population of deaf individuals. Resembling an educational video that engages the audience through teaching methods, the films depicts a group from this community as they use a nuanced, self-taught system of gestural signs to enact staged testimonials and play outdoor games. This participatory video, inspired by Augusto Boal’s Teatro do Oprimido (Theater of the Oppressed), shows how the characters on screen communicate with one another through expressive physicality and affirm the richness of language.
On the Online Viewing Room, you can also find photos from the filming backstage, as well as from the screening of “Directed Games” to the cast and crew at Várzea Queimada, and an extract from the text “Jonathas de Andrade Giver Voice to the Dispossessed”, written by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz for FRIEZE Magazine, September 2019:
“De Andrade’s work calls attention to these ‘social silences’: structural problems most would simply rather not address. The difficult-to-translate puns and street slang of his titles are further evidence of the way he plays with the social ambiguities of language to tease at their underlying contradictions. Ambiguity can breed silence, and where silence prevails, there is always plenty of social and political noise”.
To visit the OVR and watch “Directed Games”, click here.
