Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Twelve years ago, one visual artist and nine architecture students (eight from the University of São Paulo and one from the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation) created a common space in which to do college work, throw parties, develop artistic projects, and discuss matters related to the moment that they were going through. The multiplicity of identities seeking the same objectives gave birth to BijaRi, a collective characterized by the notion of unity in diversity since its early days.

This feature is present in the group’s various artistic and commercial projects in Web art, video, performance, installation, live shows featuring sound and image manipulation, graphic design, music videos, video dance, intervention, and activism. A tribute to the first address, in the vicinities of Instituto Butantã, the word Bijari is rooted in Tupi [Brazilian Indian language] and means “the scab that falls off is the skin that renews itself,” which is reminiscent of sources of inspiration to the group, such as cultural anthropophagy and Tropicalism. The capital “b” and “r” make the name easier to read in any font, and according to collective member Rodrigo Araújo, “they highlight the BR, for Brazilian.”

Together, Araújo, Eduardo Loureiro Fernandes, Flávio Araújo, Frederico Ming Azevedo, Geandre Tomazoni, Gustavo Godoy, Luis Maurício Brandão, Olavo Ekman, and Sandro Akel engage in a permanent discussion about where boundaries and borders are, what they are, and why they are formed—be they physical or psychological, explicit or camouflaged by the urban landscape. Just as they aim to break away from normally accepted schemes—such as tacit divisions between rich and poor, bosses and employees, first and third worlds—, the group also departs from traditional parameters of art production by developing corporate projects using the same language and the maximum possible criticism.

The audacity of bringing up conflicts that lie latent in the social fabric was a feature, for example, of Antipop galinha, made in 2002. By using an element as simple as it is potentially offensive—which became clear later on—, the group made palpable the untouchability of worlds located just one kilometer apart: the people who go to the Iguatemi shopping mall and street vendors at Largo da Batata square. The effort recorded diametrically opposite reactions to the appearance of a hen: a sense of unfamiliarity that came through as refusal and fear, in the affluent part of the city, and as cheerfulness and covet among the poorer people.

In 2004, Largo da Batata would be both the setting and the protagonist for another emblematic intervention by the group: in Estão vendendo nosso espaço aéreo [They are selling our air space], balloons, signs, and leaflets informed merchants and pedestrians of the repercussions of a project for “revitalizing” the area, and reported on the speculation practiced by “real estate sharks.” The action, which is part of a project by SESC São Paulo involving several collectives based in the city, was built around the architectural concept of gentrification—renovation of an urban property that results in the removal of impoverished people. Recordings of the work were screened in 2005 in Kassel, Germany.

The same struggle against gentrification gained new faces and strategies when BijaRi became an ally, between 2004 and 2006, with the families resisting eviction at an occupation of building Prestes Maia, in downtown São Paulo. Immersed in the problematics of the inhabitants, the artists joined members of nongovernmental organizations and other groups in a series of artistic and political demonstrations and actions. In one of those, BijaRi, along with twelve other collectives, such as Contrafilé and Frente 3 de Fevereiro, created Território São Paulo, a special room at the 9th Bienal de La Habana. Amidst judicial orders, police force, choppers, and TV cameras, the group used thousands of leaflets to write on the asphalt the number 468, equivalent to the number of families that would be left in the streets after the reclaiming of ownership of the Prestes Maia building by the government.

The challenge of creating within other urban circumstances presented itself to the group, which created actions for the 3rd Mercosur Biennial, in Porto Alegre (2001), and during the 8th Bienal de La Habana (2003) they carried out interventions in the city streets. The video Ocupação (2006) documents how an abandoned downtown building in the city of Pelotas (state of Rio Grande do Sul) was turned into a support for slogans and anonymous phrases taken from the urban scene, combining intervention and installation. The thematic of an egalitarian use of the city, one that favors all—rather than only those with the most capital—constitutes the core of the video.

São Paulo provides the setting for most of the group’s interventions, from Poesia dos problemas nada concretos (2002) to João bobo (2005) and Cubo (2005), in which a public structure of seven by seven by seven meters received projections of images manipulated live by the group and other collectives. In 2007, during the trip of United States President George W. Bush to São Paulo, the group used billboards spread throughout the city’s main streets, questioning the agreement between Brazil and the United States for ethanol production. The work developed into Porque Luchamos?, an installation presented at the 1st Biennial of the End of the World, held in Ushuaia, Argentina, in that same year.

Also in 2007, another world came into being with Reconstrucidades, a travelling interactive installation in which the group offered viewers a chance to rearrange their ideal city, visually and in terms of sound, based on new values and demands, with the aid of colored chips. Made in 2006, Várzea, a partnership with choreographer Ricardo Iazzetta that was awarded at the 16th Videobrasil, uses video dance to reflect on the predetermined roles assigned to individuals and countries in the contemporary global “concert.” In Várzea, the city of São Paulo—a muse, laboratory, and enigma that the artists work tirelessly to decipher—becomes one huge, simple soccer field in which different dreams and “jerseys” interweave with each other in a ballet of conflicts, overcomings, and survival tactics.

Reflections on nature and city are recurrent themes for the group. Their projects include the intervention Disk mobilidade, which turns dump boxes into gardens. The 40th anniversary of May 1968—and the very notion of demonstration—is the theme of a new performance involving thirty participants.