Contiguity and succession
As regional director of São Paulo's Sesc (Social Service of Commerce), Danilo Santos de Miranda has not only been at the forefront of initiatives of great importance in the cultural scene of the metropolis, but also, with increasing emphasis has been engaged in a debate in which thinkers such as Edgar Morin (whom has works published by Edições Sesc SP) and Achille M'Bembe (who participates in a meeting held on the 18th Festival Sesc_Videobrasil) are prominent - it is the cultural decentralization, which is expressed, among other ways, on the emergence of new poles of production and artistic fruition. In the text he signs for the Festival catalog, that can be read firsthand below, Miranda discusses this issue a bit, having as a background the event that celebrates 30 years of commitment with avant-garde expressions and the art from the geopolitical South of the world.
Art and openings
The 18th edition of the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil proposes a gaze that spans time and space. These two vectors, the very fundaments of our apprehension of the world—as succession and contiguity, respectively—enable us to survey aesthetic consonances and dissonances within a broadened scope.
The world as succession: the viewer is invited to visit the Festival’s thirty-year existence through a historical show that activates the Videobrasil Collection in order to underline issues that remain of contemporary relevance despite the passage of time. It’s a way of thinking about History, of lending fresh meaning to what has gone before, of looking for lucidity in the construction of the present.
A milestone in Videobrasil’s history, which started in the 1980s, internationalized, and underwent a progressive diversification of languages, was the partnership with Sesc, sealed in 1992. There has been a clear zone of convergence between Videobrasil and Sesc ever since, one that is grounded in diversity. Beyond mere variety, the crux here is to lend visibility to uncrystallized forms of thought and expression.
The contemporary thinker Edgar Morin—a friend present in our reflections and actions—inhabits that zone of convergence, serving as an important reference through the geopolitical connotation he gives to diversity. Morin invites us to “think the south,” that is, to consider the idea that a geopolitical South offers us new ways of analyzing and understanding reality. Values bound up with human cohabitation, the systemic notion of the environment, and the distrust of excessive rationalization, developed in many regions throughout this vast “South,” function as opposition to a pragmatic and homogenizing north.
The French philosopher leads us toward a second movement: the world as contiguity. The Southern Panoramas exhibition gathers together facets of an artistic production that operates on an altogether different key from the Western European/US axis. Artists from Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania articulate a kaleidoscope of versions of our world today. Examinations of shifting aspects of contemporaneity—cities, landscapes, borders, identities—materialize in mutual contrasts and offer the possibility of conversing with the viewer.
The two exhibition fronts are the arteries irrigating a program that also includes publications, an artistic residency network, courses of study, and mediations. Each aspect illuminates the vision of the others, configuring the very complexity Morin values so highly. At Sesc, foremost is the chance to host this art movement in all its fertile incompleteness; with the standing invitation for that incompleteness to transform into openness to multiple gazes, so that they can trigger the emancipatory vocation of culture.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. 18º Festival Internacional de Arte Contemporânea SESC_Videobrasil. De 6 de novembro de 2013 a 2 de fevereiro de 2014. p. 226. São Paulo, SP, 2013.