Frame do vídeo "Há Terra!", de Ana Vaz. Imagem selecionada para a capa da Revista impressa.
Reading Cycle

Reading Cycle: Editorial

Barbara Mastrobuono
22 Apr 2020, 12:28 pm

April 1st, 2020 would celebrate the launch of the third edition of SP-Arte Magazine, completing one year since its launch on the 15th anniversary of the Fair in 2019. For the new magazine, we chose to work on the concept of crisis, not from the angle of those who face it now, but from the work that has emerged in it (whether personal, political, environmental). Our new issue was, therefore, a reminder: crises pass or transform and any work produced during turbulence, resists. The title of the editorial was What was left, of everything we’ve been through.

A few weeks before the opening of the Fair, we faced its suspension for public health reasons. Along with the event, there was also the interruption of everything that goes with it: the magazine, the parallel programming, the support materials, the educational itineraries… a series of cultural productions that are now on hold so they can soon reemerge in more calm. And the editorial, written at a time when “certainty” was a word that still belonged to our vocabulary, got stuck in the pages of a print proof, a small portrait of the hopeful vision that we had during January 2020.

Now, we have chosen to publish the magazine in its virtual version.

In order to make this happen in the best possible way, our talented design team translated the physical design proposals into the online version, recreating the experience of reading these texts and absorbing their images.

We also invited authors and curators to participate in the Reading Cycle, in which we will collectively debate the essays and recontextualize them for the moment experienced. Each text will be released at the beginning of the week on our website. At the end of the same week, through a live on SP-Arte’s Instagram channel, I will meet with you readers and the author of the text read, to discuss the topics of the article. We hope that, with this cycle, we will be able to engage directly with our community of readers, and together start a dialogue around these texts and recreate new possibilities of reading.

The editorial of the physical magazine ended like this: “Danger, difficulty, revolution, circumstance. Momentum. Concepts that try to unravel what we understand by crisis as we expand our dialogue on the subject. It is important, therefore, to occasionally stop and observe the badges of past battles – reminders of battles fought by those who preceded us in our struggles, and which remain in the present as messages from the past. And thus, we go on”.

For this new editorial, I feel that, in addition to holding firmly to past messages that this too shall pass, we may need to understand our actions now from the perspective of what they will be one day: our own messages for the future.

Above: Video frame of "Há Terra!", by Ana Vaz. Image selected for the cover of the print Magazine.

Check out below the full program of the Reading Cycle


1st text

Contestation Art: The Experience of JACs

Mirtes Marins de Oliveira

 

The author takes us through the history of JACs – Jovem Arte Contemporânea [Young Contemporary Art] – that occurred in the 60s and 70s, during the term of Walter Zanini as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP), emphasizing how experimentalism opened up space to rethink the place of creation before the institution.

Reading and discussion with the author on Instagram Live
Friday, May 1st
from 11am to noon


2nd text

Emergency Confluences: From the Experimental in the 1960-70s to Contemporary Living Memory

Diego Matos

 

Curator Diego Matos surveys artists who return to the dictatorship theme and revive production techniques used by resistance artists in the 60s and 70s, rescuing counter-hegemonic territories and histories, assuming narratives where an imaginary is inscribed from which future potentials may arise.

Reading and discussion with the author
on Instagram Live

Friday, May 8th
from 11am to noon


3rd text

Notes on Amrita Sher-Gil and Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu

Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes

 

Maria do Carmo MP de Pontes writes about political and personal crises within the production of art, pointing out the works of Amrita Sher-Gil and Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu – two artists who had intense productions and died prematurely – as sublime results that can arise from turbulence.

Reading and discussion with the author
on Instagram Live
Friday, May 15
from 11am to noon


4th text

Making a Video: Free, White and 21

Howardena Pindell

 

The text by the American artist Howardena Pindell recounts the process of creating her important work Free, White and 21. The video is her first autobiographical work, and delves into the inheritance of racism experienced first by her mother and then by the artist during her childhood and youth. For the conversation, we invite curator Carollina Lauriano.

Reading and discussion with the curator
on Instagram Live
Friday, May 22
from 11am to noon


5th text

An Introduction to Ineconomy

Daniel Jablonski

 

Artist and researcher Daniel Jablonski speculates about the artist’s role as an art worker and the implications of this role for the art system as a whole.

Reading and discussion with the author
on Instagram Live
Friday, May 29
from 11am to noon


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Barbara Mastrobuono is an editor, translator and researcher. She has worked in publishing houses such as Editora 34 and Cosac Naify, and served as the editorial coordinator of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. Among the titles she translated are “Tunga”, with text by Catherine Lampert; “Poesia Viva”, by Paulo Bruscky, with text by Antonio Sergio Bessa; and “Jogos para atores e não autores”, by Augusto Boal. She defended her master’s dissertation at the Department of Literary Theory at the University of São Paulo.

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