For the third year, and in partnership with Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo, SP-Arte presents a sector exclusively dedicated to performances.
For 2017 edition, applicants were evaluated by a committee composed by Cauê Alves and Roberto Bertani, professors and coordinators from Belas Artes; Solange Farkas, curator and director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil; and Paula Garcia, artist.
Floated Burks, by Alice Tima
The issue of the anonymous being raises many questions. For Aline Tima, one of the most intriguing is: why are we constantly watched? As an answer, masks, burkas, and other objects that cover the face are present in the artist’s production, which she names Performative Devices of Resistance (PDR).
Burcas flutuantes [Floating Burkas] is an intervention that presents people on skates while dressed in such devices produced in the shape of a burka.
Psycographing Tunga, by Andressa cantergiani
Psicografando Tunga [Psychographing Tunga] is a durational performance that started out with a dream of the artist with Tunga, in which he asked her to make a long braid. For SP-Arte/2017,
Andressa Cantergiani builds ten meters of braid and grows a relation with the architecture of the Bienal Pavilion. The braid as interweaving on the perception of social living, as body policy, as identity and resistance.
Repeating Repeatedly, by Erica Storer
The action is composed by the relationship between body and the construction of a tower. Made with bricks and cement, the construction begins by passing through a table with a hole and continues for another 1.5 meter over the table surface. Seated on a chair next to the table, the performer has her head and legs inserted inside the tower, and she draws circles for several hours nonstop using both hands, on the space still empty on the table. The body is consumed by the repetition. The continuous drawing occurs almost as an extraction and the result of such condition, or even an endless attempt to record time.
Ratsrepus, by Fabiano Rodrigues
In Ratsrepus , Fabiano invites professional skateboarder Akira Shiroma to participate in an experiment of interference in the skating universe, where the identity of a skateboarder is erased.
In contact with the artist, Shiroma executes actions using a single skateboard, shifting him from his usual function and creating strange patterns of movement. The two roam between the dysfunctionalization and resignification of the skateboard as object.
Social Entropy, by Felipe Cidade
Entropia social [Social Entropy] is a performance composed of boxes of oranges, an empty bag, a knife on top of a table, and a chair, with the action defined by the gesture of peeling oranges, maintaining the peels in the middle of the table and placing the peeled fruits in the empty bag.
During the performance, the juice from the orange drips from the table down to the floor and, little by little, contaminates the environment with the fruits’ citric smell. In several cultures in history, the orange was and still is an exotic fruit, of higher social classes. Positive and negative reactions occur as the smell spreads around the space, attracting some and chasing away others, as a natural catalyst for the more privileged social classes.
Status Quo, by Felipe Cidade
The Status quo performance comprises the performer standing still between eight heaters positioned in a closed circle. The image exhibits the dichotomy of the modern man: while industrialization advances at full speed, man returns to ancestral practices. In this case, the heat from the heaters remits to comfort and safety, even though things around him are already favorable for this.
The touch convinces me i’m real, by Felipe Cidade
O toque me convence que sou real [The Touch Convinces Me I’m Real] is an action composed of a series of pieces of sandpaper on a wall, where the performer writes the title phrase on sandpapers, using a wooden cube. The piece is manageable; it has to do with the painful attrition of sandpaper on skin, which brings the spectator back to reality and question whether one should touch something that may cause pain in order to feel real.
Existencial Gravity, by Hélio Tafner
In Gravidade existencial [Existential Gravity], the artist puts Zen Buddhist meditation into practice, in a static and rigid corporal act, as well as an existentialist reflection of life. Using his forehead, he keeps day-to-day objects – that also possess an emotional charge – held against a wall, through different pause and breathing rhythms. In a brief and intentional movement backwards, he lets them drop around the space, and then “halts” the body at the moment when his forehead faces the wall in front of him.
With this, the artist questions the action-reaction of his own body. When in a static position, he attempts to domesticate the flow, so as to no longer control his desire. He allows the disorder of the operation to take over and repeatedly continues the action. In this work, the fact that he allows objects to drop with the force of gravity can be used as a metaphor about the forces the world exerts on our bodies.
Time-misadventure, by Lucas Dupin
Amid the incessant flow of visitors, the artist sits in absolute silence at the table set in a location with a large circulation of people, and prepares to remain there four hours. Wearing the clothes of an anonymous worker and equipped with only a stiletto and business calendars, he spends the day removing each and every time reference present in them, one by one. Through slow and precise cutting, the representation of days, months, and years little by little give room to an intricate and delicate empty grille. Lastly, the pieces removed from each calendar, ensuing of hours of work, remain accumulated at the feet of the table.
