What's beyond art in Ana Maria Maiolino's images in the series poem from the 70s, in the work “What remains”, where she cuts her tongue, her nose? What's beyond a disturbing, thought-provoking image? In her words, “they are images, reflections of emotions that are sustained by resistance. I use my own body not as a metaphor, but as a truth, something that belongs to the realm of reality, given that, in a moment of repression and torture like that of the dictatorship, all bodies become one in pain”. [Anna's skin: Anna Maria Maiolino. Ed.Cosac Naify, 2016]. Or in the works of countless women who used irony just to denounce the place of invisibility in which they were placed in a world of men.
What's beyond art in the works of artists who built their work based on research into secret documents. Shedding light on the unsaid, the censored, the erased.
What is beyond art in the XNUMXst century, in a Biennial that is built around a new global map. And another that decides to have a black majority in its curatorial group. And when artists from different parts of the world, use the same visual metaphors, in different supports to denounce the xenophobia of their countries towards immigrants. These countries are mostly colonizers.
Transcendence, one of the frameworks of art, is today impregnated not only by the strength of the aura, or by the poetics that enchants us, but also by its ability to bring up silences and memories, in an accelerated time that doesn't want to know.
This edition, which accompanies the realization of our V International Seminar, coincides with the opening of exhibitions where radicalism appears in the most varied forms.
It was very difficult to do culture in Brazil. Our culture is being burned, literally. It's not just about neglect, it's planned divestment, it's a choice and, after all, a choice of inept people from people whose interests are only individual, and predators. They are people capable of fulfilling the mission of destruction.
Thinking about culture is thinking about the other. It's thinking about how to create bridges, how to see the other and how to listen, how to make them known, how to include.
All this, here, is disappearing.
There are two Brazils: one that wants to take care of its memory, learn from mistakes and grow; the other wants to pretend that the different does not exist. Why take care of or invest in the work of educators, researchers? Why take care of artists' works if they are not for sale? If they're not for sale, they're worthless.
What about life, then?
This Brazil ruled by ambition, power and obscurantism is killing us. The fire at the National Museum, which destroyed millenary works, caught us up because it was a symptom. A symptom that alerts you to what is being left undone and, worse, to what is being done.
Art is a tool, a cry that allows us to go on and on.
In that sense, perhaps there is nothing… but art.
The video that opens the exhibition radical women, on display at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, They yelled at me black!, by Afro-Peruvian artist and poet Victoria Eugenia Santa Cruz, is a slap in the face.
