Frestas – Trienal de Artes is part of the phenomenon of decentralization of art and reinforces its purpose of open space for free expression. Conceived by Sesc de Sorocaba, it reaches its second edition with activist, collaborative and urban works that desecrate the established order of the city of São Paulo, located 90 kilometers from the capital. The 58 contemporary artists from 13 countries reinforce the dialectical relationship between art and social reality, provoke local thinking and prove that art can also be a space for play. There is a successive and systematic movement in every major exhibition in search of the new, and it is faced with antagonistic forces between rupture and continuity. Curator Daniela Labra gets the theme right Between Post-Truths and Event by putting into question the dubious media truths that ignite social networks.

At the opening ceremony, after the official speeches, artist Gustavo Speridião surprises the audience with a singer performing, a cappella, the anthem The Communist International, in a pertinent critique of the precarious situation of workers today. Meanwhile Panmela Castro, author of the graffiti that infuriated a city bishop for considering it pornographic, prepares to present the performance Femme Maison, a warning about the unequal role of women in society. Scattered around the space, a performance group makes paper rain with photos of politicians and the banner “coupists”. Despite its small size, Frestas shows personality with sharp points that tear through the calm surface and the gray of everyday life in the city.

The conception of a participatory, collaborative and dematerializing art spreads through several places in which some works are ephemeral. The graffiti artist Never, by “tattooing” Brazilian Indians on the side of a building in the center of the city, transforms his work into a warning against the extinction of an endangered people.

In terms of communication, Frestas forms a visual culture in mosaic, replacing the linear culture, opening up to the unknown to find the new, but balancing emerging artists with the complex conceptual junctions of already established names. Raul Mourão makes an exercise of externalizing and internalizing the human presence in the powerful installation made with railings and swings. under the title Passage, the installation opens up to public participation, as if reinforcing the idea that freedom cannot be simulated, as Ritkrit Tirabanija says. In this work there are inexhaustible suggestions for the use of the body and its behavioral effects.

The confluence of efforts by artists from different regions, whose works are carried out practically at the same time, reinforces the idea that exhibitions of this nature are indeed experimental laboratories. Daniel Senise, exponent of the 80's Generation, rescues part of the city's period of splendor, with photos of the old cafeteria on the Sorocabana Railroad, once a pride of the country. On beautiful images, he incorporates and fixes objects and residues taken from the place itself, in a visual dissolution of the subject and revolting memory of the dismantling of the railway networks in Brazil. the intervention full void, Maria Thereza Alves, has an appointment with Sorocaba to unveil the indigenous presence in the city, a contribution in the anthropological field, reproducing fifteen replicas of an indigenous urn found in a museum in the city. By burying the copies in various parts of the city, she shifts the discussion about the condition of indigenous peoples from a protected field to the streets, allowing for a broader reflection.

Frestas has unique works and the effort to constitute the show in an open field, without censorship, is his greatest achievement. Dias & Riedweg went to the depths to bring to light an unpublished work, Waiting for a Customer paradigm of the universe underground. A video installation on the collection of American photographer Charles Hovland shows the sexual fantasies of more than 1970 people who responded to him through an advertisement in New York newspapers between 1980 and XNUMX. Days & Riedweg are authors of seminal works of contemporary art.

Violence has already given life to thousands of works of all hues and it seems that the public is drawn to well-defined categories, with provocative meaning, such as the work of the Mexican artist and medical examiner. Teresa Margolles which makes its contribution with a collection of 18K gold jewelry made from bullet or glass shards taken from the bodies of victims of the drug war in their country.

Under the gaze of a foreigner, the German Michael Wesely, the images captured in the street demonstrations, in favor of and against the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, displayed on the wall, become a platform of controversy in front of which some visitors grit their teeth, while others just smile. The artist seems to ask what is the real basis of the divergences between the Brazilian left and right. Or what is its non-verbal but real importance?

Sometimes man is placed in direct relation to the environment that surrounds him, as, for example, the Cuban Reyner LeivaNew. On an immense wall he displays hundreds of used toothbrushes, which he exchanged for new ones with the inhabitants of Sorocaba, composing an intimate and local history.

The American Collective Guerrilla Girls is the spokesperson for a new feminist consciousness that denounces the segregation of women within the ArtSystem, dominated mostly by men. In fact, what they criticize is that few things have changed in the man/woman relationship within the art circuit that insists on repeating, in disguised forms, the conservative behavior of the market of other decades. The collective also brings Complaints Department, already held last year at Tate Modern, in London. A huge chalkboard opens for the public to leave their protests. The group maintains anonymity and only performs with gorilla masks, in attitudes of domination, threat, mockery, a response to the restricted, arid and domesticated universe of art.

The outcome is for Yango Hernandez, the young Cuban artist renowned in international exhibitions who, in a simple and powerful installation, perfects the engineering of the political image. A chair with only three legs balances on a “stage”, rotating around itself, inside a circle of cut wood. We are talking about a fractured, fragile and everyday object that travels through time through memory and can refer us to the economic, political, social and intellectual imbalance of the entire planet.

Already thinking about the third edition, Frestas Trienal de Artes de Sorocaba could be inspired by the Bienal de Lyon, which in its first editions makes a solo career to later contaminate other important institutions in the city. From this expansion it becomes more powerful and international.