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When i read that Os Gêmeos were having a solo show in Milan, i nearly fell off the chair. I wasn't expecting it. Not that the guys aren't everywhere, they were part of the The Graffiti Project which invited Brazilian artists to paint the walls and turrets of the south side of Kelburn Castle in Glasgow, i discovered their huge mural in Berlin, they've exhibited at Art Basel Miami in 2005, etc. but while looking for exhibitions to check out this week in Milan and Turin, i found so many "recycling": yesterday i saw the Gilbert & George retrospective at the gorgeous Castello di Rivoli, yes that's the same show which took place at the Tate Modern in Spring. Last week i had a look at David Lynch's The Air is On Fire at the Triennale di Milano which had previously been shown at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. And the next one on my list is Vivienne Westwood at Palazzo Reale in Milan, the very retrospective set up at the London Victoria & Albert Museum in 2004. Although i'm quite happy to catch up with exhibitions i had missed, i can't help but be disappointed to see that independent galleries are not taking much risk either... Except the freshly opened Patricia Armocida. The gallerist actually told me that she jumped into the fire and opened her own gallery because the city of Milan was in need of a space dedicated to the independent underground art scene.
To launch the exhibition space, she turned to identical twin brothers, Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, AKA Os Gemeos. In this show called Assum Preto (Blue-Black Grassquit), Os Gemeos are exposing six previously unreleased canvases paintings and two installations, in addition to new works painted directly on the walls of the gallery.
I particularly liked the noisy and lovely El Mentiroso. While wandering on a flea market in Italy Os Gemeos found an old tiny b&w television set, they zapped from one channel to the other until they discovered a telemarketing channel which fascinated them so much that it inspired a sculpture exhibited in the Milan gallery: El Mentiroso (The Liar.) Permanently set on the telemarketing channel the tv has most of its screen covered by a wooden portrait, so all you get is the sale pitch without the image.
If you're living in or around Milan, keep an eye on Galleria Patricia Armocida, they have some goodness coming up next such as shows with Dash Snow, Nico Dios and Ari Marcopoulos. My pics. |
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Inspired by Graffiti Research lab, Diffiti offers an open source platform made in Macromedia Flashâ„¢, allowing anyone to use and change the project original code and graphics, however they see fit.
Also by Yaniv Steiner & co: InstantSOUP, Virtual Sumo, Mossalibra, Yaniv Steiner's talk on rapid prototyping process, I Ching, etc. |
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Mouna Andraos was showing her Power Cart in the streets of Williamsburg (Brooklyn) yesterday, offering alternative power to passersby in need of charging their mobile phone.
The mobile unit is inspired by street vendors, knife sharpeners from India, refills of gas in Africa, fake Gucci bags in Paris and chair massages in New York, the Power Cart looks and feels like another service for the city of today. Where ever you might be in the world, hail the Power Car for a quick fix. The Power Car owner will turn the crank for you and get the electricity you need, one minute of cranking at a time. With a little help from the solar panel. More images. |
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It took me ages to come up with the second part of Urban Interface Berlin. The event ended a few days ago but i thought it would be worth waiting for some proper documentation of Exposure as the images i took of the installation are -to say the least- pathetic.
Exposure monochromatic posters looked like the covers of mainstream magazines, the bars closing a prison cell or thumb prints. Installed along a segment of a passageway, they could only be enjoyed at night. When a pedestrian passed by the poster, a distance sensor, connected to a tele-objective camera, activates the flash of the camera, casting the person’s shadow momentarily on the poster. The poster's graphics being printed with fluorescent ink, shadows are captured and become an integrated element of the poster that gradually fades away. Simple, immediate and effective.
As Jussi Ängeslevä and Richard The explain, the technology is used by science museums around the world, and artists such as Random-International. The artists/designers combined the simple technological principle with traditional poster design, where static graphics are augmented with the viewer's silhouette to create playful situations and weave micro narratives for the unsuspecting public as they navigate through the dark alleys. The work comments on the effects social softwares have on us. The online self-presentation being an idealisation of the reality, and only existing through the aid of the service providers. By reminding the traces and constraints the license terms levy upon us, Exposure brings the online discourse to physical space in the form of a poster series. The work is also a comment on the omnipresent cameraphone, a "little brother" who is relentlessly prying on the unexpected moment of embarrasment or shock. Exposure's motion sensing flash lights relate to this "everyman paparazzi". Related: SonarMatica has a fantastic line-up of projects playing with shadow this year. |
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On the second day of OFFF, I walked in to a super-crowded presentation of the Graffiti Research Lab. It's probably unnecessary to introduce their work as such, so just a few notes. GRL are obviously most well-known for their Throwies, which they themselves call "the most loved and the most hated project on the internet", since they received a lot of criticism for tossing around batteries. While this is certainly true, the popularity of their work proves that it definitely strikes a chord with many people and if we're talking about expanding existing cultural practices through technology this is something that they've certainly achieved for graffiti.
Their project Night Writer for instance uses Throwies to form words which then can be attached to metal walls, bridges, etc. (This was later copied and led to the infamous Boston bomb-scare for which GRL temporarily even were suspects because some related dude stole one of the Mooninites and posted himself on Flickr). These glowing pieces have something about them which makes them much more of a screen and thus creates a simple device which can actually compete with the ever-spreading urban screens which visually, at least at night, vastly outgun traditional graffitis. Another example of their work enabling artists to compete with modern advertisements is an incident when mineral water-makers Perrier were projecting ads in NYC, "guerilla"-style and coincidentially used GRL's building as a screen. In response, they rolled out their Mobile Projection Unit and started to write over the ad. Eventually the "Perrier Krew" gave in and GRL scored in probably the first projection-battle ever.
In Barcelona, there's now a mobile projector unit too which might be for rent at some point. GRL planned to use it in the city every night and were told off by the police at MACBA the first night (see previous post), announced they would project on El Corte Inglés (to cheers from the audience) the second night what they successfully did and were later told off again. But you can't arrest people for playing with light, right? The third night they stayed at the CCCB, allowing people to try out the new brushes that Zach Lieberman had contributed. The second talk of the day I attended were the guys from raster-noton (Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto, Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender). Their highly acclaimed label was formed in 1999 as a fusion of the two Chemnitz-based labels "rastermusic" and "noton.archiv für ton und nichtton". From their very beginning, they agreed that they would regard the music they release as a series in order to be putting ideas about music and sound in the foreground rather than the persons who make it. This notion became even stronger when Carsten Nicolai joined since he had already had a background in fine arts where similar approaches are more common. One of the first releases was designed to be more an acoustic magazine with one statement per issue, eventually there were 12 releases. For the design they collaborated with BLESS who created almost translucent CDs and put them in extremely simple cases. What proved to be more difficult though, was how to design what will be holding the CDs together, the braces if you want. The solution was simple and effective: a 13th issue just contained 12 round neodymium-magnets to be put in the individual cases which could then be joined to a whole. Other series included the "static"-release with antistatic bags known from computer equipment and the "clear"-series that focusses on the same ultra-minimalistic packaging. However, over time they slowly moved towards a less strict style and also adopted cover designs, including a design by Japanese scientist Takashi Ikegami that depicts errors in loop systems. A beautiful project on the graphic design-side was Notationen Archiv that Nicolai's students at HGB Leipzig created together with Cyan. They had half a year to each create their own notation systems from provided audio-tracks. The result was an amazing collection of booklets each from which could actually be played. In fact, everyone was so happy with the result that they eventually were produced in a small series.
Carsten Nicolai's own artistic work focuses on similar topics and maintains the same aesthetic quality some might find too rectangular but which has a great clarity about it that allows the underlying concepts to be perceived. In 2005, he has had his first retroperspective antireflex for which he designed two rooms: A black room in which the video spray and objects which intentionally alluded to the aesthetics of stealth technology. In return, the other room was bright white and thus revealed all the mechanics of the pieces it contained. The work which might best reflect raster-noton's and Nicolai's explorations into audio-visual perception is syn chron, which was shown at Mies van der Rohe's modernist Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2004.
A crystal-shaped object which the visitor could enter, its membrane-walls were equipped to be speakers while at the same time white laser-projectors textured them with patterns that related to the sound, rendering it a kind of synaesthetic sculpture. The lecture concluded with a performance that employed similar black and white patterns as video-projections, to great effect on the retinas of everyone who had managed to sit through the whole two hours. |
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Eduardo Fernandes, Flávio Reis, Geandre Tomazzoni, Gustavo Godoy, Frederico Ming, MaurÃcio Brandão, Olavo Ekman, Rodrigo Araújo and Sandro Akel are the members of Bijari, a Brazilian collective of artists/activists whose portfolio is one of the most impressive i've ever seen. They work for commercial corporations without loosing their soul, freshness and identity, they are also well-known for their VJ activities and somehow they even find some time to invade cities with their critical and witty interventions that comment on contemporary urban issues.
Bijari is 10 years old this year. How did it all start and how did you grow over the years? Were you planning to cover so many areas (artistic urban interventions, web design, graphic design, video installations, etc.) right from the start? The art collective was born in 1997, when we began to meet for common interests, research, chats, parties. Since 2001, we think about art with regard to the city, architecture and urbanism issues (most of us are graduates of the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo). Through the extended field of art and the countless symbolical forms that it offers, we distinguish a very interesting way of developing considerations and criticisms about the metropolitan condition as well as about architecture, since we never have made architecture strictly speaking. Diversity and elasticity always were our priorities, and we are constantly researching and linking diverse knowledge areas, in order to create more possibilities of transformation in our works as well as to extend the number of potential clients, something very inconstant in this market. Bijari engages with many media and technologies. Does it mean that each member of the group has a specific role and its own competences? Or is each project always developed through a "total team" work? Nowadays, we are an enterprise with nine partners, distributed over a horizontal structure in which we perform all productive and administrative functions. We participate and function as art directors on the commercial market (video, VJ, graphic design, web, scenery). At the same time, we have our own art project that gives us some independence as to the necessity of art-products commercialization (most of them aren’t "consumable" like a sculpture is, for instance, consumable at an art gallery). Thus, a lot of those works are more focused on the process than on the final products. Among us, there are varied talents and, depending on the nature of the work and availability of each partner, we organize groups for each job. A job differs from other one and the group organizes itself according to this. Some works are made by all of us but other not.
The Arquitetura da (R)esistência project (there is there a play on words: resistance-existence) was conceived through a look on the non-official urban equipment and architecture of downtown São Paulo city. Analyzing clandestine and parallel inventions and constructions over and for the urban network, we have created devices that drive attention on the manifestations that we regarded as creative and resistant expressions in front of the restrictions of the official, controlling and standardizing city. Through them appear some design and desire for adaptation and resistance. Their image expresses concepts of polyphony, multiplicity and organicity which are typical of Brazilian culture. Thus, we want to establish an inclusion of this present and non-official memory, allowing other looks stirring up reflections on this phenomenon and asserting the dissonant image that is typical of the real city. Bijari also developed a very intriguing "Chicken Project". How exactly did the intervention use the volatile? How did people react to your action and what did the project reveal that you might not have Using a camera to register, we’ve inserted a chicken in a street refuge where hucksters and pedestrians fought against cars and buses. After that, we moved the chicken to the front of a famous shopping center in Faria Lima avenue. The chicken acted as a kind of thermometer that could reveal us differences among people that use the same space.
On the one hand, the chicken was the solution! Several people started to cluster and run after it. The gallinacean had become an object of fascination and provoked greed – an opportunity to take away, bring home and maybe eat! On the other hand, it was a problem! In another place, after the chicken had begun to move in front of the shopping center, pedestrians deviated, looked distrustful, somewhat astonished by its presence in the city. Some people deviated, other hesitated before crossing it. Little by little, we were surrounded: three keepers appeared after a watchman had reported the situation by radio. A minute after, there was a guard vehicle over the sidewalk. Some nervous men accosted us, demonstrating some fear because of the situation: there was a new element scratching and pecking at their ground. We thought that we would have met with situations of resistance, or strangeness, but we never considered the presence of so many watchmen. This short story illustrates the approach of architecture Bijari is concerned about – the one that develops in spite of the ready space established by political wishes imposed from top to bottom. In fact, we understand architecture as a space under permanent construction, subject to participation and pressing inclusion. Are there urban phenomena you see emerge whatever the country you are in due to gloablization trends? On the other hand, what are the urban characteristics of Sao Paulo (or Brazil) that are peculiar to the place? The great metropolis is an excluding place. The perception change on the appropriation of space – and its consequent appropriation from those who live in it – is the goal of our work.
The constellation of global cities, where city chains influence and polarize other ones around it, configure homogeneous cities that acquire the same aspect, one becoming like the other. It’s impossible to recognize if we are in São Paulo or Hong Kong. Urban space becomes pasteurized, sterile. We loose local identity and design tramples the living body of the city. This trend is sold to us as the unique truth and the paradigm for progress and modernity. By creating a resistance to the general movement of globalization, the city preserves its own characteristics and learns to say no to certain ready-made proposals for a new world. The city is a living body; architecture must be thought as the possibility of building a space that welcomes its manifestations and essential activities. In the last four years, we conceived projects that question the functions of public place, revealing relations of power hidden in everyday settings. We did and do this by using artistic artifices that serve to crop and amplify some aspects of the city. In an inverted process of architecture that builds solid structures, we create almost ephemeral works that guide themselves by rupture of standards in each individual, allowing a reflection on the approached themes.
Bijari is also involved in a series of projects developed for the commercial corporate market. How do the purely artistic projects relate to "hired" ones? Do the commercial and the art works feed each other? We produced commercial works for some enterprises. Working commercially allows us to get some financial income and, also, to support part of our artistic research with a certain level of independence. We take advertising as a reference for us because of its brutal visual and communication power, although the sense used in our art projects are completely inverted. The knowledge as a tool in trade or advertising works helps us working formally better in the image construction. Lastly, we use our knowledge in interventions, installations and urban performances for developing projects in Guerrilla Advertisement trend, non-standard media. In those works we try to convince clients to invest in pieces or happenings that privilege contents creation and new experiences that are not pure branding. How do you feel about the advertising world finding inspiration in and using the tools and mechanisms of alternative culture as it is happening more and more in urban areas*? I guess new media are appearing, people are more and more online, communication pulses and information flows are more opened, in several paths and from interlocutors different from official media.
It’s important that, among this, anything gets fixing and changing mind of the people to a more conscious present and active participation in this world. Our times are very dynamic; people must gain enough mobility to accompany its speed, and enough action that ensures that they don't become mere coadjuvant actors. Any advice for young creatives who dream of setting up a group like yours? It’s important to keep updated with what's going on in the world, references, researches, to be attentive to the senses and always present some critical sense imbued with pro-activity.
How is the contemporary art scene in Sao Paulo? Could you name us a few artists who deserve to get more attention from the public? Because we are a group of nine artists, it’s difficult to know on which each one is connected at this moment. But, generally, we have some common references and we can quote those in areas we act them. From Brazil, we would quote the documentary-makers João Salles and Eduardo Coutinho that possess a very strong work associated to urban urgencies. Thinking on integration of video with multimedia, Joshua Davis and his crazy work developing systems for standards generation. It’s to be remembered also the recently deceased Korean Nam June Paik, father of video-art and member of Fluxus group, that acted at 1960 and 70 decades proposing plays, actions, performances, concerts, demystifying art, bringing it closer to the dynamics of daily life. Mentioning a contemporaneous video-artist, the young Uruguayan Martin Sastre and his creative fantastic-realistic videos in which he performs as character of his paranoid stories (in one of them, he proposes that Lady Di isn’t dead and lives hidden in Uruguay). Quoting some artists that work with this approach here in Brazil, we can mention works of Daniel Lima and Frente 3 de Fevereiro [February the 3rd Front], that mixes theater, music and art with an appeal for the black cause. The Integração-Sem-Posse [Integration-Without-Possession] project (on which we were involved), linked to social movements fighting for housing; Contra-Filé group searching short-circuits in media and solo works of Cildo Meireles, MaurÃcio Dias and Walter Riedweg, Rubens Mano, Marcelo Cidade and graffiti-painters Zezão and Orion, just quoting some of them... In the VJ area, scene in which we many times act, we mention the japs of Glamoove (that have developed a powerful software for image mixing), improvisations on jingles by Eclectic Method (UK) and VJ Anyone (UK) with whom we are developing a project (see also w.roland.com/audiovisual). Other generic references that have inspired us but aren’t directly related to our artistic making: Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his critic and acid look on contemporaneous metropolis, studies involving deleuzean concepts and psychoanalysis in the structuration of contemporaneous being by Suely Rolnik, the book Abusado [Bold] by Caco Barcellos on Rio de Janeiro city’s drug traffickers, the Canadian electronic music producer Richie Hawtin and the fanzine Sociedade Radioativa [Radioactive Society] drawn by cartoonist friends. Thanks Flavio for having orchestrated the interview! * cf. this article. |
Resistant Architecture was an artistic investigation of non official activities and architecture of excluded citizen in central Sao Paulo. Can you give us more details about these non official activities and architecture of excluded citizen. Which form do they take? What was the outcome of your artistic project?
