Lia Menna Barreto
Fabiana de Barros
Michel Favre
Sylvie Blocher
Marcos Chaves
Helena Ignez
Fabio Delduque
Paola Junqueira
Jorge Macchi
David Oubina
Joao Mode
Rivane Neuenschwander
Sergio Neuenschwander
Cao Guimaraes
Nils Nova
Toma's Ochoa
Joao Onofre
Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro
Ana Rolda'n
Eduardo Srur
Julio Villani
A migrant exhibition. The show queries not only the notion of migration and movement; it also highlights the fact that identities are shaped by real life experiences, and that they change throughout life. The artists' works reflect the difficulty of identifying with a homogeneous culture and launch a dialogue between breach and tradition.
A migrant exhibition
The exhibition Stopover is akin to Fiction ou re'alite'? ( 2003) and Shifting
Worlds (2005), presented over the past years in the Centre d’art
contemporain in Fribourg. Stopover queries not only the notion of migration
and movement; it also highlights the fact that identities are shaped by real
life experiences, and that they change throughout life. Confronted with the
three original questions: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we
going? Every individual tirelessly attempts to identify and recompose the
fragmented image of his or her own condition. The artists of Stopover all
pass through this infinite scenery, be it near or remote, composing and
associating their vision with that of others. Their works reflect the
difficulty of identifying with a homogeneous culture and launch a dialogue
between breach and tradition.
Outside and upper ground level:
-The work by Eduardo Srur, named Acampamento dos anjos - Angels’ camp -
(2004) presents an ephemeral campsite which he erects against the gable end
facade of Fri-Art. This shelter is lit up from the inside and functions as a
metaphor of the exhibition itself. The artist defines this work as an
attempt at transcendence, a bridge spanning the physical and spiritual, the
traditional and modern worlds, in which society establishes a direct
alliance between the precarious and the sustainable.
-The Logradouro series (2005) by Marcos Chaves is an on-site installation.
Architect by training, the artist likes to fashion space, constructing a
vanishing game of signal codes (adhesive tape) which he transforms into a
spatio-temporal experience. Astray between bearings and visual references,
these safety zones circumscribe an unforeseeable threat.
-In do Ce'u, da Terra - of Sky, of Earth - (2003) by Joao Mode', space is both
a conquest and a spiritual quest. Balloons bear messages, with their
trajectory creating a dynamic metaphysical link between sky and earth.
- Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro’s Mundo maravilhoso dos objetos flutuantes -
Marvellous world of floating objects - (2002/2005), assembles masterful
sculptures to which the artist confers a material and an immaterial
character. They evoke an organic universe which endows matter - alabaster -
with a life of its own.
Disunions com lagartixas - Drawings with salamanders - (2002) by Lia Menna
Barreto, are based on the tension between form and content - the
salamanders. This tension discloses the powerful contradictions between a
childlike and playful universe while adults seek sham and pretence. A
dismantling of semiological fields and simulated images.
-The fish or ants in Love Lettering (2002) by Rivane Neuenschwander and
Sergio Neuenschwander and World- Word (2001) by Rivane Neuenschwander and
Cao Guimaraes travel the world and draw the outlines of a story in which
personal and collective memory poetically partakes of a universal language.
-The work of Ana Rolda'n, entitled Kill the Beest, plays on the words “bees"
and “beast". Her aim is not only to intensify the uneasiness she creates
within a bee swarm, but above all to highlight a disincarnate and oppressive
world. Human beings, alienated and instrumentalized, have disappeared from
this setting and are replaced by a fragment or a prosthesis, which takes on
the shape of a seemingly fetishist and totalitarian leather glove. Metonymy
of the artist and of artistic creation: the invisible hand cups honey, the
symbol of affluence.
-With the Complexe du perroquet (2002) and the Promeneur (en the'orie),
(2005), Julio Villani presents two works closely dedicated to Brazilian
cultural anthropophagism and the history of Western art. With the parrot
which vindicates “the work of art in the era of its mechanical reproduction"
(Walter Benjamin) or the panegyric to Duchamps’ celibate machine, the artist
pinpoints the industrious character of a hybrid culture, creating the
illusory impression of multiplying paradoxes and bizarre elements in
ceaseless movement.
-Joao Onofre’s video, entitled Untitled (mask tap dancer) (2005), presents a
masked tap dancer strolling through a town, on a solitary quest which
remains a mystery. The tap dance and the masquerade linked to a form of
obsessive flight generate a schizophrenic dream terminating in a subway
entrance. This ambiguous manner of affixing a moving image to a specific
action sounds out the viewer’s critical capacity, and misleads him at the
same time.
-Living Pictures / Dignidad (2002) by Sylvie Blocher is a video installation
made with inhabitants of Buenos Aires. Alerted by the recruitment notice for
the video shoot, these persons went to meet the artist, sporting their
finest apparel and armed with a tune or a song. However, the critical
economic situation made some of them “forget" the idea of glad rags, and
replace them for the occasion by a “dignified attitude". They tell each
other and us a story, their story. Then, unexpectedly, a man appears,
reciting names of criminals. He is a son of one of The Disappeared.
-The double projection, Contagio (2002), by Toma's Ochoa tells the story of
Victor Lo'pez, an actor in Buenos Aires. With the economic crisis at its
peak, he decided to “go into the street" and live there with its denizens. A
life of errantry and random encounters, projecting the outlines of singular
and multiple lives. Landscapes unfold but do not resemble each other,
contrasting elements unfurl greatness and decadence, aspects of animal and
human existence.
Stairwell:
-Paola Junqueira presents a series of performances, entitled 24 Hours of a
Hole, which she launched in 1998 and executed over ten years, i.e. until
2008. She regularly accumulates 24 hours of work per hole, and relates her
experience through different cultures. The history of these holes is
equivocal: the artist is motivated by the will to create a space for
herself, but also by the desire to excavate a common stock of experiences
worldwide. Also, for Paola Junqueira, “digging means to uncover the
superposed layers of the earth, the sediments which tell its history."
-The video La Flecha de Zenon (1992) by Jorge Macchi and David Oubina
conjures up a film leader. Numerals and decimals appear and disappear,
subdividing endlessly. Inscribed in circles, these sequences refer to the
difficulty of considering time, continuity, movement or the endless. Were
artists to accept that it is impossible to endlessly divide time and space,
they would have to refuse paradoxes, proving everything and its opposite.
First floor:
-With Helena Ignez - in cooperation with Fabio Delduque - Brazilian
experimental cinema crosses a form installation entitled Electric
Sganzerland. For the first time the cinematographic work of Rogerio
Sganzerla will be presented both during the Fribourg International Film
Festival and in Fri-Art, as a “film/installation" projecting a novel vision
of the history of European cinema.
- Nils Nova’s stage structure combines various artistic media, appropriating
a hybrid language in which the subject reconstructs a frustrated vision of
the lost object. Altering the way in which media are usually read, the
artist diverts and manipulates the image’s primeval function, by projecting
it in a fictitious space. The perceiving subject must directly redefine his
relationship with the work and his direct environment. Both denied and
confirmed, image and information supplant the space to create a
spatio-temporal experience that is both critical and cinematographic.
-AUTO Psi - 10 days in Sao Paulo (2003) by Fabiana de Barros and film-maker
Michel Favre documents chance encounters. AUTO Psi is an urban intervention
in which Fabiana de Barros asks fellow passengers to comment upon drawings
and paintings while sharing a cab tour of Sao Paulo.
Stopover itself is a migrant exhibition subject to constant metamorphoses.
It expands and mutates depending on locations and contingencies. Entitled
Espace urbain X Nature intrinse'que, it was organized in 2005 - with Lia
Menna Barreto, Fabiana de Barros, Michel Favre, Marcos Chaves, Joao Mode,
Rivane Neuenschwander, Sergio Neuenschwander, Cao Guimaraes, Maria-Carmen
Perlingeiro and Eduardo Srur - for the Espace Topographie de l’art in Paris
by curator Evangelina Seiler, with Adon Peres as initiator and warrant of
these migrant shows. Today it assumes a new form, grows and makes a stopover
in Switzerland before bringing its travels to an end in Sao Paulo. Like the
viewers strolling at will through the Fri-Art exhibition, it addresses the
notions of transition and movement.
However, the aim is to review, at close
or distant range, the discovery of the Latin American continent,
experimenting with a hybrid and anthropophagous culture in poetic and humane
terms (like cultural mixity, the anthropophagist movement which developed in
the 20th century as part of Brazilian modernism, calls for the
deconstruction of foreign cultures by the assimilation of their ideas and
values generating an original vision of the world).The exhibition also takes
a sociopolitical approach via documentaries and the cinema. Artists and film
makers interweave viewpoints from different cultures, exploring the wealth
and diversity of a sharply expanding world. Sao Paulo, Mexico City or Buenos
Aires - these megalopoleis bear witness to the fascination and urban
brutality which the opulence of a globalizing world wishes to impose
worldwide.
Has Latin America not always personified the promise of a new world, while
laboring under its own tragedy, the destruction of ancient civilizations and
vast expanses of land? Is not this dual and unfinished trajectory its very
strength? And does it not offer us an imaginary, multi-facetted voyage in a
world that is more real than real?
Artists: Lia Menna Barreto, Fabiana de Barros & Michel Favre, Sylvie Blocher, Marcos
Chaves, Helena Ignez & Fabio Delduque, Paola Junqueira, Jorge Macchi & David Oubina,
Joao Mode, Rivane Neuenschwander & Sergio Neuenschwander , Rivane Neuenschwander & Cao
Guimaraes, Nils Nova, Toma's Ochoa, Joao Onofre, Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro, Ana Rolda'n, Eduardo Srur, Julio Villani
Translation: Zosia Rosankowska
On Thursday, April 27 2006 at 20 h 00 at Fri-Art, film/projection de Brian
Burman, Bahia de todos os samples and improvisation/ dance with Marisa Godoy
| oona project (BR/CH)
On Thursday, April 6 / on Friday, April 7 at 20 H 00 at Fri-Art, M.AR.IM
presents : HAZ MAT materiaux dangereux
Opening, February 17, from 6 pm - 12 pm
Fri-Art
22 petites-Rames - Fribourg