32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016) - Catalogue

INCERTEZA VIVA

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Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho 1898–1977 · Chairman Emeritus

Elizabeth Machado Emanoel Alves de Araújo Evelyn Ioschpe

Management Board

Fábio Magalhães

Tito Enrique da Silva Neto · President

Fersen Lamas Lambranho

Alfredo Egydio Setubal · Vice President

Geyze Marchesi Diniz Heitor Martins

Lifetime Members

Horácio Lafer Piva

Adolpho Leirner

Jackson Schneider

Alex Periscinoto

Jean-Marc Robert Nogueira Baptista Etlin

Álvaro Augusto Vidigal

João Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz

Beno Suchodolski

Joaquim de Arruda Falcão Neto

Carlos Bratke

José Olympio da Veiga Pereira

Carlos Francisco Bandeira Lins

Kelly Pinto de Amorim

Cesar Giobbi

Lucio Gomes Machado

Jens Olesen

Marcelo Araujo · On leave

Julio Landmann

Marcelo Eduardo Martins

Marcos Arbaitman

Marcelo Pereira Lopes de Medeiros

Pedro Aranha Corrêa do Lago

Maria Ignez Corrêa da Costa Barbosa

Pedro Franco Piva

Marisa Moreira Salles

Pedro Paulo de Sena Madureira

Meyer Nigri · On leave

Roberto Muylaert

Miguel Wady Chaia

Rubens José Mattos Cunha Lima

Neide Helena de Moraes Paula Regina Depieri

Members

Paulo Sérgio Coutinho Galvão

Alberto Emmanuel Whitaker

Ronaldo Cezar Coelho

Alfredo Egydio Setubal

Sérgio Spinelli Silva Jr.

Ana Helena Godoy de Almeida Pires

Susana Leirner Steinbruch

Andrea Matarazzo · On leave

Tito Enrique da Silva Neto

Antonio Bias Bueno Guillon

Tufi Duek

Antonio Bonchristiano Antonio Henrique Cunha Bueno

Audit Board

Beatriz Pimenta Camargo

Carlos Alberto Frederico

Cacilda Teixeira da Costa

Carlos Francisco Bandeira Lins

Carlos Alberto Frederico

Claudio Thomas Lobo Sonder

Carlos Augusto Calil

Pedro Aranha Corrêa do Lago

Carlos Jereissati Filho Claudio Thomas Lobo Sonder Danilo Santos de Miranda Eduardo Saron

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Board Luis Terepins · President Andreas Ernst Mirow Flavia Buarque de Almeida João Livi Justo Werlang Lidia Goldenstein Renata Mei Hsu Guimarães Rodrigo Bresser Pereira Salo Kibrit Advisor Emilio Kalil

Curators Jochen Volz Gabi Ngcobo Júlia Rebouças Lars Bang Larsen Sofía Olascoaga

Ministry of Culture, Bienal and Itaú present

32nd BIENAL DE SÃO PAULO

INCERTEZA VIVA 7 Sept - 11 Dec 2016

CATALOGUE

It is through the medium of art that we can successfully break with indifference and stimulate reflection and the critical spirit. With great sensitivity, artists offer us interpretations of reality that stimulate our emotional and sensorial development, tracing the paths of our own understanding and empowerment as a civilizing experience.

In its 32nd edition, the Bienal de São Paulo proposes new visions of the world in transformation and the uncertainties arising from it. The public visiting the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion during the Bienal’s threemonth duration will have the opportunity to connect with nuances unveiled by artists from 33 nations.

The exchange of languages proposed by the Bienal de São Paulo reinforces a diversity of thought. It is urgent to reflect on intolerance and discourses of hate. The dynamics of “likes,” “emojis” and “selfies” have direct impact on one’s relationships with others and his or her own way of reading the world. At this time of extreme connectivity, we look to the analogue world of printed books, notebooks, painted canvases and other physical media for a sense of security and encouragement.

The stroke on the drawing board connects my own personal trajectory with the history of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. While I was leading the Rio450 Committee, I read and studied a lot about the importance of graphic symbols and their role in commemorations. I became immersed in the work of Aloísio Magalhães, a designer and graphic artist from Pernambuco, who created the logo for the commemoration of Rio de Janeiro’s 4th anniversary, combining four rotational numeral 4s to form a kind of windmill.

His precise stroke inspired the open call for the selection of the symbol for Rio’s 450th anniversary. The genius of the artist, who also worked as the National Secretary of Culture, is imprinted on countless other logos that were, and continue to be, part of the lives of millions of Brazilians, including that of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

The stylized letter B which represents the Bienal has a fond place in the memory of all admirers of the visual arts and synthesizes the avant-garde spirit of this foundation which, along with so many others, comprises a national network of institutions that are essential to the development of culture and arts in Brazil. Each and every visitor can exit the exhibition with the certainty that the Bienal de São Paulo will continue to count on the full support of the Ministry of Culture, which sponsors this event that is so vital to Brazil’s cultural itinerary through the Rouanet Law. May the Bienal de São Paulo live forever!

——Marcelo Calero Minister of Culture

Inaugurated in 1954 as part of the celebrations for São Paulo’s 4th Centenary, Ibirapuera Park was designed with the intention of uniting nature and culture in the same public space. Bienal de São Paulo’s installation in a site with such a proposal, the most widely visited park in São Paulo and recently voted the best urban park in the world, is without a doubt one of the event’s unique traits.

Ever since the start of the work for the 32nd Bienal – INCERTEZA VIVA, the curatorial team has shown interest in strengthening the connection between the Bienal and the park and the people who frequent it.

Throughout the year 2016, actions were realized to bring it closer to other institutions based in the park, including programs geared toward the park’s employees and the public, involving the participation of artists. The course for the mediators working at the exhibition also featured activities for exploring the park, as a way of acknowledging its potential as part of the school visits program to the Bienal.

It is important to emphasize that the exhibit design for the 32nd Bienal was conceived with a garden as its inspiration – a garden in which visitors are invited to different types of experiences, at times with more physical participation and involvement, at others with more contemplation in contact with a large amount of brand new works of art and those commissioned for the exhibition. In addition, some artistic projects occupy areas outside the Bienal Pavilion, establishing a direct dialogue with the park’s public.

The Bienal’s movement toward its surroundings is accompanied by an increasingly clearer awareness of its history and its role as an institution committed to experimentation on several levels. In recent years, Fundação Bienal’s institutional structure has shifted to an increasingly horizontal management model, with engagement from all the teams who participate in the work flow. Furthermore, we have sought to build our strength as a research institution. Initiated in 2015, the Archives Project has been developing integrated programs to organize, catalogue and make available information on the documentation and events realized by the foundation, promoting quality public access to the collections and thus consolidating the Bienal Archive’s role as a center of reference for the research of contemporary art in Brazil and around the world.

The realization of the 32nd Bienal depends on crucial support from the Ministry of Culture and co-realization of Itaú. The Bienal’s Itinerancy Program, made possible thanks to a consolidated cultural partnership with Sesc São Paulo and its extension to Sesc Nacional, will once again allow for the spread of the Bienal de São Paulo’s content to other cities in 2017. At a historic moment governed by uncertainty in the most diverse fields, the Bienal believes that contemporary art can contribute, in innovate ways, to opening up possibilities, strategies and models of dialogue for us to face a world in constant change.

——Luis Terepins President of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Itaú Unibanco believes that culture changes people and that people change the world. That’s why we invest in and support different forms of artistic manifestations.

For us, access to cultural activities and events brings people closer to the arts and complements the educational process, contributing to the development of critical thinking. This is so because the cultural repertoire that we build throughout our lives helps us understand who we are, what our values are and what we want from the world. Citizens who are more critical and aware ask questions and become agents of transformation, capable of influencing and changing the society in which they live.

This is why we are sponsoring the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, an event that is renewed with each edition, receiving new ideas and variations of artistic expressions that expand the horizons of those who participate and visit the exhibition.

Investing in culture_ #thischangestheworld Itaú. Made for you.

For CTEEP – Companhia de Transmissão de Energia Elétrica Paulista [The São Paulo Electrical Energy Transmission Company] – people are the main catalysts for transformation in society, and investing in cultural education is our contribution toward a more conscientious mankind.

The valorization of human beings has always been the guiding principle of our project sponsorship policy.

This premise has underpinned our support for the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo and its educational actions, which are aligned with our commitment to the nation’s cultural and social development.

Just as electricity – conducted through their more than 13,000 kilometers of transmission lines – is essential for people’s lives, CTEEP knows how vital is for the population to have access to actions that foster their cultural and intellectual development.

The work carried out by Fundação Bienal certainly fulfills this role and is an example of dedication and commitment to the enrichment of our nation’s culture.

CTEEP. Your energy inspires us.

Bloomberg Philanthropies operates in over 120 countries all over the world in order to guarantee greater longevity and a higher quality of life for the greatest number of people. The organization concentrates on five key areas – arts and culture, education, the environment, government innovation and public health – to generate long-term change. Bloomberg Philanthropies encompasses all of Michael R. Bloomberg’s charitable giving activities, including his foundation and his personal donations. In 2015, Bloomberg Philanthropies contributed over half a billion dollars to the execution of a variety of projects.

Bloomberg was founded with one main mission: to bring transparency to the capital market via access to information. Today, Bloomberg has over 15,500 employees at 192 locations in 73 countries. The company’s great strength – quickly and accurately delivering data, news and analytics through innovative technology – is at the core of the Bloomberg Professional service, which supplies financial information in real time to over 325,000 subscribers around the world.

For more information, visit www.bloomberg.org, www.bloomberg.com/professional or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat: Bloombergdotorg and Twitter @BloombergDotOrg.

For the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), culture, aside from being the combined set of the expressions of a people, is an important asset to be employed as a vector for sustainable development.

With its vast potential for innovation, creation and distribution of wealth, cultural economy is a strategic sector, contributing to the validation of the nation’s symbolic attributes, the generation of employment and income, and the reduction of social and regional inequality.

Based on that vision, the Bank works to strengthen creative businesses and agents, fomenting the growth of the market of cultural assets and services through economic sustainability and social improvements.

The BNDES provides the cultural sector with a diversified set of instruments of financial support – including non-refundable resources, financing and venture capital – enabling projects in the segments of historical heritage, audiovisual production, publishing, recording and live shows.

Furthermore, the Bank sponsors film, music and literary festivals, editorial publishing, exhibitions and other projects which focus on spreading and decentralizing the offer of cultural assets. At its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, it also hosts a lineup of Brazilian music performances and visual art exhibitions free to the public.

It is in this context that the BNDES is once again sponsoring the Bienal de São Paulo, one of the most important contemporary art events in Latin America. Besides to uniting significant works produced by artists from several different countries, the Bienal develops a wide educational program, contributing to the democratization of access to art and culture. This is yet another action which demonstrates that culture is also synonymous with development and, as such, it can count on our support.

Living in the present as it is, taking on the difficulties and insecurities we are faced with is a constant challenge. To a greater or lesser extent, each individual feels the urgency to search for new ways to relate to a world that seems to escape us. In this way, learning about artistic proposals that see contingencies as possibilities rather than limits can expand opportunities for interpretation and action in the world.

Based on the perception of this potential, in 2010, Sesc and Fundação Bienal de São Paulo initiated a meaningful partnership, the fruit of the compatibility of their missions to spread and foster contemporary art.

Focusing on the development of new artistic projects, this edition of Bienal de São Paulo consolidates this partnership through the coproduction of works and by planning traveling exhibitions of art works selected for the Sesc cultural centers throughout the state, as well as the development of educational actions.

This joint action between Sesc and Fundação Bienal de São Paulo reaffirms the conviction of both institutions in encouraging the sensitive education and autonomy of people as vectors of collaboration between diverse parties, enabling individuals to transform and perhaps even pointing to possibilities for society’s transformation.

——Danilo Santos de Miranda Regional Director of Sesc São Paulo

CONTENTS

21 Spiraling Journeys: INCERTEZA VIVA (Live Uncertainty) · Jochen Volz 29 Art Just Because · Júlia Rebouças 37 Uncertainty Between Fear and Hope · Boaventura de Sousa Santos 47 A Question of Power: We Don’t Need Another Hero · Gabi Ngcobo 57 On Difference Without Separability · Denise Ferreira da Silva 67 Never Was a Whole: Linking the Precarities · Lars Bang Larsen 77 After the Other Natures and the New Cultures, an Otherwise · Elizabeth Povinelli 86 Artists 390 About the Authors 396 Image Credits 404 List of Works 427 General Credits 432 Acknowledgements

ARTISTS

86 Alia Farid

184 Heather Phillipson

290 Oficina de Imaginação Política

90 Alicia Barney

188 Henrik Olesen

292 OPAVIVARÁ!

92 Ana Mazzei

192 Hito Steyerl

296 Öyvind Fahlström

96 Anawana Haloba

196 Iza Tarasewicz

300 Park McArthur

98 Antonio Malta Campos

200 Jonathas de Andrade

304 Pia Lindman

102 Bárbara Wagner

204 Jordan Belson

308 Pierre Huyghe

106 Bené Fonteles

208 Jorge Menna Barreto

312 Pilar Quinteros

110 Carla Filipe

212 José Antonio Suárez Londoño

316 Pope.L

112 Carlos Motta

216 José Bento

320 Priscila Fernandes

116 Carolina Caycedo

220 Kathy Barry

324 Rachel Rose

120 Cecilia Bengolea & Jeremy Deller

224 Katia Sepúlveda

328 Rayyane Tabet

124 Charlotte Johannesson

228 Koo Jeong A

330 Rikke Luther

128 Cristiano Lenhardt

232 Lais Myrrha

334 Rita Ponce de León

132 Dalton Paula

236 Leon Hirszman

338 Rosa Barba

136 Dineo Seshee Bopape

240 Lourdes Castro

342 Ruth Ewan

140 Donna Kukama

244 Luiz Roque

346 Sandra Kranich

144 Ebony G. Patterson

248 Luke Willis Thompson

350 Sonia Andrade

148 Eduardo Navarro

252 Lyle Ashton Harris

354 Susan Jacobs

152 Em’kal Eyongakpa

256 Maria Thereza Alves

358 Till Mycha

154 Erika Verzutti

258 Mariana Castillo Deball

360 Tracey Rose

158 Felipe Mujica

262 Maryam Jafri

364 Ursula Biemann & Paulo Tavares

162 Francis Alÿs

266 Michael Linares

368 Víctor Grippo

166 Frans Krajcberg

270 Michal Helfman

372 Vídeo nas Aldeias

170 Gabriel Abrantes

274 Misheck Masamvu

376 Vivian Caccuri

172 Gilvan Samico

278 Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi

378 Wilma Martins

176 Grada Kilomba

282 Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

382 Wlademir Dias-Pino

180 Güneş Terkol

286 Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas

386 Xabier Salaberria

Spiraling Journeys: INCERTEZa viva (live uncertainty) Jochen Volz

Felt across the humanities and the sciences alike, uncertainty seems to rule the ways in which we understand or no longer understand our being in the world today: environmental degradation, violence and threats to communities and to cultural diversity, global warming, economic and political collapses, natural catastrophes, life wiped out by atrocity, disease and hunger are the stories surrounding us daily.

In the light of an ever-increasing alienation between convictions and cognition, I cannot help but remember Don Quixote, the relentless traveler, circling the Iberian peninsula to find proof for what he has read in books. Don Quixote is the celebrated anti-hero, because he refuses to construe his mindset according to what he encounters in the real world, but instead continuously searches for a real-world equivalent to his learned truths. From quest to quest and adventure to adventure, he gets more obsessed with the matches and mismatches between what he believes and the world he experiences. Don Quixote renounces the world of his time, which is undergoing a series of radical social and political changes, as Cervantes describes.

Without doubt, just as Don Quixote, we are experiencing our epoch as highly disturbing, without a clear future perspective. As Marc Fischer states, “the feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed.”1 We also see an increasing number of mismatches between what we believe, what we know and what we experience. Also, we are subject to a sensation that the signs of language are no longer in conformity with the things themselves and that single forms of knowledge prove to be insufficient. And as

1 Marc Fischer, Ghosts of my Life – Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Winchester: Zero Books, 2014, p. 9.

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2 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future.

Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore: AK Press, 2011, p. 126.

3 James Lovelock, A Rough Ride to the Future.

London: Penguin, 2014.

4 Naomi Klein,This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. London: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

5 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso, 2014 6 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 7 Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction – An Unnatural History, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

8 Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Há mundo por vir? Ensaio sobre os medos e os fins.

Florianópolis: Cultura e Barbárie, 2014, p. 23.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi states: “Chaos is too complex an environment to be decoded by the available explanatory grills, it is an environment in which semiotic flows and emotional flows are circulating too fast for our mind to be able to elaborate.”2 We are experiencing the significance of uncertainty on a day-to-day basis, increasingly aware of the fact that we exist immersed in an environment that is ruled by it.

The beginning of the project for the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo dates back to October 2014, a year which saw the publication of an extraordinarily large number of books and scientific papers announcing the end of the world as we know it. James Lovelock3 and Naomi Klein4 are just two of many distinguished scholars from different fields of research who two years ago released their disturbing findings on climate change. But the notion of a deflation of expectations is not restricted to global warming. The exhaustion of capitalism and of traditional governance versus the increasing dominance of infrastructure as the hidden geographies of globalization and as the new social and political thread are analysed by Keller Easterling.5 Timothy Morton introduces the term “hyperobjects” to describe entities of temporal and spatial dimensions beyond our conventional comprehension of things in his book on “Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.”6 Biologists say that we are facing the so-called 6th Extinction7 as a consequence of a rising human population all the more demanding of resources, all the more empowered by technology. And the ascendency of the term “anthropocene” – used to describe an epoch shaped by human activities and their significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems – has reached a climax across disciplines. “We are, to put it briefly, about to enter – if we haven’t already, and this very uncertainty illustrates the experience of temporary chaos – an Earth System entirely different from anything we’ve ever known,”8 say Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in the brilliant book titled Is There a World to Come? Essays on Fears and Ends, Culture and Barbarism, also published in 2014.

Even if the predictions for future events on our planet are not without contradictions, thinkers from all fields are calling for immediate action. They demand that collective awareness be raised around the globe to the challenges our societies are facing right now. But

we’ve a long way to go until school curriculums, media agendas and political programs effectively make these issues their cause.

It is in this context that the research for the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo initially took off, not as a post-apocalyptic art show, but instead as an investigation to trace cosmological thinking, ambient and collective intelligence, and systemic and natural ecologies. The project started under the working title “Measures of Uncertainty”, pointing to the quixotic desire to overcome a paradox: describing the indescribable, measuring the immeasurable. Ever since Werner Heisenberg (19011976) introduced the uncertainty principle in 1927, the idea that we could quantify uncertainty is being discussed across many disciplines.

In information theory,9 for example, the measure of uncertainty is entropy, a property borrowed from thermodynamics to determine how close a system is to equilibrium, and to measure the disorder in a system. Entropy describes the loss of information, the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work. The further a system is from balance, for example, the more likely it is “to produce radical, productive and unforeseeable behaviors.”10 The arts have always played on the unknown. Historically, art has insisted on a vocabulary that allows for fiction and that qualifies uncertainty. Information is lost and doubt persists, but art can moderate such paradoxes by operating outside standard systems, scales and paradigms, by introducing alternative patterns and measures.

Art dwells on the incapacity of existing means to describe the system we are part of – it points to its disorder. Most importantly, art can do this because it naturally joins thinking with doing, reflection with action. Art is grounded on imagination, and only through imagination will we be able to envision other narratives for our past and new ways into the future.

A lot has changed since we developed the initial proposal around the idea of “Measures of Uncertainty”. While originally intrigued by the word measures, both referring to scales, dimensions and weights as well as to possible plans of action, only a year on the word measures has come to serve, especially in the popular media and politics, to affirm that something needs to change, but without necessarily implying propositions of alternative projects or strategies. The connotation

9 Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1949.

10 Sanford Kwinter, Far from Equilibrium – Essays on Technology and Design Culture.

Barcelona/New York: Actar, 2007, p. 16.

Spiraling Journeys: INCERTEZa viva (live uncertainty) 23

11 Silvana K. FigueroaDreher, Uncertainty as a Creative Principle in Free Jazz Improvising, published in kunsttexte.de 02/2012.

of the sheer word, within a few months, shifted from active to passive, from innovative to reactionary.

INCERTEZA VIVA (Live Uncertainty) talks about embracing and inhabiting uncertainty. It recognizes uncertainties as a generative guiding system and is built on the conviction that in order to confront the big questions of our time objectively, such as global warming and its impact on our habitats, the extinction of species and the loss of biological and cultural diversity, rising economic and political instability, injustice in the distribution of the Earth’s natural resources, global migration and the frightening spread of xenophobia, it is necessary to detach uncertainty from fear. INCERTEZA VIVA is clearly connected to notions endemic to the body and the earth, with a viral quality in organisms and ecosystems. Though it is related to the word crisis, it is not equivalent to it. Uncertainty is, above all, a psychological condition linked to individual or collective decision-making processes, describing the understanding and non-understanding in a given situation. INCERTEZA VIVA is felt everywhere. It is a condition that infiltrates our heads, our bodies, the streets, the market, the forest or the fields.

It’s contagious; it generates images, sounds, smells, instability and also enthusiasm, and curiosity. It may be connected to social and mental realities, to artistic methods, epistemology and an unruly imagination.

Unlike in other fields of research, uncertainty in art points to creation, taking into account ambiguity and contradiction. Art feeds off uncertainty, chance, improvisation, speculation and the event. Time and again, art sets out indeed to measure the immeasurable. It makes room for error, for doubt and even for the most profound misgivings, without evading or manipulating them. The creative principles of uncertainty can propose other means of action, remembering for example the most elaborate forms of improvisation in Free Jazz11 or the improving methods in drama education. Learning to live with uncertainty can teach us solutions. But discussing uncertainty also includes processes of unlearning and requires an understanding of the diversity of knowledge. Describing the unknown always implies interrogating what we take for granted as known and valuing scientific and symbolic codes as complementary rather than exclusionary. Art promotes an active exchange between people, recognizing uncertainties

as guiding generative and constructive systems. Would it not make sense then to take art’s numerous methods of reasoning and apply them to other fields of public life?

As part of the research for the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, and inaugurating its public activities, a series of Study Days guided the investigative thought leading up to the exhibition. Understanding today’s role of the Bienal de São Paulo as that of an articulating platform of critical thinking and artistic experimentation within a geographical region, independent of national borders, we proposed that the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo should adopt a less centralized perspective by assuming the role of the listener. It became important to us to explore the scope of INCERTEZA VIVA not only from and within São Paulo, but also through a series of study days in places where they can unfold the notions surrounding uncertainty from a local urgency and relevance. Expanding the Bienal beyond its temporal and territorial borders, allowed for open-ended debate on ecologies, cosmologies of beginnings and ends, extinction, collective knowledge, evolutionary narratives, living practices, forms of language and models of education.

Each of the Study Days was a specific experiment, proposing and practicing other formats of listening, learning and living together.

They included field trips to cultural centers, traditional communities, ecological reserves, landscapes, artist studios and centers of reference and research, as well as conferences open to the public, featuring guest lecturers and local professionals from different backgrounds and fields.

In Santiago de Chile we spoke of “omnipersons” in Rapa-Nui cosmology, of magic and of the pre-hispanic imaginary in contemporary Latin American literature, about the fungi kingdom, about Canadian beavers in Tierre del Fuego, and of xenochrony and the super-computer Synco commissioned by Salvador Allende (1908-1973). In Accra, Ghana, we explored the deep and difficult relationship between the West-African coast and Brazil, full of complex narratives; we listened and danced to “High Life” and reflected upon notions of bonds and renewals, projections and collective dreams. We learned from the Quechua Lamas communities of Alto Pucalpillo, Naranjal and Anak Churuyaku Valisho in the Peruvian High-Amazon about tradition, customs, knowledge and diversification as a strategy of survival and about the

Spiraling Journeys: INCERTEZa viva (live uncertainty) 25

amazing work of the non-governmental organisation Waman Wasi, which has developed a comprehensive practice in preservation and divulgation of indigenous knowledge within the traditional communities of San Martín. In Mato Grosso, Brazil, we walked the Chapada dos Guimarães, getting to know the rich but fragile biodiversity of the Brazilian Cerrado, and investigated in Cuiabá the principles of monoculture, of species vanished and cultures lost, of extinction and preservation, of abundance and drought. And in São Paulo, we brought together case studies on art, architecture and activism, from the Xingu River Basin, from the lands of the Terena and the Krenak nations, from Matera and Athenas, from Avenida Paulista, from Jamestown and from The City We Want. The Study Days promoted networks and friendships that hopefully exceed the temporality of a Biennial. They informed and helped shape the project of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo by testing its framework from multiple perspectives, but they also allowed for an unfolding of the curatorial research seeking to develop alternative ways of thinking and creating together.

INCERTEZA VIVA is built as a garden, where themes and ideas are loosely woven into an integrated whole, structured in layers, the attempt of ecology in itself. The 32nd Bienal de São Paulo wants to be permeable and accessible, actively participating in the continuous and collective construction of the Ibirapuera Park as a public space, expanding its sense of community. Various artistic projects have been commissioned for the park and the exhibition sees itself as an extension of the garden inside the pavilion. With the help of the firm Álvaro Razuk Arquitetura we developed the exhibition displays for this Bienal based on reflections on the spatial logic of the park. The garden thus becomes a model, both metaphorically and methodologically, promoting diversity of space, favouring experiences and activation through the public.

Over the past months, the political scenario in Brazil has become increasingly unstable. In this context, we see that the questions that instigated INCERTEZA VIVA have grown in dimensions that resonate strongly with the unfolding political situation. We are closely observing the energetic forms of mobilization currently engaging large parts of the population, beyond the political class and parliamentary

politics. Many of the cultural and social issues at stake at this very moment have been part of the thematic considerations of our project and in this panorama they are foci of additional urgency. Today, it is the Bienal’s role to be a platform that actively promotes diversity, freedom and experimentation, while exercising critical thought and producing other possible realities.

In 1975, the visionary artist Öyvind Fahlström (1928-1976) wrote about the role of art in a globalized world and the importance of stressing plurality rather than homogeneity: “Consider art as a way of experiencing a fusion of ‘pleasure’ and ‘insight.’ Reach this by impurity, or multiplicity of levels, rather than by reduction.”12 INCERTEZA VIVA is committed to assuring and defending a pluralistic space where autonomous perspectives can enter into dialogue and debate with one another. We strongly believe in the transformative role of art and the performative potential of culture.

Similar to the spiraling traveler Don Quixote, described as an “ingenious gentleman” in a book celebrated as the first modern novel, we find ourselves at an impasse with the established scripts of reality. The period described by Cervantes is known as the so-called Golden Era, the rise of modernity in Europe, marked by the invasion of the Americas by European settlers. During those same years, the Bandeirantes brutally occupied the land once cultivated by the three large Tupi villages of Piratininga, Jerubatuba and Piquerobi, known today as São Paulo. If we indeed are entering a period of radical change as fundamental as over five hundred years ago, then it is one of the greatest privileges of art to develop imaginaries beyond certainties.

12 Öyvind Fahlström, Take Care of the World, New York, 1975.

Spiraling Journeys: INCERTEZa viva (live uncertainty) 27

Art just because Júlia Rebouças

On the afternoon of November 5, 2015, an iron mining tailing dam in the municipality of Mariana, Minas Gerais, broke, dumping some sixty million cubic meters of mud and heavy metals into a six hundred and sixty-three kilometer stretch of the Doce River, which drains into the Atlantic Ocean. The volume of mud released is contested by the company responsible, as is the toxicity of the debris. Levels of lead, arsenic and manganese above those considered safe for the ecosystem are registered. According to Minas Gerais state prosecutors, a number of the conditions for the environmental licensing of the dam were being disrespected without due oversight having occurred. These conditions included an emergency plan that could have avoided the deaths of seventeen people and the total destruction of the village of Bento Rodrigues. The territory of the Krenak indigenous people in the Doce river valley has been totally destroyed by the contamination from the mud. It is no longer possible to fish, farm or raise animals. The river, sacred to the Krenak, embodies the entity Watú – grandfather – because of its importance and grandeur and because of the respect it radiates. A fence now separates people from its poisoned and infertile banks. All of us are rivers, beings of the water. Every child born is a spring. In the weeks surrounding the disaster, thousands of women took to Brazil’s streets in protests against the bill currently winding its way through the Chamber of Deputies, authored by the Speaker of the House, aimed at making assistance for women who are victims of rape more difficult and which is part of a series of measures tightening legislation on abortion. Singer Elza Soares publicly sang of the end of the

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Verses from the song “Mulher do fim do mundo” [Woman at the end of the world] by Rômulo Fróes and Alice Coutinho, performed by Elza Soares on the 2015 album A mulher do fim do mundo [The woman at the end of the world].

world. In the confetti rain I leave my pain / There in the parade / I left my point of view, my discourse / My home, my solitude / I threw it all from the third floor / I fell on my face and got rid of / the rest / Of this / Life / In the parade / Wich lasts / till / the end / Woman / At the end / Of the world / I am / I go on / Singing / Till the end. Elza sings to keep herself from going crazy, she says. Her career began when she was thirteen and appeared on a variety show on television in order to raise money to buy medicine for her newborn baby. With her wiry black body dressed in what were for the Sunday television studio audience laughable clothes, she heard host Ary Barroso mockingly ask her what planet she came from. Elza answered that she came from planet hunger. In December 2015, on a Saturday night, five young black men were in a car on the north side of Rio de Janeiro when they were gunned down by police with one hundred and eleven rifle and revolver shots. The police tampered with the crime scene and forged a report claiming the victims resisted arrest. Extinction – we speculate on this threat, which is already imminent. How can we make something sprout from the humiliated soil, how can we pry open windows to new forms of life? Tomorrow is here, and looks like yesterday. The federal government announces the Matopiba Plan, which expands the frontiers of farming into one of the last remaining swaths of Brazilian savannah. A series of incentives are granted to agribusiness to make use of this region, which stretches through parts of the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia. Machines in perfect synch advance along the monoscape of soy on the chemical-soaked terrain.

The wealth of Brazil. The future market. The sky falling down.

Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa works with ethnologist Bruce Albert to draw records of his people’s cosmology on the skin of paper.

He tells his story, which is not that of an individual, but of a collective, with its knowledge, narratives and prophecies. The history of the Yanomamis, transmitted by way of dreams, comes in the form of a book that escapes the genres and disciplines of Western hegemonic knowledge. Generously, he looks at us, subjects of alienation, and explains to us that the land of the ancient whites was similar to ours.

There, there were as few as we are now in the forest. But their thinking gradually became increasingly lost on a dark and tangled trail. [...]

They began to desire the most solid and sharpest metal he [Omama] had hidden under the earth and the waters. Then they began to rip the ore voraciously out of the ground. They built factories to cook it and manufacture merchandise in great quantities. Then their thinking became stuck in it and they fell in love with these objects as if they were beautiful women. This made them forget the beauty of the forest. [...] And so the words of the merchandise and the money spread throughout the land of their ancestors. This is what I think. Before the year is over, a two-year-old Kaingang boy is beheaded on his mother’s lap by a man who patted him when he first came up to them. A country in the dizziness of the present. Crisis. Crisis is the diagnosis and crisis is the justification. In spite of the crisis has become a cliché. Cliché opens large doors. Democratic institutions are hijacked. Fragile with post-colonial youth, they drag with them the wound of three hundred and eighty-eight years of slavery. Five hundred and sixteen years of extractive and plunder-based economic cycles. A colonial subconscious. The communication system works with the judicial system, subservient to political misdeeds, to ensure that the old orders always prevail. Old orders produce retrograde images. Crisis. The mediatized narratives don’t convince even the most gullible, even the most skeptical. Crisis. The Bible, bullets and beef caucus sets the National Congress’s agenda. April 17, 2016. Three hundred and sixty-seven votes for God, for family values, for the fatherland, against the crisis, against corruption, lead to the suspension of the president elected in 2014. A woman. On the city’s picture-postcard boulevard, the surroundings of the building housing the São Paulo Federation of Industries (Fiesp) turn into a pro-impeachment gathering spot. A crowd wears the national soccer team jersey and wraps itself in the Brazilian flag to protest against… the crisis and corruption. Some call for the return of the military regime, others call for the end of social programs, still others, given their precarious living conditions, call for the president and her party to be removed from power. Who asks then what? A twelve meter-high inflatable duck becomes the icon of the legitimately elected president’s impeachment process. The duck under the architecture of the Fiesp building, designed by Rino Levi, lasts long enough to become the mascot of those in green and yellow who don’t

Quote from A queda do céu: Palavras de um xamã Yanomami [The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman]

by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2015.

Verse from the song “Chavão abre porta grande” [Buzzword opens big door], by Itamar Assumpção, from the 1983 album Sampa Midnight – Isso não vai ficar assim [Sampa Midnight –It won’t stay this way].

Art just because 31

Excerpt from the song “Apesar de você” [Despite you] by Chico Buarque de Hollanda, released as a single, Apesar de você, in 1970 and re-recorded for the 1978 album Chico Buarque 1978.

realize that they themselves are the butt of the joke. The duck is removed following accusations of plagiarism – a similar object had been presented by artist Florentijin Hofman in 2008 in the city of São Paulo, as well as in Amsterdam and Hong Kong. On May 11, 2016, when voting in the Brazilian Senate begins, the Fiesp building is surrounded by other inflatables. A giant Mortadella sausage alludes to a popular sandwich that is alleged to have been used as payment to leftist militants. A caricature of the president, of the same scale, features a bandit’s mask and the presidential sash with the phrases Impeachment and Goodbye, darling. Classism and misogyny hand in hand with neoliberalism. On the same perimeter there is a banner with the verse In spite of you, tomorrow shall be another day from the 1970 Chico Buarque song. The poster is part of an action that spread 30 pieces along Paulista Avenue to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Samba and the rhythm’s relationship with Brazilian workers. The smiling face of a young Chico Buarque has been vandalized with black paint. Today, you’re the one who’s boss / If you’ve said it, that’s that / There’s no discussion / Nowadays my people go around / talking sideways / and looking at the ground, you see / You are the one who invented this state / who came up with the idea of coming up with / all this darkness / You’re the one who invented sin / But you forgot to invent forgiveness. The song was composed when Chico Buarque returned to Brazil from his self-imposed exile in Italy, when he believed the political situation in Brazil could improve in terms of the actions of coercion, torture and violence practiced by the military government, as well as the rigor of censorship, which had become more acute with the passing of Institutional Act nº5 in December 1968. He found a country euphoric with its win in the 1970 World Cup and car windows displaying the slogan “Brazil, love it or leave it.” The song, “Apesar de você,” slips unnoticed past the censors and sells one hundred thousand copies in the blink of an eye. It becomes one of the hymns of resistance to the dictatorship. The song is banned, even though the composer argued to censors that the “you” in the song referred to an overly authoritarian woman. Several months before, in September of 1969, the 10th Bienal de São Paulo had opened under the boycott of a large group of artists and representatives from different countries. In June of

that year, there is a meeting at the Paris Museum of Modern Art to read and discuss the manifesto “Non à la Biennale de São Paulo” (No to the Bienal de São Paulo), which details acts of censorship and the persecution of intellectuals, artists and politicians prominent in Brazilian culture at the time. In the first sentence of the text, an accusation against this year’s Bienal de São Paulo, for it is completely dominated by the absurd rules imposed by the fascist regime governing Brazil. Among the measures condemned was a memorandum sent by the Bienal de São Paulo secretariat to the then-commissioners: works of obscene or subversive character were not to be selected. They also condemned the fact that works had been removed and entire exhibitions closed in Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Bahia. Eighty percent of the artists originally invited do not participate in the tenth edition.

Ciccillo Matarazzo had been preparing the event as a celebration of the nearly two decades of biennials. In his introductory text in the catalogue of the 1969 Bienal, he cites man’s landing on the moon. Over the course of the following decade, the editions of the Bienal de São Paulo would be systematically boycotted, with greater or lesser degrees of forcefulness. Artists criticized the institution’s leniency with regards to the authoritarian regime or believed in refusal as a weapon of resistance. In the United States, the artist Hans Haacke writes to the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, György Kepes. He turns down the invitation to participate in an art and technology exposition that was to be part of the 1969 Bienal. In the wake of news about the refusal of the French, Haacke’s letter is seconded by other artists who were to participate in the MIT exposition. In an article written by Grace Glueck published on July 6, 1969 in the New York Times, Kepes publicly expresses his respect for the artists’ decision, but laments the fact that the channels of communication have not been maintained, speculating about the positive impact that critical participation on the part of the American artists could have caused in Brazilian cultural life. He quotes the Chinese proverb it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Back on Paulista Avenue 2016, before the vandalized face of Chico Buarque, echoes are heard of a poorly told, poorly written, poorly remembered and poorly cured history. Three hundred meters

Quote from Arte brasileira na ditadura militar: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, Cildo Meireles [Brazilian art under the military dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, Cildo Meireles] by Claudia Calirman. Rio de Janeiro: Réptil Editora, 2014.

Art just because 33

Conversation between Cildo Meireles, the author and Jochen Volz at the artist’s studio in Rio de Janeiro on March 29, 2016.

Verse from the song “Yáyá Massemba” by Roberto Mendes and Capinam, performed by Maria Bethânia on the 2003 album Brasileirinho

away, under the free span of the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), manifestations in defense of democracy take place. Art is on the forefront, and institutions come close behind. Holding the Bienal de São Paulo set for 2016 encompasses the exercise of thinking, ever and again, about what art can be. Or for what art, or for whom? The room is deep and dark. The path is unstable on a floor covered with talc.

The air smells of gas. At the far end of the room we notice the existence of another room similar to this one, and a candle sits on a saucer on the floor. The imminence of explosion. Volátil [Volatile], 19801994, by Cildo Meireles. We knock on his door to chat. Days now are different from those back then, but history speculates on the present.

How can the challenging intensity that separates what falls now upon that which will come tomorrow be traversed, we ask ourselves. He laughs from the corner of his mouth, let’s take it easy and think, and exhales the smoke from his cigarette. He says that artists know that to observe the future they’re equipped with candles, not flashlights. The visit appears to be over. High school students stage sit-ins at their schools, demanding quality education and repudiating the dismantling of public education. They decry the embezzlement of funds that were to be used to purchase school lunches. School lunches. I’m going to learn to read in order to teach my comrades. The police are called riot police and drag the students out of the school. Women hold a march, the front line of which is made up of mothers carrying their babies.

The police are called riot police and follow the procession as if it were a famished, flogged beast ready to attack at any moment. The women’s bodies are marked by red paint. The television in the bakery broadcasts the morning show debate. Specialists discuss whether or not the case of a sixteen-year old girl violated by thirty-three men constitutes rape. Videos with scenes of the incident go viral on social networking sites. There is not enough red paint to represent so much blood. “To occupy is to resist,” reads the poster. The homeless and the landless occupy. The indigenous occupy to take back their lands. In the face of the constant fluidity of power and the need for the circulation of merchandise, ideas and values, these immobile, implicated bodies occupied by empowerment and affection are like blood clots traveling slowly through veins. June 2, 2016, two boys, one ten and the other eleven

years old, steal a car in an upper-class São Paulo neighborhood.

During a chase, the ten-year-old, who is driving the automobile, is killed by military police. Ten years old. A report is made saying the boy resisted arrest and that he had made an attempt against the police’s life. The residents of the upper-class neighborhood join forces to hire lawyers to defend the police officers in case of trial. Everything here seems like it’s still under construction and it’s already in ruins.

Artist Helen Sebidi arrives in Brazil and is happy to recognize so many relatives here. We’re sitting around the dinner table and she says that eating together is praying. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed, joining hands and lowering our heads so that they could steal our land. A succession of sterile and furtive images, transported and transmitted by electrically lit devices. One week before June arrives, there is news that at least eight hundred and eighty immigrants drowned in the Mediterranean trying to make it to Europe. A night club popular with the gay community in Orlando, Florida is broken into by a shooter who kills fifty people. A right-wing extremist candidate’s numbers go up in American presidential election polls. How to forge pregnant images, seed-words, mutant forms. The need for art. The Aymara people of the Chilean Andes says that the future lies behind us, unknown, while the past is in front of us, before our eyes. He will come, for I have seen him. An artist holding hands with a Tukano shaman, blowing on a cloud, sitting on the geodesic center of South America. Today is June 14, 2016.

Verse from the song “Fora da ordem” [Out of order] by Caetano Veloso from the 1991 album Circuladô.

Verse from the song “Um índio” [An Indian] by Caetano Veloso from the 1977 album Bicho.

(Based on the ideas of and dialogues with Ailton Krenak, Alvaro Tukano, Ana Maria Maia, Bené Fonteles, Boris Groys, Carolina Caycedo, Catarina Duncan, Comitê Invisível, Eduardo de Jesus, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Gabi Ngcobo, Giorgio Agamben, Isabella Rjeille, Jochen Volz, Lars Bang Larsen, Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Moacir dos Anjos, Naine Terena, Pedro Cesarino, Peter Pál Pelbart, Rodrigo Nunes, Rodrigo Tavares, Sofía Olascoaga and Suely Rolnik.)

Art just because 35

Uncertainty between fear and hope Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Spinoza (1632-1677) once said that the two basic emotions of human beings are fear and hope. Uncertainty is the experience of the possibilities that emerge from the multiple relations that can exist between fear and hope. When these relations are different, the kinds of uncertainty are different as well. Fear and hope are not equally distributed among all social groups or historical ages. There are social groups in which fear so overwhelms hope that the world happens to them without their being able to make the world happen. They live awaiting, but without hope. They are alive today, but they live in such conditions that they could be dead tomorrow. They feed their children today, but they don’t know if they’ll be able to do so tomorrow. The uncertainty in which they live is a downward uncertainty, because the world happens to them in ways that depend very little on them. When fear is such that hope has completely disappeared, downward uncertainty becomes abysmal and turns into its opposite: the certainty of fate, however unfair it may be. There are, on the other hand, social groups in which hope so overwhelms fear that the world is offered to them as a field of possibilities they may manage at their whim. The uncertainty in which they live is an upward uncertainty in that it takes place between options that bear generally desired, even if not always positive, results.

When hope is so excessive that the notion of fear is lost, upward uncertainty becomes abysmal and turns into its opposite: the certainty of the mission of appropriating the world, no matter how arbitrary such a mission may be.

Most social groups live between these two extremes, more or

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less afraid, more or less hopeful, going through periods in which downward uncertainties are dominant and others in which upward certainties are dominant. Ages are distinguished by the relative preponderance of fear and hope and of the uncertainties to which the relations between one and the other lead.

what kind of age do we live in?

We live in an age in which the mutual ownership of fear and of hope seems to collapse in the face of the growing polarization between the world of hopeless fear and the world of fearless hope – in other words, a world in which uncertainties, be they downward or upward, increasingly become abysmal uncertainties by turning into fates unfair to the poor and powerless and into missions of appropriation of the world for the rich and powerful.

An ever greater percentage of the world population lives by facing imminent risks against which there is no insurance, or, if there is, it is financially inaccessible, such as the risk of death in armed conflicts in which they are not actively participating, the risk of illnesses caused by dangerous substances used legally or illegally on a massive scale, the risk of violence caused by racial, sexist, religious or other prejudices, the risk of the pillaging of their meager resources, be they wages or pensions, in the name of austerity policies over which they have no control, the risk of expulsion from their lands or homes as a result of the imperatives of development policies from which they will never benefit, the risk of precariousness in employment and the collapse of expectations that are stabilized enough for them to plan their personal and family lives in direct opposition to the reigning propaganda of autonomy and entrepreneurship.

In contrast, social groups making up ever smaller minorities in demographic terms accumulate ever greater economic, social and political power, a power based nearly always on the control of financial capital. The polarization has long existed, but is today more blatant and perhaps more virulent. Let us consider the following quote:

If a man knew nothing about the lives of people in our Christian world and he were told “there is a certain people who have set up such a way of life that the greater part of them, ninety-nine percent, or thereabouts,

1 Leo Tolstoy, Last Diaries. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960, p 66.

live in ceaseless physical labor and oppressive need, and the remaining one percent live in idleness and luxury, now, if that one-hundredth has its own religion, science and art, what would that religion, science and art be like?” I think that there can only be one answer: “A perverted, bad religion, science and art.” 1

One would think this to be an excerpt from the manifestos of the Occupy Movement or the Indignados Movement from the beginning of the current decade. Nothing of the sort. It is actually an entry in Leo Tolstoy’s diary from March 17, 1910, shortly before he died.

what uncertainties are faced?

As I have just explained, uncertainties are not equally distributed, whether with regards to their kind or with regards to their intensity, among the different social groups and classes that make up our societies. As such, the different fields in which such inequalities have the greatest impact on people’s and communities’ lives must be identified.

The uncertainty of knowledge. All people are subjects of knowledge, and the overwhelming majority define and exercise their practices with reference to knowledge other than scientific knowledge.

We are experiencing, however, an age, the age of Eurocentric modernity, which attributes total priority to scientific knowledge and the practices directly derived therefrom: technologies. This means that the epistemological and existential distribution of fear and hope is defined by parameters that tend to benefit those social groups that have more access to scientific knowledge and technology. For these groups, uncertainty is always upward, inasmuch as the belief in scientific progress is a strong enough hope to neutralize any fear as to the limitations of current knowledge. For these groups, the principle of precaution is always something negative, because it stems the infinite progress of science. The cognitive injustice that this creates is

Uncertainty between fear and hope 39

experienced by social groups with less access to scientific knowledge as an inferiority that generates uncertainty as to their place in a world defined and legislated based on simultaneously powerful and strange knowledge that affects them in ways over which they have little or no control. This knowledge is produced about them and in some cases against them and, in any case, never produced with them. Uncertainty has another dimension: uncertainty about the validity of their own ways of knowing, often ancestral ways of knowing, based on which they have guided their lives. Must they abandon and replace them by other kinds of knowledge? Is this new knowledge given to, sold to or imposed upon them, and, in all cases, at what price and at what cost?

Will the benefits brought by this new knowledge be greater than the harm? Who will reap the benefits, and who will incur the losses? Will the abandonment of their own knowledge involve a wasting of experience? With what consequences? Will they be left more or less able to represent the world as their own and transform it according to their aspirations?

The uncertainty of democracy. Liberal democracy was conceived as a system of government grounded in the uncertainty of results and the certainty of processes. The certainty of processes ensured that the uncertainty of results would be equally distributed among all citizens.

The right processes allowed different reigning interests in society to be confronted on equal footing and the results arising from this confrontation to be accepted as fair. Such was the basic principle of democratic coexistence. Such was the theory, but in practice things have always been very different, and today the discrepancy between theory and practice has attained disturbing proportions.

For a long time, only a small part of the population could vote, and as such, no matter how certain and correct the processes were, they could never be mobilized so as to take the interests of the majorities into account. Only in very rare cases could the uncertainty of the results benefit the majorities: in the cases in which the results were the side effect of rivalries between the political elites and the different interests of the dominant classes they represented. No wonder, then, that for a long time the majorities saw democracy the other way around: as a system of uncertain processes whose results were

certain, ever at the service of the interests of the dominant classes and groups. This is why the majorities were divided for so long: between the groups that wished to assert their interests through means other than those of liberal democracy (for example, revolution), and the groups that struggled to be formally included in the democratic system and thus hoped that the uncertainty of results would eventually favor their interests.

From that point forward, the dominant classes and groups (that is, those with social and economic power that was not supported by democratic means) began to use another strategy to make democracy work in their favor. On one front, they fought to see any alternative to the liberal democratic system eliminated, which they symbolically achieved in 1989 on the day the Berlin Wall fell. On another front, they began to use the certainty of processes to manipulate them so that the results would systematically favor them. However, in eliminating the uncertainty of results, they ended up destroying the certainty of processes. In being able to be manipulated by whoever had the social and economic power to do so, the democratic processes, supposedly certain, became uncertain. Worse yet, they became subject to a single certainty: the possibility of being freely manipulated by whoever had the power.

For these reasons, the uncertainty of the great majorities is downward and runs the risk of becoming abysmal. Having lost the capacity and even the memory of an alternative to liberal democracy, what hope can they have in the liberal democratic system? Could their fear be so intense that they are left only to resign themselves to their fate?

Or, on the contrary, is there an embryo of genuineness in democracy that can still be used against those who have transformed it into a cruel farce?

The uncertainty of nature. Particularly since the European expansion beginning in the late 15th Century, nature has been considered by Europeans as a natural resource devoid of intrinsic value and, as such, unconditionally and limitlessly available to be exploited by humans.

This conception, which was new in Europe and had no validity in any other culture in the world, gradually became dominant as capitalism, colonialism and the patriarchy (the last of which was reconfigured

Uncertainty between fear and hope 41

by the other two) imposed throughout what was considered to be the modern world. This domination was so deep and far-reaching that it was converted into the basis of all the certainties of the modern and contemporary age: progress. Whenever nature seemed to offer resistance to exploitation, this was seen, at most, as an upward uncertainty in which hope overwhelmed fear. It was how Luís de Camões’ Adamastor was courageously defeated, and the victory over him was called the Cape of Good Hope.

There were peoples that never accepted this idea of nature, because doing so would be tantamount to suicide. Indigenous peoples, for example, lived in such an intimate relationship with nature that it was not even considered to be something outside of them; it was, rather, mother Earth, a living being that encompassed them and all living beings past, present and future. As such, the Earth did not belong to them; they belonged to the Earth. This conception was so much more credible than the Eurocentric one and so dangerously hostile to the colonial interests of the Europeans that the most effective way to combat it was to eliminate the peoples who held it, turning them into one among many other natural obstacles to the exploitation of nature.

The certainty of this mission was such that indigenous peoples’ lands were considered free and unsettled no-man’s land, even though fleshand-blood people had been living on them since time immemorial.

Such was this conception of nature inscribed in the modern capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal project that naturalizing became the most effective way of attributing an incontrovertible character to certainty. If something is natural, it is so because it could not be any other way, whether as a consequence of the laziness and lasciviousness of the populations that live between the tropics, of women’s incapacity for certain functions or of the existence of races and the “natural” inferiority of darker populations.

These so-called natural certainties were never absolute, but always found effective means of making people believe they were. However, in the last hundred years, they have begun to reveal zones of uncertainty and, in more recent times, the uncertainties have begun to be more credible than the certainties, when they have not led to new certainties in the opposite direction. Many factors have contributed to this.

I will select two of the most important ones. On one hand, the social groups declared to be naturally inferior never allowed themselves to be completely defeated. From the second half of the last century onwards, they managed to make their full humanity heard loud and effectively enough to the point of transforming it into a series of demands that became part of the social, political and cultural agenda. Everything that was natural unraveled into thin air, which created uncertainties that were new and surprising to the social groups considered to be naturally superior, especially the uncertainty of not knowing how to maintain their privileges other than as long as they are not contested by their victims. Out of this arises one of the most tenacious uncertainties of our time: is it possible to acknowledge the right to equality and, simultaneously, the right to the acknowledgement of difference? Why is it still so hard to accept the meta-right that seems to be the foundation of all others and that may be formulated as follows? We have the right to be equal when difference makes us inferior, and we have the right to be different when equality de-characterizes us.

The second factor is the growing revolt of nature in the face of such intense and prolonged aggression in the form of climate changes that put at risk the existence of various different forms of life on Earth, including that of humans. Some human groups have already been definitively affected, be it by seeing their habitats submerged by rising sea levels, be it by being forced to leave their lands turned irreversibly into a desert. Mother Earth appears to be raising her voice above the ruins of the house that was hers in order to be everyone’s and that modern humans have destroyed out of greed, voraciousness, irresponsibility and, finally, a limitless ingratitude. Will humans be able to learn to share what’s left of the home they judged to be theirs alone and which mother Earth actually granted them the generous privilege of inhabiting? Or will they prefer the golden exile of neo-feudal fortresses while the majorities surround their walls and disturb their sleep, no matter how many legions of dogs, arsenals of video cameras, kilometers of barbed wire and bullet-proof glass protect them from reality, but never from the ghosts of reality? These are the ever more abysmal uncertainties of our time.

The uncertainty of dignity. All human beings (and, perhaps, all

Uncertainty between fear and hope 43

livings beings) aspire to be treated with dignity, which they understand as acknowledgement of their intrinsic value, regardless of the worth that others attribute to them as a function of instrumental ends foreign to them. Aspiration to dignity exists in all cultures and is expressed according to very distinct idioms and narratives – so distinct that they are often incomprehensible to those who do not share the culture from which they emerge. In recent decades, human rights have turned into a hegemonic language and narrative to give name to the dignity of human beings. All States and international organizations proclaim the necessity of human rights and purport to defend them.

Nevertheless, like Lewis Carroll’s (1832-1898) Alice in Through the Looking Glass, if we dive through the mirror proposed by this consensual narrative, or if we look at the world through the eyes of Blimunda, which were able to see in the dark in José Saramago’s (1922-2010) novel Memorial do Convento, we are faced with some disquieting conclusions: the vast majority of human beings are not subjects of human rights, but are, rather, objects of state and non-state human rights discourses; there is much unjust human suffering that is not considered a violation of human rights; the defense of human rights has often been invoked in order to invade countries, pillage their resources, and spread death among innocent victims; in the past, many struggles for liberation against oppression and colonialism were fought in the name of other emancipatory languages and narratives, and without ever making reference to human rights. These disquieting conclusions, once put in front of the looking glass of the uncertainties I have been mentioning, open the way to a new uncertainty that is itself also one of the founding uncertainties of our times. Is the primacy of the language of human rights the product of an historic victory or an historic defeat? Is the invocation of human rights an effective tool in the fight against the indignity to which so many human groups are subjected, or rather an obstacle that de-radicalizes and trivializes the oppression into which indignity is translated and soothes the bad conscience of the oppressors?

So many are the uncertainties of our time, and for so many people do they take on a downward character, that fear seems to be triumphing over hope. Must this situation lead us to the pessimism of

Albert Camus (1913-1960), who in 1951 bitterly wrote: “for twenty centuries, the sum total of evil has not diminished in the world. Has there been no Parousia, whether divine or revolutionary”?2 I think not.

It must only lead us to think that, under current conditions, revolt and struggle against the injustice that produces, disseminates and deepens downward uncertainty, especially abysmal uncertainty, have to be waged with a complex mixture of a great deal of fear and a great deal of hope, against the self-inflicted fate of the oppressed and the arbitrary mission of the oppressors. The struggle will be more successful, and the revolt gain more adepts, inasmuch as more and more people gradually realize that the hopeless fate of the powerless majorities is caused by the fearless hope of the powerful minorities.

2 Albert Camus, L´Homme révolté. Paris: Gallimard, 1951, p. 379.

Uncertainty between fear and hope 45

A Question of Power: We Don’t Need Another Hero Gabi Ngcobo

downward facing dream

Instructed by a local elder, I approach the sacred lake walking backwards. I spread my legs and bend down to observe the body of water and surrounding nature from between my legs, upside down. That is how one is meant to approach and greet the lake.

My visit corresponds with a rare, once-in-a-lifetime appearance of White Crocodile, one of the many creatures that guard the lake. The last time she was seen, her message announced the coming of a new generation that would be the agents of the age of total recall in which memory would never again be lost and information would travel at the speed of Ndadzi, the lightning bird. The inverted view reinforces a tension in the landscape; the mountains, by holding onto the water, resist flying off with the clouds in the sky. The lake becomes even more powerful in its solid liquidity. I feel all the blood in my body gushing towards my head. I hold myself together to stop my eyes from bulging out. Resist, I resist to keep all my bodily liquids where they should be.

I want to weep but suspect it will be in vain.

where the water stood, it will surely stand again

In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, a personal account of Saidiya Hartman’s re-tracing of slave routes in Ghana, the author details how forgetting was induced by slave

47

1 Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

traders, who used various potions and performed forgetting rituals on soon-to-be slaves. They were made to circle a tree of forgetfulness, women seven times, men nine times. An enchanted rock that drained away all will was used to subdue them, and ceremonial baths distilled from plant roots were performed before slaves were integrated into groups of the newly pacified. In present-day slave routes turned tourist sites, located along the Ghanaian Coast, the writer finds herself in front of the “tree of return,” for which no word exists in the local Fan language. This tree, as Hartman observes, makes no sense. “Why did they want the ones who had forgotten to return?” she asks.1 There is no simple way to scientifically account for the paradox embedded in Hartman’s question. There exist, however, other arguments that can be constructed to think about this question, to consider how memory can function in inverted ways. One would be to draw on scientifically contested knowledge, such as the paranormal phenomena known as xenoglossia, a condition in which one writes or speaks in a language one could not have obtained by “natural” means.

Since the beginning of the curatorial process for incerteza viva, it has always been clear to me that my contribution to this process would begin from a series of conversations I had with Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi (1943, South Africa). More specifically, through her work Tears of Africa, a diptych collaged charcoal drawing, completed and shown in 1989 as part of Sebidi’s Standard Bank Young Artist Award exhibition at the National Arts Festival. Tears of Africa appeared months before Nelson Mandela was released from a 27-year prison term, concurrent to the beginning of the collapse of real and metaphorical walls in many parts of the world. Sebidi, who was 46 years old at the time, was by no means a young artist in ways we define youth in the arts. She happened to be the first black recipient of a prestigious annual award; she represents a turning point in national politics, a time when apartheid could no longer hold. Within this narrative, she becomes a symbol of a critical political shift.

Tears of Africa was created during a two-year period of selfimposed isolation. This was after Sebidi had enrolled for a creative writing course with, according to her instructor, undesirable results: too deranged to fathom and perhaps too big a responsibility to guide

as a writing process. The body of work created during this time, more evident in Tears of Africa, resounds the personal as the political and vice-versa. It is an accumulation of her inner turmoil that was being released. This enunciation of subjectivity was paralleled with conflicts that were unfolding at the time in South Africa and its neighboring countries – conjointly with struggles that have marked the African continent, from slavery to the anti-colonial drive and the civil wars that ensued after political independence had been achieved. Much of this historical knowledge was not available in its detail to Sebidi, nor, undoubtedly, to most (black) South Africans. The work came to be realised “outside of the realm of consciousness”2 but not outside that of responsibility for the youth in her teaching capacity and involvement in the artistic political climate as it was unfolding.

Sebidi has held on to Tears of Africa for 27 years, searching and uncovering lessons and messages it contains, to opportunely communicate its meanings. The work can be understood through what Sarat Maharaj (1951-) describes as “…distinct from the circuits of know-how that run on clearly spelled out methodological steel tracks”… it is a “rather unpredictable surge and ebb of potentialities and propensities – the flux of no-how.”3 If Tears of Africa is a protest, it does not fit neatly into the bracket of “Protest Art” symptomatic of South African art historical readings of that period (1970s and 1980s). The work finds its own language; it incorporates political forces that have been witnessed and felt, whose neurotic realities remain, to this day, almost impossible to grasp. If Tears of Africa is a self-portrait, it rejects naval gazing; here the physical body and the psyche come to be read as a portrait of humanity and a montage of the political field.

Presently, the political fields are, in South Africa (as they are in Brazil), marked by the recent student protests that have dominoed across the country, demanding more active, all-inclusive processes of decolonization. The Fallists, as the dissident student movements have come to be known, bear historical resemblance to the 1976 student protests that began in the township of Soweto, spreading all over the country and stirring the apartheid government to declare the country “ungovernable.” Sparked by a refusal to have Afrikaans become a

2 Felix Guattari, “The Three Ecologies”. Transl.

by Chris Turner, Material Word. New formations, n.

8, summer 1989. Available at http://banmarchive. org.uk/collections/ newformations/08_131. pdf. Accessed in 2016.

3 Sarat Maharaj, “Know-how and Nohow: Stopgap Notes on ‘Method’ in Visual Art as Knowledge Production” in Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, v.2, n.2 Spring 2009.

A Question of Power: We Don’t Need Another Hero 49

4 The #Rhodes Must Fall protest led to the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes on 9 April 2015, after the University of Cape Town’s senate voted in favour of the removal of the statue on 27 March 2015.

language of instruction in all schools, the Soweto uprisings were, in many respects, also against Bantu Education, a substandard system of education reserved for black South Africans, and apartheid itself as a system of governance. These students further radicalized the anti-apartheid struggles and increased the urgency of the international community’s attention to realities lived in South Africa. In prisons, the arrest of young people often inspired by the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) hailed in a new breed of political prisoners – young, fearless and convinced that freedom was certain during their lifetime.

The #Rhodes Must Fall (rmf) movement was instigated on 9 March, 2015, by a student’s action of throwing a bucket of human faeces over the statue of the British imperialist, Cecil Rhodes, that had stood on the grounds of the University of Cape Town (uct) for over 80 years. This radical act captivated the country and rallied thousands of students into the movement, which called for the fall of the statue and, along with it, of institutionalized racism in all its forms. Similar statues are scattered all over the (South) African landscape. Like open graves, they act as stand-ins for traumas that continue to be inflicted through systematic historical exclusions. They infect public spaces as much as they do the mental states of being of those who encounter them daily, especially those who feel no allegiance to what they stood for then, and, even more crucially, what they stand for in the present.4

biofluids of eternal re-returns

In eThekwini (Durban), the east coast city where I was born and grew up, I encountered many of the colonial stand-ins, reminders and erasures posing as historical footnotes referencing and commanding how we should understand ourselves in the world. Some formally stand out more than others whilst others provoke more emotions, depending on what historical role they represent. Others serve as landmarks, many others as shade on hot days. They are found in public parks and squares, spaces frequently occupied by the unemployed and the homeless. The full-body statue of General Louis Botha (1862-1919), located at the corner of King Dinizulu Road (former Berea Road) and

Julius Nyerere Avenue (former Warwick Avenue), stands for all statues in the world, according to my mother. She employed the prominence of Botha’s statue on the eThekwini landscape to rebuke against nonaction, as symptomatic of unproductive lack of movement.

It is, however, the bust of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (18881935) that has always caught my attention, perhaps because of the lyrical inscription quoted from a poem written through Pessoa’s heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, “Portuguese Sea” (published in 1934). I recall always being intrigued by Pessoa’s pensive, intelligent-looking thin face under the shadow of a hat and the statue’s obvious asymmetry (the left shoulder is aesthetically sliced off). It stands awkwardly ghostly in front of Mississippi, a fish-and-chips eatery that has been in this location for as far back as I can remember, under a willow tree in a corner leading to bus terminals connecting thousands of black township sections and suburbs with the city. Pessoa’s name, birth and death date engraved on the marble pedestal supporting the bust are accompanied by the first line of the poem “Portuguese Sea”: Oh salty seas, how much of your salts are tears of Portugal!5 I walked past this bronze statue almost every day on my way to and back from my university.

As far as I know, Pessoa’s bust has never been used as a landmark, nor was it ever a marker of a meeting point for those not actively seeking it. It always seemed homeless or deserted to me, its lament belonging to a time out of joint.

It stood like that until soon after that day in March when excrement was poured over Rhodes’ contemplative statue at UCT, and as many statues all over the country reactivated a history that, though visible, still requires recontextualisation, for present and future relevance. A number of statues across the country were marked, burned and defaced with whatever the protesters had at their disposal. From Paul Kruger (1825-1904) to Queen Victoria (1819-1901), Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948) to Jan van Riebeeck (1619-1677), all stood accused, students and many in solidarity with their cause calling for their fall, bringing contemporary attention to historical violations, as if judgment day had finally come. Pessoa was not spared the wrath of history; somebody, maybe more than one body, located him in his “hideaway” and rescued him from alienation, called upon him, and

5 Fernando Pessoa, “Portuguese Sea” (1934), in Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems. Ed. and transl. by Richard Zenith. New York: Grove Press, 1998, p. 278.

A Question of Power: We Don’t Need Another Hero 51

6 Poet’s Statue Covered in Paint”. Available at http://www.iol.co.za/ news/south-africa/ kwazulu-natal/poetsstatue-covered-inpaint-1843807. Accessed in 2016.

7 Quoted in Thomas Crosse’s essay A. Caeiro in “Fernando Pessoa: The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro” P10, translated by Chris Daniels, Shearsman Books, London, 2007.

8 “Heteronym (literature) – Pessoa’s Heteronyms”. Available at http://www.liquisearch. com/heteronym_ literature/pessoas_ heteronyms. Accessed in 2016.

Portugal as well this time, to be implicated, claimed and moaned for.

“You can’t erase history like that,” lamented Manuel Sousa, the voice representing the Associação Portuguesa do Natal in eThekwini. “And this man was not a politician, he was an artist, a poet”.6 But judging by the inscription on the supporting pedestal, Pessoa’s statue was erected to celebrate the poet and to mark a tragic loss of Portugal’s golden age. It did not necessarily elevate or inspire creative curiosity from those who encountered his image, at least not for present-day South Africans. Pessoa, like most memorials of the past, occupies a ghostly realm – a marker of loss, a loss that is not timeless and not always in context. Tears do not hold the same meaning in all times and all places.

It is worth noting that Pessoa’s memory in eThekwini, a city where he spent his early years, between 1895 and 1905 (a fact omitted on his memorial), is inscribed with words written through one of his seventy or so heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, the one most connected to nature.

“In essence, he is Nature: he is nature speaking and being vocal.”7 Caeiro’s other notable characteristic is his belief in living without pain and aging without anguish. A “being” also known for believing in nothing, he existed by avoiding uncertainty, adamantly clinging to a certainty – where there is no hidden meaning behind things, where things, simply, are. He is, according to Mexican poet Octavio Paz, “everything that Pessoa is not and more.”8 Forgetting and being forgotten can subject one to a traumatic return. Pessoa’s bust was defaced with red paint, as if smeared with blood, this, in turn, making his tears trivial. In my language, isiZulu, we have a callous aphorism meant to reduce the essence of one’s tears: “awukhal’igazi, ukhal’amanzi anosawoti” (you are not crying blood, you’re merely crying salty water).

That there is an inherent hierarchy in bodily fluids is no secret.

Indeed, it is a hierarchy evident in contested spaces of memory, (violent) histories and the pain associated with them. The pouring of human feces, arguably the lowest of bodily eliminations, over a statue of Rhodes at UCT has also activated a response described with the term “white tears,” referring to white people who find articulate and performative struggles that address white privilege, systematic

exclusions and untransformed social, educational and economic spaces violating to their whiteness. Suggesting that the past is best left behind, they seem to fear that looking back will turn them, similar to Lot’s wife, into pillars of salt.9 The meaning of salt lingers throughout histories of humankind; myths, legends and spiritual associations have been constructed around its connotations and currency. Salt, for example, was used as one of the mediums of exchange in the slave trade. Its power has been used to curse lands, cure and clean those possessed by evil spirits and prevent things, such as ghosts, from reappearing.

As an element in all human tears and a universal sign for suffering (and joy), tears are also a metaphor for hard labour. In Lamentations (2005) a video and sound work by Anawana Haloba (1978-), the artist is seen with her face down, using her tongue to draw a map on a pile of salt. The soft yet violent gesture, accompanied by an equally violent scraping sound, provokes a spontaneous reflex in the viewer’s senses, becoming a perfect metaphor for our inherent associations with historical events.

In Toni Morrison’s (1931-) Beloved (1987),10 the traumatic return happens when the main character, Sethe’s dead child, returns, at the age she would have been had she lived. When she encounters the young woman for the first time, Sethe has a sudden, urgent need to urinate. In essence, the return of the girl, Beloved, causes her water to break, as if she were about to give birth to her again. Named after the only word she could afford to write on her tombstone, Beloved had died when Sethe, an escaped slave, sighted her white master approaching to take her and her children back to the plantation. In a moment of total panic, Sethe decided she would rather her children die than go back to an enslaved existence, where past and future ceased to exist. The child was dead by the time the white man and his entourage entered the tool barn where she had gathered all four of her children.

Revolted by what he saw before him, the white man abandoned his mission, and the dead child’s ghost began to haunt Sethe’s household from then on. It is when a man after Sethe’s heart, Paul D, forces the ghost of the child out that Beloved returns, in flesh and blood, demanding to be re-remembered.

9 Available at http:// www.independent.co.uk/ voices/leader-of-rhodesmust-fall-campaign-wasright-to-mock-whitetears-theyre-just-anotherform-of-racism-a7013456. html. Accessed in 2016.

10 Toni Morrison, Beloved. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987.

A Question of Power: We Don’t Need Another Hero 53

11 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”. Transl.

by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture, winter 2003, 15(1): pp. 11-40. Duke University Press Journals online.

12 “In Relative Opacity” is a phrase lifted from a quote by Frantz Fanon which in full reads “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.” The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Transl.

by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004, p.145.

13 Fernando Pessoa, “General Introduction”, in: The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro. Transl.

By Chris Daniels. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2007.

One does not enter into a ghostly realm out of curiosity or because one wants to. Ultimately, a tragedy, indeed a loss, is at the origin of everything.11 The RMF movement reminds us that we cannot fight an evil disease with sweet medicine. It represents a generation’s refusal to accept a future created by colonization. It accurately points at a political landscape full of contradictory signs that constantly nullify each other. It compels us to recognize that we exist in an ongoing crisis of citizenship, in which we are subjected to the incessant movement of history.

…in relative opacity12 O rejoice, all you weeping In History, our worst disease Great Pan is reborn!13

A Question of Power: We Don’t Need Another Hero 55

On Difference Without Separability Denise Ferreira da Silva

Following European states’ responses to the “refugee crisis” resulting from the latest wars of Global Capital – that is, local and regional conflicts about control of natural resources – it is evident how effectively the racial grammar and lexicon work as ethical descriptors.

Without their citizens’ assertions of fear of the new, incoming wave of “strangers,” it would have been more difficult for them to justify the building of walls and deportation programs to contain the hundreds of thousands fleeing armed conflicts in the Middle East and throughout the African continent.1 For in the tale of the dangerous and undeserving “Other” – the “Muslim Terrorist” disguised as (Syrian) refugee and the “starving African” disguised as asylum seeker – cultural difference sustains statements of uncertainty that effectively undermine claims for protection under the human rights framework, thereby supporting the deployment of the EU security apparatus.2 Fear and uncertainty, to be sure, have been the staples of the modern racial grammar. Since the early 20th century, articulations of cultural difference in the modern text added a social scientific signifier designed to delimit the reach of the ethical notion of humanity.

Precisely because they too are specimens of modern thought, the available critical tools cannot support an ethico-political intervention capable of undermining cultural difference’s capacity to produce an unbridgeable ethical divide. That is, they cannot effectively interrupt deployments of otherwise unacceptable total violence onto those placed on “the Other” (cultural) side of humanity. Why? Because they also rehearse the modern text’s scientific imaging of The World as an

1 Read, for instance, Slavoj Zizek’s comments available at: inthesetimes. com/article/18385/ slavoj-zizek-europeanrefugee-crisis-and-globalcapitalism. Accessed on 3 June 2016.

2 See the European Commission plan for dealing with the crisis released on September 2015, available at: europa. eu/rapid/press-release_IP15-5700_en.htm. Accessed on 3 June 2016.

57

3 This is inspired

by Leibniz’s notion of the plenum. See, for instance, G.W. F. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays.

Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991.

ordered whole composed of separate parts relating through the mediation of constant units of measurement and/or a limiting violent force.

When deployed for thinking about the social, this imaging renders sociality as being contingent upon the inhabiting of the same (juridical, spatial, or temporal) parts.

An ethico-political program that does not reproduce the violence of modern thought requires re-thinking sociality from without the modern text. Because only the end of the world as we know it, I am convinced, can dissolve cultural differences’ production of human collectives as “strangers” with fixed and irreconcilable moral attributes.

This requires that we release thinking from the grip of certainty and embrace the imagination’s power to create with unclear and confused, or uncertain impressions, which Kant (1724-1804) postulated are inferior to what is produced by the formal tools of the Understanding.

A figuring of The World nourished by the imagination would inspire us to rethink sociality without the abstract fixities produced by the Understanding and the partial and total violence they authorize – against humanity’s cultural (non-white/non-European) and physical (more-than-human) “Others.”

the thinking of the world

After breaking through the glassy, formal fixed walls of the Understanding, released from the grip of certainty, the imagination may wonder about reassembling the fundamental components of everything to refigure the World as a complex whole without order.

Let me consider a possibility: What if, instead of The Ordered World, we could image The World as a Plenum, an infinite composition3 in which each existant’s singularity is contingent upon its becoming one possible expression of all the other existants, with which it is entangled beyond space and time. For decades now, experiments in particle physics have astonished scientists and laypeople with findings that suggest that the fundamental components of everything, every thing, could be just such, namely the virtual’s (subatomic particles) becoming actual (in space-time), which is also a recomposition of everything

else.4 For decades now, the counter-intuitive results of experiments in particle physics have been yielding descriptions of the World with features – uncertainty5 and non-locality6 – that violate the parameters of certainty. Experiments that, I propose, invite us to image the social without the Understanding’s deadly distinctions and lethal (re)ordering devices.

What is at stake? What will have to be relinquished for us to unleash the imagination’s radical creative capacity and draw from it what is needed for the task of thinking The World otherwise? Nothing short of a radical shift in how we approach matter and form. Early Natural Philosophy (Galileo, 1564-1642 and Descartes, 1596-1650) and Classical Physics (Newton, 1643-1727) have inherited the Ancient view of matter – in the notion of body which comprehends it in abstract notions, such as solidity, extension, weight, gravity, and motion in space, in time, which are said to be present in thought. In any event, the claim that the human mind could know the properties of the bodies with certainty, without the mediation of the divine ruler and author of the Book of Nature, would rely on two departures from Scholastic philosophy: first, the 17th century philosophers who called themselves “modern” devised a knowledge program that was concerned with what they called the “secondary (efficient) causes” of motion, which cause change in the appearance of things in nature, and not with the “primary (final) causes” of things, or the purpose (end) of their existence; second, instead of relying on Aristotle’s (384-322 a.C) logical necessity for the assurance of the correctness of their findings, philosophers such as Galileo relied on the necessity characteristic of mathematics, more precisely, on geometrical demonstration as the basis for certainty. Unquestionably, these philosophers inherited earlier writings of Man’s exceptionality – his soul, free will, capacity for reasoning, etc. What Descartes introduced in the 17th century is a separation of mind and body in which the human mind, due to its formal nature, also acquires the power to determine the truth about the human body as well as anything that shares its formal attributes, like solidity, extension, and weight.

This separation is precisely what is consolidated in Kant’s modeling of his philosophical system after Newton’s program, particularly

4 The actual (atomic and supra-atomic level) and the virtual (subatomic) refer to different material moments – atomic and supra-atomic and subatomic, respectively – of everything that exists.

5 Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle accounts for experiments that violate the view that measurements of property correspond to events in reality, which cannot be altered by human intervention; see Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1999 6 The principle of nonlocality refers to measurements of a property of a particle (such as position) that instantaneously provide the measurement of a related property (such as momentum) of another particle regardless of the distance between the two; see Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The NonLocal Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

A Question of Power: We Don’t Need Another Hero 59

7 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

the idea that knowledge consists in the identification of the limiting forces, or laws that determine what happens to observed things and events (phenomena).7 Kant’s accomplishment, which was the design of a system that relied primarily on the determining powers of reason and not on a divine creator, troubled his contemporaries, who saw the possibility that formal determination would also become a descriptor of human conditions, constituting a deadly threat to the ideal of human freedom. Yet, two interrelated elements of the Kantian program continue to influence contemporary epistemological and ethical projects: (a) separability, that is, the view that all that can be known about the things of the world is what is gathered by the forms (space and time) of the intuition and the categories of the Understanding (quantity, quality, relation, modality) – everything else about them remains inaccessible and irrelevant to knowledge; and consequently (b) determinacy, the view that knowledge results from the Understanding’s ability to produce formal constructs, which it can use to determine (i.e. decide) the true nature of the sense impressions gathered by the forms of intuition.

A few decades after the publication of Kant’s major works, Hegel (1777-1831) addresses this threat to freedom with a philosophical system that inverts the Kantian program with a dialectical method that accomplishes two things: (a) a notion of actualization, which presents body and mind, space and time, Nature and Reason, as two manifestations of the same entity, namely Spirit, or Reason as Freedom and (b) the notion of sequentiality, which describes Spirit as movement in time, a process of self-development, and describes History as the trajectory of Spirit. With these moves, he introduces a temporal figuring of cultural difference as the actualization of Spirit’s different moments of development and postulates that post-Enlightenment European social configurations represented the fullest development of Spirit.

the thinking of cultural difference

Ever since the post-Enlightenment consolidation of the Kantian program, physics has provided models for scientific studies of human con-

ditions – a task facilitated by Hegel’s account of time as the productive force and theater of knowledge and morality. Unfortunately, however, these models have been successful precisely because of how these writings on the human as a social thing rely on the same departures from Medieval philosophy that supported modern philosophers’ claim of knowledge with certainty, namely, efficient causes and mathematical demonstration, which ground the modern text. The racial grammar activated in reactions to the flow of refugees to Europe is but an iteration of the modern text. Not only does it carry over into the claim of certainty, its claims of truth rest on the same pillars – namely separability, determinacy, and sequentiality – modern philosophers have assembled to support their knowledge program.

When one looks closely at the racial grammar, it is possible to identify two discrete moments. First, George Cuvier’s (1769-1832) initial framing of the science of life, even if modeled after Newton’s Natural Philosophy, still relied on the descriptive mode of early Natural History, and introduced Life as both the efficient and final cause of living things. Later, in the 19th century, after Darwin (1809-1882) released his descriptions of living Nature, in which differentiation emerges as the result of rational principle, an efficient cause, which operates in time through force, namely Natural Selection, or as the result of a struggle for existence, the science of life would guide a program for the knowledge of human existence, namely 19th century anthropology, or the science of man. In addition to external traits, which were used in Natural History’s mapping of Nature, the self-named scientists of man developed their own formal tools, mathematical tools such as the facial index for measuring human bodies, which became the basis for the description and classification of human mental attributes, both moral and intellectual, on a scale said to register their degree of cultural development.

Second, in the 20th century, not surprisingly, the physicist-turned anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) performs a major shift in the knowledge of the human condition with the claim that social, rather than biological aspects account for the variation of mental (moral and intellectual) contents. With this he assembles a notion of cultural difference, which has both a temporal and a spatial aspect. According to

A Question of Power: We Don’t Need Another Hero 61

8 Alfred Kroeber.

Anthropology. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1948, p1.

9 See, for instance, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

10 Today’s New Materialists also draw from insights from particle physics, see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Boas, the study of mental contents should address the cultural “forms,” or “patterns of thought” which emerged in the early moments of a collective’s existence and were expressed in its members’ beliefs and practices. Emerging and consolidating in time, he argues, cultural, not physical “forms” account for noticeable mental (moral and intellectual) differences. The anthropological school his work inaugurated, namely cultural anthropology, marked a methodological shift, that is, a departure from ethnocentric views of human difference, which resonates with a major shift in physics, namely Einstein’s principle of relativity. For Kroeber, Boas’ student, From that, they commenced to envisage it as a totality, as no historian of one period or of a single people was likely to do, nor any analyst of his own type of civilization alone. They became aware of culture as a “universe,” or vast field in which we of today and our own civilization occupy only one place of many. The result was a widening of a fundamental point of view, a departure from unconscious ethnocentricity toward relativity.8

In the second half of the century, in the mid-1970s, we find particle physics, in the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, opening new venues for critical thinking. For instance, Foucault establishes a distinction between a mode of operation of juridico-political power that resembles the events involving larger bodies as expressed in Newton’s laws of motion and what he called the microphysics of power, which work primarily through language, or discourse, and institutions.9 This second view describes power/knowledge as productive of its subjects and objects, and operating at the level of desire – much like experiments in quantum mechanics, which inspired Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, show how the apparatus determines the attributes of the particles under observation.

For centuries, as these examples indicate, developments in postclassical physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, have been crucial in the development of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of economic, juridical, ethical and political issues, which both produced and rehearsed human difference.10 Unfortunately, however, they have not yet inspired imagings of difference without

separability, whether spatio-temporal, as in Boas’ cultural collectives, or formal, as in Foucault’s discursively produced subject. Not surprisingly, they have further reinforced the idea of culture and the mental contents to which it refers as expressing a fundamental separation between human collectives, in terms of nationality, ethnicity and social (gender, sexual, racial) identity.

the entangled world

Following the recent European responses to the “refugee crisis,” we find how cultural difference describes a global present mired in fear and uncertainty: Ethnic identity does this by means of statements that name the threatening “Other,” that is, those seeking refuge in Europe from wars in the Middle East, political unrest in East and North Africa, and conflicts fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources in West Africa. Meanwhile, in Brazil, it manifests itself by those attempting to impeach President Dilma Rousseff by unleashing moral attacks on those who recently had their rights recognized on the basis of their social (gender, sexual, racial, and religious) identity. In both cases, cultural difference sustains a moral discourse, which rests on the principle of separability. This principle considers the social as a whole constituted of formally separate parts. Each of these parts constitutes a social form, as well as geographically-historically separate units, and, as such, stands differentially before the ethical notion of humanity, which is identified with the particularities of white European collectives.

What if, instead of the Ordered World, we imaged each existant (human and more-than-human) not as separate forms relating through the mediation of forces, but rather as singular expressions of each and every other existant as well as of the entangled whole in/ as which they exist? What if, instead of looking to particle physics for models of devising more scientific or critical analysis of the social we turned to its most disturbing findings – such as nonlocality (as an epistemological principle) and virtuality (as an ontological descriptor) – as poetical descriptors, that is, as indicators of the impossibility of comprehending existence with the thinking tools that

A Question of Power: We Don’t Need Another Hero 63

cannot but reproduce separability and its aids, namely determinacy and sequentiality?

I close this essay with a contemplation of what can become available to the imagination, what sort of ethical opening can be envisioned with the dissolution of the grip of the Understanding and the releasing of The World to the imagination.

Towards re-imagining sociality, the principle of nonlocality supports a kind of thinking that does not reproduce the methodological and ontological grounds of the modern subject, namely linear temporality and spatial separation. Because it violates these framings of time and space, nonlocality allows us to imagine sociality, in such a way that attending to difference does not presuppose separability, determinacy, and sequentiality, the three ontological pillars that sustain modern thought. In the nonlocal universe, neither dislocation (movement in space) nor relation (connection between spatially separate things) describes what happens because entangled particles (that is, every existing particle) exist with each other, without space-time.

Though Kant’s comments on that which in The Thing is irrelevant to knowledge dismiss metaphysical concerns, they also suggest that the reality described in Newton’s (and later Einstein’s, 1879-1995) physics consists in a limited picture of The World because it refers only to phenomena, in other words, things as they are accessible to the senses, that is, in spacetime. What nonlocality exposes is a more complex reality in which everything has both actual (spacetime) and a virtual (nonlocal) existence. If so, then why not conceive of human existence in the same manner? Why not assume that beyond their physical (bodily and geographic) conditions of existence, in their fundamental constitution, at the subatomic level, humans exist entangled with everything else (animate and in-animate) in the universe. Why not conceive of human differences – the ones 19th and 20th century anthropologists and sociologists selected as fundamental human descriptors – as effects of both spacetime conditions and a knowledge program modeled after Newtonian (19th century anthropology) and Einsteinian (20th century social scientific knowledge) physics, in which separability is the privileged ontological principle. Without separability, difference among human groups and between human and nonhuman entities,

has very limited explanatory purchase and ethical significance. For, as nonlocality assumes, beyond the surfaces onto which the prevailing notion of difference is inscribed, everything in the universe co-exists in the manner Leibniz (1646-1716) describes, that is, as a singular expression of everything else in the universe. Without separability, knowing and thinking can no longer be reduced to determinacy in the Cartesian distinction of mind/body (in which the latter has the power of determination) or the Kantian formal reduction of knowing to a kind of efficient causality. Without separability, sequentiality (Hegel’s ontoepistemological pillar) can no longer account for the many ways in which humans exist in the world, because self-determination has a very limited region (spacetime) for its operation. When nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement. That is, when the social reflects The Entangled World, sociality becomes neither the cause nor the effect of relations involving separate existants, but the uncertain condition under which everything that exists is a singular expression of each and every actual-virtual other existant.

A Question of Power: We Don’t Need Another Hero  65

Never Was a Whole: Linking the Precarities Lars Bang Larsen

1

According to Marx (1818-1883), until communism is built there is no history – only prehistory. Consequently, humanity as such does not yet exist. There is no humanity in the sense of an intelligent life form.

We are alien from ourselves and without a full relationship with the world.

Thankfully, we don’t buy these kinds of narratives of a progressive mastery of history anymore, neither in terms of communism nor any other ideology. Sadly, though, Marx wasn’t totally off the mark regarding his indictment of human alienation and immaturity on a planetary scale. This is the immaturity that has created pervasive forms of precariousness and prevents us from finding a way out of our pressing, fundamental problems.

In The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), a book based on anthropological research in a species of mushroom and the human communities that pick, trade, and consume it, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes about “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins.” Today, she writes, unpredictable encounters transform us:

1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World.

On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015, p.20. A fascinating case study of the Matsutake mushroom and the (more-than-) human communities and ecologies in which it appears, Tsing’s book is an important contribution to an environmental anthropology after the anthropocene.

We are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive.1

67

2 Op.cit., 163.

Precarity means to live exposed, to be vulnerable to others, not being able to plan, to not have ground beneath your feet. Yet Tsing’s text is not alarmist or a narrative of loss. She barely raises her voice as she urges us not to panic or become depressed. The fact that instability is what there is is simply a new condition of possibility for life. At the same time as it is frightening to realise that the nature of time is goalless, “indeterminacy also makes life possible.” In this way precarity stimulates noticing, as one works with what is available. She even states, “Precarious living is always an adventure.”2 Under advanced globalized capital all of life is affected through attempts to capitalize living matter. Thus it makes sense to talk about a “we” in terms of a global being-in-it-together, even if this we is as porous as can be imagined, and negatively defined through radical precarity. For the purpose of this text I therefore focus on the realm of human agency as our species-specific possibility for opening up history and connect to its more-than-human outsides.

These are some of the major issues that today expose human life to precarity: The destabilization of the natural environment. The Earth and its populations of species face an environmental crisis that has already turned large parts of the Earth into a ruined and humiliated terrain, and pushed the human race to the edge of space and time.

The recalibration of governance. In a world order in which power no longer has a place, democratic government is immobile and vulnerable. The dominant reality principle is exchange that makes equivalent and undoes qualities; the craziness of capital that inveigles and humbles the state. Nationally, populations are polarised, and on a transnational level violent conflicts and infernal cycles of exploitation subjugate the most vulnerable – children, refugees, the dispossessed.

The undoing of knowledge. The view of the human being as an imperial agent at the centre of history is undermined by the small agency of bacteria and code, and the big agency of networks and data.

The human being that (dis)appears in assemblage with the non-human is the falsely imagined self-contained, un-racialized, reproductive, monotheistic Western man, with science as his universal authority on what is known. We must also consider the epistemicidio (“epistemi-

cide”) that has taken place at his hands; the denigration or elimination of other knowledges.3 The atomization of work. Less of a life-long phenomenon with wages and benefits, it is becoming a patchwork of temporary employments and discontinuous self-management by people who are encouraged to become corporate units unto themselves. They compete against others who are in the same boat, and against financial and machinic means to create value. Worker insecurity makes good profit.

Around these major precarities a number of struggles are formed; social and cultural struggles, struggles for recognition and rights, for survival. When the precarities are identified and linked up to one another they are no longer insubstantial uncertainties, but so many ways to multiply the struggles and to comprehend the global extensions and limits of our being.

3 See Maria Paula Meneses and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (eds.): Epistemologias do Sul. São Paulo: Cortez, 2010.

4 Linda Sargent Wood: A More Perfect Union.

Holistic Worldviews and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p.VIII. 5 Op. cit., p.83.

6 Op. cit., p.84.

2 There are significant historical precedents for connecting precarities.

In the words of historian Linda Sargent Wood, holism has, since the 1960s, exemplified “a view that holds that reality can only be understood as a whole, can only be understood by focusing on relationships between the parts and the whole.”4 Playing a transformative role in post-World War II US culture, worldviews that followed a holistic score included Martin Luther King’s (1929-1968) idea of a “Beloved Community,” Buckminster Fuller’s (1895-1893) evocation of “Spaceship Earth,” and ecologist Rachel Carson’s (1907-1964) concept of the “Web of Life.”5 Their teachings promoted a planetary awareness that saw life as a systemic phenomenon. In this way King proclaimed that “All life is interrelated.

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”6 Holistic politics was cosmological, first of all because it dealt with “all life,” and secondly inasmuch as it exceeded the discipline of politics and its ideologies, doctrines, and party lines. It informed anti-authoritarian protests for social justice, such as the civil rights

Never Was a Whole: Linking the Precarities 69

7 Noam Chomsky in Hutchison, Nyks, and Scott (directors): Requiem for the American Dream.

US: PF Pictures, 2015, 73’.

8 Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Há mundo por vir? Ensaio sobre os medos e os fins.

Florianópolis: Cultura e Barbárie/Instituto Socioambiental, 2014, p.31.

9 Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 18901967. Cambridge 1998: Cambridge University Press, IX. I am grateful to Catherine Jones for making me aware of Ash’s book.

10 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, p.68.

movement in the US, and took into consideration not only the cognitive domain but also the experiential, emotional and spiritual realms, by attempting to knit together philosophy, religion, and science. In this way a particular sensibility was shaped by equally particular feelings and desires. King, for instance, was a priest who tackled not only racism, but also called for a nuclear test moratorium and an end to US military involvement in Vietnam, and criticized the destruction of the natural environment.

Later, holism influenced new conceptions of subjectivity and behaviour through feminism and the counterculture, educational and health movements, psychology and spirituality. In this way, through their ability to move from cause to cause and case to case, to scale up and down between exigencies presented at different moments, holisms played a big role in creating what Noam Chomsky (1928-) has called “the civilizing effects of the sixties.”7.

In a recent book Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro write that when the meltdown of Earth’s geo-physical system affects our possibility for orientation in the world, “psychological space is becoming coextensive with ecological space.”8 You can argue that such coextension was already opened up by sixties’ holism. In the spirit of the time it aimed at bringing together what Western tradition has treated separately – mind, body, and spirit; individual and community; humans and nature; nature and technology. As such, holisms were more than just popular or populist movements. Even it has been portrayed as “a woolly-headed revolt against reason,” what holism put at stake – even if only symptomatically and unconsciously – was the rejection of a dialectics of otherness.9 This is the dialectics that Rosi Braidotti has identified as that “inner engine of humanist Man’s power, who assigns difference on a hierarchical scale as a tool of governance.”10 In academia, holism can, among other branches of thinking, be related to materialist philosophies from Spinoza to Marx, to Hegel’s idealism, to anthropology’s definition of culture as complex wholes.

Because it was not uncommon for holistic thinking in the past to work with intuitions about the relativity of human agency in relation to bigger, other-than-human forces, it has common interests with

contemporary theories that speak of ecologies in the plural and trace life and agency in assemblages across matter and things. In this way 1989 proposal by Félix Guattari (1930-1992) for an “ecosophy” in his 1989 essay “Les trois écologies” can be seen to bridge the ethos of sixties’ holism with such current critical concerns.

If many people were seeing, thinking, and feeling wholes in the middle of the 20th century, why don’t we do so today? We live under the negative holism of an integrated world economy, in which spectres of wholeness and origin – religious, national, ethnic – are being mobilized in exclusionary, sometimes extreme ways; in this light it is ironic if we have become insensitive to the inseparability of life.

But also sixties’ holisms carry their part of the blame, for one thing for failing to realize a radical intersectionality. The patriarchal views of Martin Luther King, for instance, prevented him from feminising the day of triumph he forecast across race, class, and continent.11 This is a familiar issue. The failure to link up the precarities is also an Achilles heel of the socialist politics that neglects its internationalist roots and the fact that proletarization is not only a question of labour and class, but of wider axes of repression. Bodies, genders, races, species, sexualities, and imaginations are proletarized too. A socialism that cannot connect the struggles is one incapable of putting two and two together.

The holistic anticipation of wholeness built up metaphors of totality into an expectation of equilibrium and harmony. Claiming that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and that the parts can be brought to meaningfully coexist as individual wholeness and communal oneness, it understood the relation between space, knowledge, power, and subjectivity in terms of an organismic doctrine; the idea that there is a natural essence behind human communities that relies on inner, evolutionary factors.12 Thus on the level of conceptualization, their drive to unify holisms tended to be hostile to difference and insensitive to what is emergent and non-identical. Claims to symbolic unity are prone to take on an ideological life of their own, and complexity is reduced or entirely done away with when difference is assimilated in harmonic wholes. The holistic caricature is the strands of new-age culture that privilege inner attitudes and individual wellbe-

11 Wood writes: “Focused on racism, he was blind to the discrimination women faced and contributed to it by adopting a doctrine of separate and unequal spheres.” Wood, op. cit., p.96.

12 Arnold Hauser eloquently critiques “the organismic doctrine”: “The extension of the concept of organism to social groups is illegitimate, if only for the reason that within an organism there can be no oppositions or conflicts except in a metaphorical sense of the word, whereas a social group by its very nature is always involved in conflicts of interest and competitive struggles.

Arnold Hauser: “Art History Without Names” in: The Philosophy of Art History. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1958, p.133.

Never Was a Whole: Linking the Precarities 71

13 I am borrowing these questions from Silvia Federici, in her “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons in an Era of Primitive Accumulation” In Craig Hughes, Stevie Peace, and Kevin van Meter (eds.): Uses of a Whirlwind. Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States. Oakland: AK Press, 2010, p.284.

14 In Holism and Evolution Smuts writes, “Holism…is the term here coined for this fundamental factor operative towards the creation of wholes in the universe.” Jan Christiaan Smuts: Holism and Evolution. Gouldsboro: The Gestalt Journal Press, 1986, p.86.

15 As Anna Tsing declares, “I look for disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest.”

Tsing, op.cit., p.5. Tsing’s italics.

ing, or sentimentalizes the Western need for a spiritualized other.

To connect the precarities and serialize the struggles, like so many dots across the voids in life, is to try and make our historical space readable. When we do so we must ask: Are all those different moments in the continuum of precarities on the same level? Are they all compatible? How can we ensure that they do not project a unity yet to be constructed?13

3 To dismantle the notions of harmony and equilibrium, so prominent in holism, it is enough to mention that it was a 20th century South African General, Jan Christiaan Smuts, who was an original proponent of holism (Smuts himself claimed to have coined the term).14 There goes harmony, and violence – here in the form of imperialism and racism – enters the picture again. Any ecology is already contested, already political.15 It should not be forgotten that holistic movements in the sixties, with their ideologies of appeasement, were often up against violently repressive authorities. Today’s advanced state-corporate power is more indirect, and transcendent because it configures from afar, thanks to its global integration of economy and control. It is withdrawn, flexible, mediated, juridical, hybridized. It monitors and outsources, massages behaviour. Yet at the same time power is not very rhetorical anymore.

It is ready to let money do the talking on its behalf, or crack down with blitz-like violence somewhere.

Leaving dead certainties behind in the face of an ungraspable present, you can hardly talk about a paradigm shift or the beginning of a new era. The artistic experiment that is attuned to the cosmological mix of big and small events and meetings, whose shifting arrangements disturb the concepts with which we understand the world, thrives in disturbance and uncertainty. We can follow an intuition that the categories of the contemporary, and of art understood as an urban pursuit, are slowly being displaced as contemporaneity is becoming a ruin and metropolitan existence offers reduced possibilities for life in

common with others. Our big cities are subjecting so many progressive subjectivities and energies to economic socialization, pricing them out. Moreover, urban modernity can no longer offer us all we need, nor all we need to know, and so art is reconceptualising its relation to it. The movement must be double (and not just one of, say, dropping out): to re-connect our life world to nature in ways that acknowledge that there is no way back from the technological city. Survival in a disturbed world goes beyond oppositions between urban and rural, province and centre, nature and culture, human and machine. The nervous system that we will build must be a bigger one.

The forum for contestation is not only bound to sites – the street, the square, the parliament, or the gallery space – but is something active in time, a chain of anywhere-episodes and moments. In this setting, the art work becomes permeable to contingency, assembling precarious forms in transformative relations; forms that can become the hooks to link the precarities. Knowing that life happens in encounters and in allowing for encounters to happen, it works transversally to enable difference: its vexed freedom is that of giving the viewer the means to shift from where he or she should be to somewhere else, to some other condition or level in being – sometimes wildly so. Because art is uninhabitable it knows about the homelessness of thinking.

Harmony is a disaster from art’s point of view. It deflates the intensity of artistic problems and brings up all the clichés of a beautiful soul. Ultimately, a harmonious work of art is a religious art, in the sense of being docile and imposing a universal syntax. If you agree that social problems cannot be resolved in the space of art, and artistic problems cannot be solved in social space, then tension and difference are givens. Art can of course work towards betterment, but things can never get any better for art. It must stay disturbed. Art’s possibility for tensing up is to be at the same time problem-oriented and conflictaware, while sceptical of itself.

In a continuum of differences there is delay and irritation as signs of life; surges of energy and playfulness transport bodies of all kinds, and there are frottages of information in the push and pull of assemblages… If we pay attention to these frayed dynamics, they can sensitize us to the crises and tensions of representation through which

Never Was a Whole: Linking the Precarities 73

16 I am relying on Shiho Satsuka’s Nature in Translation, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

17 Henri Michaux, “Connaissance par les gouffres” (1961), in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. III. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2004, p.3.

18 Hélio Oiticica, “The Possibilities of Creleisure” (1970), in: Brett et al (eds.), Hélio Oiticica (exhibition catalogue).

Rotterdam: Witte de With, 1992, p.13. I am also paraphrasing Jean Baudrillard from “Utopia Deferred…” (1969), in: Utopia Deferred. Writings for Utopie 1967-1978.

New York : Semiotext(e), 2006, pp.61-63.

we live, and propose imaginings to overcome the disconnections – without prescribing highroads as to which connections to forge, which entanglements to articulate, which historical sequences to extend. In this way the artistic experiment is deeply related to the performance of uncertainty, in the interplay between knowledge and ignorance. To track shifting patches of life does not produce an unbroken gestalt or a community whose subjectivities are symmetrical to one another. By way of suturing and stitching, and translations that both bridge and maintain difference, one can instead string together lifelines; the necessary links that are not the power chains.16 After a war, culture questions itself. Today it is a different kind of disintegration that makes history unrecognizable. In the wake of World War II, the artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984) observed that “Nous ne sommes pas un siècle à paradis.”17 Similarly, the 21st century is not one of utopias. We need utopia like we need hope and ideals: yet utopia is not the future when all is well. It is an always deferred not-yet that does not write itself into tomorrow. It is what the order of the day is always missing. Borrowing the words of Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), we might say that utopia is “Something that lies in wait for the possibility to manifest itself, and awaits… ultrawaits.”18 Art cannot give us utopia. But with art’s contact consciousness we can look for the connections and blind spots where there is life in common.

Never Was a Whole: Linking the Precarities 75

After the Other Natures and the New Cultures, an Otherwise Elizabeth Povinelli

As global temperatures rise and toxins spread, wars pound states, insurgents and civilians alike, and the world splits into two great extremes, the 1% and the unruly, stateless, incarcerated, crumpling middle class, green radicals and militant theologists, many in the global North seem on edge, precarious, and vulnerable. Everything suddenly seems exceptionally uncertain. Of course the announcement of an epochal period of change, with two sharply defined antagonists facing off as they drag everyone else into the abyss with them is nothing new. Karl Marx’s rhetoric still excites, despite its age, “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.”1 How resonant for our times, if perhaps a bit too decisive. Everywhere we look we find hostile camps. Stand at the border of Macedonia, Slovenia, or Hungary and you will see, on one side, those who have carved out the world according to their ravenous desires, and, on the other, those demanding an accounting. Or leave the barbed wire of Hungary and Lesbos, and follow those whose hopes for safe passage have turned to Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria as, on the other side of the Mediterranean, the Italians and Albanians riot across their barricades. Or spare a thought for the tide of xenophobia rolling across the US as a reality-TV billionaire promises gates, walls, and razor wire for Mexicans and Muslims, while, further south in Brazil, a congressman calling for the president’s impeachment salutes a military torturer.

But it is not the social clashes alone that signal the epochal moment for many. What is unnerving people is a new set of antago-

1 Karl Marx. “The Communist Manifesto.” in The Portable Marx.

London: Penguin Classics, 1983, p.204.

77

2 Here I am referring to the title of Jean-Luc Nancy’s seminal Cerisy conference, collected in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy Les fins de l’homme. Paris: Hermann, 2013. See also Jean-Luc Nancy The Sense of the World (Le sens du monde). Paris: Editions Galilee, 2001.

nists and the nature of their unpredictable interactions – the clash between man and nature; between societies and natures; and between entangled species and the geological, ecological, and meteorological systems that support them. Marx may have thought the social dialectic was leading to the purification of the fundamental opposition of human classes, but what many believe we are now witnessing is a new war of worlds as an antagonism between classes of existence takes center stage. The clash of civilizations meets the clash of existants.

The cause of this new form of uncertainty is usually paraphrased as anthropogenic climate change, the moment when human existence became the determinate form of planetary existence – and a malignant form at that – rather than merely a component of it. How authors describe the key protagonists in the drama of anthropogenic climate change results in very different ethical, political, and conceptual problems and antagonisms. For instance, many geological discussions of the Anthropocene contrast the human actor with other biological, meteorological, and geological actors as a matter of course.

The Human emerges as an abstraction, on the one side, with the Nonhuman world on the other. And the question is formulated: when did humans become the dominant force in the world? This way of sorting existence makes sense from the disciplinary logic of geology, a disciplinary perspective that relies on natural types and species logics. But note, very little is altered in terms of how we conceptualize antagonism as such. The human species is now the self that confronts nature as its other in a battle for a new level of universal recognition.

True, we may finally be witnessing “Les Fins de l’homme,” with nature as the other necessary for human freedom.2 But this other and this self, who are they, where are they, and under what condition of thought are they encountered? These, rather than the Anthropocene per se, are the questions that animate anthropogenic climate change, discussions which rarely raise these Human and the Nonhuman abstractions. After all, humans did not create the radical uncertainty everyone now faces. Rather, a specific mode of human society did, and even there, specific classes and races and regions of humans are the culprits. When put this way, the antagonism shifts and the protagonists are no longer humans on the one side

and all other biological, meteorological, and geological forces on the other. The antagonism is between various forms of human life-worlds and their different effects on all other forms of existence, including other human life-worlds. It is this second drama that Pope Francis (1936-) (whose name articulates the love of nonhuman existence with a devotion to what we might call a low-impact existence) wrote of in his encyclical Laudato Si’.3 The Other has broken its human sequestration, releasing the final dialectic of self and other – humans and the world. And as this antagonism heats up, time and space are no longer as a priori an intuition as Kant might once have thought. Rather they sit at the foreground of an increasing anxiety surrounding knowledge, politics, and being.

Anthropogenic climate change does not stress an alteration over time, but its predictable and unpredictable rate and systemic effects.

How hot will it get? How much of the ice cap will melt? Have we passed the tipping point?4 The spatial distributions of the effects of climate change are also constantly calculated, often within the rhetoric of winners and losers. But if anthropogenic climate change has created a temporal uncertainty with each and every crack of the arctic shelf, then anthropogenic toxicity created a new form of spatial anxiety for many in the affluent global North. Take such anthropogenic chemicals as polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB). The US Congress banned PCB production in 1979, as did the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2001. But the reason for their ban is the same reason why they persist and circulate. The 1.5 million tons of PCBs humans created continue to attach to sediments and remain buried until gradually released into water and air. In the air, they tend to fall back to ground in rain, snow, or by mere gravitational pull. They build up in the fatty tissue of terrestrial and aquatic animals (environmental biologists note that they are bio-magnifiers, or bio-accumulators, meaning they build up along the food chain – for example, they are found in higher concentrations in shellfish than in plankton, and there is greater build-up in humans than in, say, chickens). If no PCBs existed prior to their manufacture in the 1930s, today everyone in industrial countries, and most beyond, have “some PCBs in their bodies” and in their environment. These PCBs are “probable” carcinogens,

3 Laudato Si’ is Pope Francis II’s May 24 2015 encyclical, subtitled, “Care for our common home.” Over its 184 pages, Pope Francis argues that capital consumerism, unbridled development, and environmental degradation are linked phenomena that cannot be solved individually.

4 Available at climate. nasa.gov/vital-signs/ global-temperature.

Accessed in 2016.

After the Other Natures and the New Cultures, an Otherwise 79

5 C D C Public Statement for P C B s. Available at www.atsdr.cdc.gov/phs/ phs.asp?id=139&tid=26.

Accesed in 2016. See also Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

6 See Michelle Murphy, op. cit.

hormonal developmental inhibitors, immunological disruptors...5.

“Some,” “probable”, “industrial”: but how many and where exactly?

How do I test? When do I stop testing? What is happening to me? The 2012 film Kibo no Kuni (Land of Hope) fictionalizes the emotional aftereffects a future Fukushima-like reactor meltdown caused by a massive earthquake have on two families. As the arbitrariness of the state-drawn danger zone becomes increasingly clear, paranoia grips the young wife evacuated from her contaminated village. Refusing to believe anywhere is uncontaminated, she wraps herself and her infant in mounting layers of biohazard suits and materials, creating more and more insides that must be sealed off from the outside.6 This paranoid wrapping doesn’t only suffocate the self, but digs into the self by desperately trying to expel the other. It evinces a massive auto-immunological response to the unraveling of space as a selfevident set of intuitions that could once differentiate between this here and that there. Where are the I and the it, the self and the other, if the other that threatens to undo me, re-flesh me, is already inside me, and it is my offspring? How can I stage an antagonism between my other and myself if we are not separable? These questions turn the problem of uncertainty away from the question of who, or what, these new antagonists of the dialectic of self and other happen to be. And they turn the problem of uncertainty away from a deconstruction of the confrontation between the self and the other, such as when deconstruction argues that the other is the condition and displacement of my self and my freedom. Instead, the uncertainty is lodged in the very nature of this longstanding assumption that the primary problem is the self and the other. Instead of either self or other, the new terrain of uncertainty lodges the problem in the otherwise and its endurance. To see what might be at stake, let us ask what we mean by uncertainty and thus what we think its remedy might be. How is uncertainty conjuring a different set of temporal, ontological and epistemological domains than would be generated by such terms as undecidability, indeterminacy, and incommensurateness? Will we finally relinquish the dead dialectic of self and other by grinding all assemblages into the same?

Lets take uncertainty. There is certainly nothing amiss about characterizing our times as uncertain. Many peoples in many places

express serious anxiety about their ability to predict the quality and magnitude of what seems to be racing toward them. Part of the problem seems to be the continuing relevance of dominant social and scientific epistemologies. One part of that problem is categorization, and the other is correlation. Is that a gigantic storm heading toward us, or is it merely a standard variation of the weather that we hadn’t noticed before, either because we are not using the right categories or because we are not able to apprehend the entirety of the field of forces pressing upon the present and conditioning the future? In other words, uncertainty might merely refer to a confusion about which kind of thing a thing is. Is this a normal variation of human neurological activity or is this a new emergent form of neuro-normality in the wake of anthropogenic toxicity? If this is a confusion of categories then the uncertainty will be lifted when we find the right categories. Likewise, uncertainty might refer to a state of contingency in our ability to master a set of correlations: If the radiation leaks when the tides are high and the winds pick up while a small child yawns at the break of day, then one thousand people will be poisoned. Again, the solution to the uncertainty is to seek a more complex field of causalities. For this reason, Big Data is the lodestone for many in climate science and toxicology.

But uncertainty is also used in a more radical way – as the anticipation of a birth beyond categorization and correlational logics, such as Derrida’s understanding of an event as an “as yet unnamable [factor], which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.”7 When uncertainty is meant in this way, the terms undecidability and indeterminacy are often used. In the critical philosophical literature undecidability and indeterminacy typically describe a situation in which two or more ways of describing the same phenomenon are equally true. In the deconstructive tradition the emphasis was on the internal undecidability of the truth and rhetorical functions of logos. Paul de Man, for instance, noted that every statement could be reduced to rhetoric-as-persuasion or grammar-as-truth. Taking a very different track, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) understood all truth

7 Jacques Derrida.

“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”

Writing and Difference.

Translated by Alan Bass.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp.278-293, 293.

After the Other Natures and the New Cultures, an Otherwise 81

8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. New York: Harper and Row, 1972, pp.341-343.

9 See, e.g., Wittgenstein, op. cit., p.92.

10 Stephen Wolfram, “Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics.”

The American Physical Society, v.54, n.8, Feb. 1985, pp.735-738.

11 Standard translation of the initial statement of Werner Heisenberg, “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik.” Zeitschrift für Physik, 43.2 (1927): pp.172-198, 172.

12 Paraphrasing statement in Werner Heisenberg, “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik”. Zeitschrift für Physik, 43.2 (1927): pp.172-198, 197.

statements as dependent on what he called “propositional hinges,” axes around which an entire apparatus of practical and propositional knowledge about the world turns, rather than a set of propositions about the state of the world.8 Propositional hinges are nonpropositional propositions, a kind of statement that cannot be seriously doubted, or, if doubted, the doubt indicates the speaker is doing something other than making a truth statement – she is being provocative or is a lunatic or is expressing her cultural difference. For Wittgenstein one either remains within the axial environment of a hinged world or one converts to another. This conversion does not merely reposition one in the space established by an axial proposition but moves the person out of one space and into another, from one kind of physics into another, from one metaphysics to another.9 In this sense physics and metaphysics are incommensurate – they cannot be aligned, translated, or transposed by a third without causing significant distortion.

Other modes of distortion also lead theoretical physics to posit an irreducible undecidability in their discipline. Take, for instance, the claim that there is irreducible undecidability caused by the necessary linkage between theoretical models of physical processes, such as climate change, and the physical nature of the computers processing the theoretical models.10 The object of climate science, anthropogenic climate change, intensifies the problem. The theoretical models demand great computational power and processing and thus contribute to the intensification of the object they seek to apprehend. Many people understand this dilemma through an aphoristic understanding of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; or in the more exact terms used here, indeterminacy principle. “The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.”11 For anthropogenic climate change and toxicity the stakes are significant. Again a physical claim that borders on aphorism is on the tip of many tongues – Heisenberg’s statement that if we know the present exactly we can calculate the future is not wrong in its conclusions but in its premises.12 The undecidability that emerges between the theoretical model of anthropogenic climate change and toxicity and the material modelling of the theoretical models does not negate the reality of what is happening all around us. Rather it

radically undermines the idea that one can categorize or correlate one’s way out of the problem.

For instance, if we believe the existential uncertainty of anthropogenic climate change and toxicity is caused by erroneous categorization then the solution is to find a better, more accurate way of classifying the nature of nature and ourselves as an element within, among, or in relation to it. Take some onto-cosmological discussions in contemporary anthropology and philosophy and situate them in Amazonian life-worlds. For example, Eduardo Viveiros de Castros and Philippe Descola propose a form of multinaturalism as the answer to epochal displacement of western models of nature and culture in the shadow of anthropogenic climate change. However, they have different definitions of multinaturalism. Viveiros de Castros contrasts the term “multinaturalism” with “modern ‘multiculturalist’ cosmologies” in order to pivot Amerindian ontologies of natures and culture onto western ontologies of nature and cultures.

13 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmologies: perspectivism.” Hau masterclass. Available at www.haujournal.org/ index.php/masterclass/ article/view/106/134.

Accessed in 2016.

14 Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture.

Paris: Gallimard, 2005 (Bibliothèque des sciences humaines). See also Bruno Latour, We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Where the latter are founded on the mutual implication of the unity of nature and the multiplicity of cultures – the first guaranteed by the objective universality of body and substance, the second generated by the subjective particularity of spirit and meaning – the Amerindian conception would suppose a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity. Here, culture or the subject would be the form of the universal, whilst nature or the object would be the form of the particular.13

Descola’s use of multinaturalism is primarily meant to open nature to the four distinct ways humans articulate intentionality and physicality, namely, totemism, animism, naturalism, and analogism.14 To be sure, the concept of multinaturalism slips a little loosely across cosmological and ontological claims, a claim that all cultures conjure a different nature and the claim that there are multiple natures. But pervading these rich conceptualizations is an intensification of antagonism between natures and cultures, between societies and their natures. The others of the others, the natures of other cultures, demand a new form of the contract, we are told, a rethinking of primary Western political ontologies. Up to a point. This new war of all against all demands

After the Other Natures and the New Cultures, an Otherwise 83

15 Bruno Latour, op. cit.

16 Ghassan Hage. “État de siège: A Dying Domesticating Colonialism?”. American Ethnologist , v.43, n.1, 2016, pp.40-49, 45.

that we scrap the Hobbesian social contract and replace it with a new natural contract that acknowledges the difference of the other nature.

Unless, of course, one disagrees that the notion of the contract is a neutral concept devoid of a colonial order, or that a parliament is the best form of governance.15 What if the contract, the demos, and the logos are not the common measures, the general equivalents, and the great commensurators, because there are no insides and outsides, only various densities of toxicity and climate distribution?

This has long been visible in black, mulatto, brown, mestizo and indigenous lands, cities, and neighborhoods, where extractive colonial capital came, took and left a differentially distributed toxosphere of refuse. We have a rich aesthetics of these sites. From Killer of Sheep (1978) to Darwin’s Nightmare (2004) and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), filmic portrayals of specific worlds have borne the brunt of casual abandonment to vicious and total extraction or massive displacements. These have been met with new local and state urgencies and intellectual interventions. As Ghassan Hage notes, the increasing inability of industry and government to control, manage, and recycle the by-products of the exploitation and transformation of natural resources […] has given rise to an ungoverned overflow of unrecyclable waste that is increasingly polluting – visually, chemically, and in many other ways – our lands and waters, as well as the atmosphere. As with the flow of unwanted refugees across national borders, waste of all kinds appears to be beyond our control: ungovernable.16

Thus not humans and nature, but some humans and the crap they have consumed and produced (mega-trash heaps of Lebanon, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, the Pacific Ocean). This production and consumption now keep time with massive fires, sand storms, and tornadoes – what Tim Morton might call hyper-objects of human consumptive informational capitalism. This ungovernable flow is coming home to roost. But coming with it is a breakdown not of nature and culture, natures and cultures, but of the entire apparatus of the self and the other no matter where or how it is located. Natures may be cosmological. Natures may confront cultures. The Other may be in search of a

new contract or universal mode of recognition. But there is no Other.

What anthropogenic toxicity and climate change demonstrate – what the exploitations, appropriations, and abandonments that have created the toxicologies we call Flint, Rochester, Martinique, the Amazon, Nigeria and elsewhere – is the undecidable entanglements of bodythings.17 The other and the self are already otherwise to each and the same.

17 See Vanessa Agard-Jones, “Spray.”

Somatosphere (May 2014). Available at http://somatosphere. net /2014/05/spray. html. Acessed in 2016; Catherine Fennell, “Emplacement.

Theorizing the Contemporary”. Cultural Anthropology website, 24 Sep. 2015; Ali Feser, “It was a family’: Picturing Corporate Kinship in Eastman-Kodak.”

Drawing Together: Solidarities, Pictures & Politics, 10th Visual & Cultural Studies Graduate Conference, 17 April 2015; and Nicholas Shapiro, “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime.” Cultural Anthropology 30, n. 3 (2015), pp. 368-393.

After the Other Natures and the New Cultures, an Otherwise 85

Alia Farid

1985, Kuwait. Lives in Kuwait and Puerto Rico

There are many similarities between the architectural complex built in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, to celebrate the city's 400th anniversary, and the Rashid Karami International Fair in Tripoli, Lebanon.

Designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1952-1953 and 1963, respectively, the complexes were created with the aim of hosting large-scale international exhibitions. The idea was that after their opening, the new leisure spaces would transform their surroundings, which at the time were sparsely inhabited regions. Designed to occupy vast areas, dotted with multifunctional buildings of different shapes, interconnected by long paved covered promenades, both were built in reinforced concrete and painted white.

The construction of Tripoli Fair was interrupted in 1965 mainly due to the Lebanese Civil War but also due to the specificities of its design, costs and the scale of its operation. The works were never resumed and the unfinished structures have since served many purposes: from ammunition dumps to informal shelters for militias and refugees and a music venue. Tripoli's locals also regularly use the buildings for leisure activities.

Alia Farid's production combines art, architecture and education through interventions and installations that encourage critical thought about the space where they are inserted. In 2014, she curated the Kuwait Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition – hosted by the Venice Biennale. For the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, the artist presents the film Ma'arad Trablous [The Exhibition of Tripoli], shot in Tripoli and depicting the Fair in its current state with its keepers and regular users. By showing this film at Ibirapuera Park, the artist is proposing a comparative exercise between the two places and buildings, which are tangible embodiments of modern architecture's internationalisation projects, industrial growth and Niemeyer's oeuvre. Farid projects the image of one project onto the other, pushing the comparison to its limits in order to reveal what each project means today. The projection contrasts the balance of the architectural forms and the disorder of the ruins; the belief in progress to come and the failure of the project in its present state.

In both Tripoli and São Paulo we find buildings inspired by the shape of indigenous huts – ocas – revealing the architect's vocabulary of constructive solutions and formal strategies, combined with attempts to translate his principles to a different territory, evidenced by the arabesque columns of one of the buildings in Tripoli. If Niemeyer transposed Le Corbusier to Brazilian circumstances he also transplanted it to the Lebanese context. Therefore, in Ma'arad Trablous, Farid exposes the issue of whether forms can be translated – something that had already appeared in her work Mezquitas de Puerto Rico (2014), in collaboration with Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón – not only in terms of modern architecture's attempts to adapt to different ‘cultures’ but also the possibility of connecting the architecture and experience of two building complexes through the use of sound, image and projection on-site. The artist proposes a comparison on the importance of the site, the role played by its construction, history and strength within a country's history and how to record and project this materiality. Her work examines not only the political dimension – of modernism's ruin – but also the formal dimension of the tension between one's own invention and its aesthetic translation.

——Guilherme Giufrida

Ma'arad Trablous [The Exhibition of Tripoli], 2016. Video, 14’26”. Video still.

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Ma'arad Trablous [The Exhibition of Tripoli], 2016. Video, 14’26”. Video still.

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Alicia Barney

1952, Cali, Colombia. Lives in Bogotá, Colombia

In the 1970s, Alicia Barney moved to the U.S. where she finished high school and studied visual arts.

She later earned her master's degree from the Pratt Institute in New York City. Her first exhibition was called Diário-Objeto Series I (1978), and its title work consisted of found objects randomly collected on walks in New York City and other places. Each object, sewn together by copper wire, brought the story of its trajectory while at the same time opening up new paths of narration for viewers. “When collecting the objects,” she says, “I felt their call as if they were magical. This intimate relationship with the objects was also present in my hyper-acute feelings about the impossibility of real communication between human beings.”

Back in Colombia, Barney recreated the same work in a different context. Entitled Diário-Objeto Série II (1978-1979), this time the elements were collected on walks on beaches and in the mountains: shells and snails, leaves and twigs. Industrial waste, the residue produced by the city, also started to appear in these collections – unlike natural debris, it does not easily assimilate into the decomposition process. It was in this context – in a landscape profoundly damaged by mankind and the metropolis – that the artist found herself. It was the beginning of a long trajectory marked by two fundamental works: the first is Yumbo (1980/2008), a piece created in the small industrial city of the same name. In it, Barney presented 29 closed glass boxes, accompanying the passage of the days of the month of February in a leap year. The boxes clearly demonstrated the changing color of the pollution that we breathe on a daily basis. The second piece is Rio Cauca (1981-82), in which the artist collected water samples from the river before, during and after its passage into the city limits. The results are devastating and perhaps the saddest part is the fact that this situation has only gotten worse with the passing years.

For the 32nd Bienal, Alicia Barney returns to landscape with an installation in Ibirapuera Park, Valle de Alicia [Valley of Alicia] (2016), whose title refers to the Valle del Cauca, located near the city of Jamundí, Colombia. This valley is known for the fungi that grows there. The artist intervenes in the context of Ibirapuera Park with over 100 mushrooms made of paper and resin, installed close to a musical instrument made of tubes which is activated by the wind in a free and random manner. Without any major mediations between the work and the site, Valle de Alicia functions as a game in which the public is able to discover the work via sound, wonder through it and have an experience similar to Barney's when, three decades ago, she discovered forgotten objects in mountains and cities.

——Julia Buenaventura

Sketch for Valle de Alicia [Valley of Alicia], 2016.

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Ana Mazzei

1980, São Paulo, Brazil. Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Ana Mazzei's work is motivated by her search for other worlds and imaginary universes and by a need to tell and re-signify stories. She is interested in the eternal and diverse relations between man and history: landscapes, architectures, fictions, theories and archives. Everything is part of a large narrative construction of man in this world. Her artworks are like pieces and fragments of myths, lives and fictions that are represented in drawings, videos, sculptures and installations. At other times, her works function as observation devices framing this vast repertoire from a specific point of view. Focusing on a widely experimental practice, the artist appropriates different sensorial materials, such as felt and concrete, connecting to the environments in which she works.

The relationship between the body and space is recurrent in her oeuvre. In recent years Mazzei has created many installation-objects, some with a performative nature and others participative, such as Avistador de Pássaros [Birdwatcher] (2014/2015) and Garabandal (2015). In the first piece, the spectator is invited to go up some steps to a viewing point or pulpit located at the top of a building and check out the view, perhaps to see a bird in a furtive flight? In the second piece, she invites the viewer to try a seat where the body takes on what the artist calls a “position of ecstasy”: bent knees, open arms and head up – a position in which we are forced to look up whilst our body is off balance. This composition, which is recurrent in the history of painting, also appears in early psychiatric studies, and is associated with psychic decontrol. In Garabandal, the positioning of the viewer's body provides a displacement of points of view, a change of place that triggers other world visions and, consequently, different perspectives and references.

In Espetáculo [Spectacle] (2016), a new commission presented at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Mazzei also explores positions and points of view, but this time her approach is via a more direct relationship between the place of the spectator and the place of the observed object. In this spectacle, it is uncertain what is the stage and what is the audience, or even what is being exhibited. If the stage delimits a field of action, or a territory for acting where the body moves in a world that represents other worlds, then it constitutes the field of all possible things. The set of objects we see, positioned as protagonists, in the ambiguity of being both observers and objects being observed, also seem to originate from some medieval astrology treatise or from an obsolete lab. They are like remains of machines, geometric clocks, compasses, pendulums, fragments of furniture, measuring devices… all forgotten stories. Nevertheless, their verticality makes them look like they are reaching for the sky. Their position represents a point in the universe from which the world can be observed and imagined. If the spectacle can be defined as something which is presented to us and catches our attention, or as something exceptional, then it works here as evidence of our existence in the world.

——Camila Bechelany

Avistador de pássaros [Birdwatcher], 2014/2015. Wood. 300 × 300 × 120 cm. Installation view at Centro Cultural São Paulo, III Programa de Exposições, São Paulo, Brazil (2014).

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From the series Êxtase, ascensão e morte [Ecstasy, Ascension and Death], 2016. Wood, metal and felt.

Installation view at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil (2016).

Sketches for Êxtase, ascensão e morte.

Ana Mazzei 95

Anawana Haloba

1978, Livingstone, Zambia. Lives in Oslo, Norway

Anawana Haloba produces installations and videos that bring sound, performance and poetry together around issues pertinent to the social and political structure of the globalized world. Haloba's texts are constantly linked to her sculpture and audiovisual production, adding a literary and fictional layer to her works. Hers is an exercise in the re-examination of historical narratives on colonization and post-colonial processes in Africa between the 1960s and 1980s. In 2002, Haloba emigrated from Zambia to Norway to conclude her studies in art at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. According to the artist, the condition of immigrant is important in understanding issues of identity, given that the movement of people from one nation-state to another brings the relations of otherness present in each context into play.

Salt, an element that, for Haloba, is at the foundation of humanity, is one of the materials with which she habitually works. The mineral appears in the video Lamentations (2006-2008) and in the Road Map installations (2007), two works that deal with immigration and with the border disputes common to both Africa and the Middle East. In Lamentations, Haloba draws lines with her own tongue on a set made of salt to discuss the role of language in these transits. In Road Map, she invites the public to run their fingers along a salt-covered surface shaped to resemble the outline of a country as represented on a map. The sound of these lines made by the public is amplified by contact microphones and resonates as lines are erased with each new one drawn, in an analogy with processes of dispute.

For the 32nd Bienal, the artist presents the work Close-Up (2016), centered on salt that undergoes a liquefaction and trickling process in a sonic installation. Like a long-lasting performance, water's dissolution of the salt is assisted by used receptacles collected by the artist in the city of São Paulo. These vessels receive the salt that trickles into them and, using contact microphones, the sound of this action is amplified like that of falling rain, weeping or a symphony stretched out in time. The movement of the salt from one receptacle to another in a slow process of dilution is akin to the relationships of exchange, exploitation and extinction present in the use of this mineral throughout human history. In Close-Up, salt – present in our bodily fluids and in the landscape, used as food and as an ancestral currency for the labor force trickles, transforms and evaporates, little by little heralding its own demise.

——Bernardo Mosqueira

This and Many More, 2013. Installation, sound, video, objects and salt. Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, EAU (2013).

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1961, São Paulo, Brazil. Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Antonio Malta Campos

Antonio Malta Campos's work is the result of a solid and continuous artistic research, unmistakably pervaded by aspects of his personal and social life which are affected by the progression of contemporary culture. Part of the celebrated '80s Generation, he was initially a member of the studio Casa 7. Permeated by an obsession with the ordinary and the artist's vast repertoire, drawings and paintings are Malta's most explored dynamic means, almost like an ongoing insurgency, overflowing into indiscriminate contact with collage and printmaking, as well as experimentation with scale.

Confronted by Malta's work – the large-scale diptychs and sets of small graphic exercises –, we see the artist's technical skill and his insurgency against visual comfort, geometrical precision and the borders between the abstract and the figurative. In his paintings, the artist makes the harmonious tradition of this medium collide with a graphic irony, whether through the indiscriminate use of color or the insertion of comical figurative elements. The compositions as a whole doubtlessly allude to a wide-ranging modern artistic repertoire: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Le Corbusier, Maria Martins, Henry Moore, Oscar Niemeyer, Burle Marx, Wifredo Lam and Asger Jorn, among many others. Due to his erudition, and not simply out of a sense of memorialist attachment, Malta Campos constantly references art history, assuming this attitude in an unashamed, unforced manner.

Both in the large and small scale, without distinction, the artist seeks not to resist the implacability of time in accord with the very nature of the material, which seems to neither conform nor to obey the possible rigor to which it should answer. His recent work, in collaboration with assistant Antonia Baudouin, and the disobedience of his early projects contribute to this apparent sabotage. Conscious of this defiance, Malta Campos does not seek to combat it, but, on the contrary, he makes it a factor of potency which instantly allows for aggregations, deformations, anamorphoses or even shapes that almost have a life of their own; to our eyes, it ressembles a miscellany of Dadaist inspiration. That said, it's no wonder that the work adds tension to the scale, by providing the spectator with a Lilliputian experience, which is transformed with the distance from or proximity to the work, obviously more intensely so in the case of the oil diptychs displayed on the wall.

Much more so, the small-scale pieces or Misturinhas [Little Mixtures] (2000-2016) as he himself calls them, compose the nerve center of his studies. In these, colors in contrast to the gouache and color pencils; the uninhibited strokes of the pencil, pen or India ink drawings; cutouts of juvenile prints and stickers are used to make these small free compositions, which resist classification. Like artist Philip Guston's bold later production, it is important to keep in mind that Malta Campos's production echoes back to his high-school years, when, as a teenager he drew for comic books – a place for youthful resistance at the end of the military regime – an intense clash with the formalist paralysis in art and in a movement of resistance which provided an outlet for the impulse and programmatic uncertainty of life in such difficult times.

——Diego Matos

Mapa-múndi [World Map], 2015. Oil on canvas. 360 × 230 cm (dyptich). Assistance by Antonia Baudouin.

Dimensão [Dimension], 2016. Oil on canvas. 360 × 230 cm (dyptich). Assistance by Antonia Baudouin.

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Sim Não [Yes No], 2015. Oil on canvas. 360 × 230 cm (dyptich). Assistance by Antonia Baudouin.

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Bárbara Wagner

1980, Brasília, Brazil. Lives in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil

At the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Bárbara Wagner exhibits the series of photographs Mestres de Cerimônias [Masters of Ceremony] (2016) and the film Estás vendo coisas [You are Seeing Things] (2016), made in collaboration with artist Benjamin de Burca. Based on her most recent artistic research, and with the support of the ZUM/IMS 2015 photography grant, Wagner and de Burca immersed themselves in the “brega” and “funk” music genres of Pernambuco and São Paulo, documenting the lives of young MCs. In the film, the artists revisit Wagner's key themes in her production, such as how group identities are forged through the construction of an image (and a self-image) and her investigation on documentary in its expanded forms and as a representation device.

Wagner started her career in photojournalism, examining image construction techniques in the field of mass communication. By experimenting with this language, she produced her first series of photos, Brasília Teimosa [a district of Recife whose name could be translated as “obstinate Brasilia”] (2005-2007), in which you can identify aesthetic elements that she has since gone on to replicate in her projects, such as the use of artificial light over ambient light and other composition techniques often used in publicity and journalism. This last investigation is present in the series Mestres de Cerimônias in which the artist documents the making of “brega” videoclips, adressing to an aesthetics and imaginary created amongst ostentation and precarity. Since Brasília Teimosa, Wagner has been searching for ways to emulate the media's language and image construction in order to subvert its formula and, therefore, deconstruct hierarchical and homogenising discourses, such as the persistent division between “high and low cultures”, between pop and popular, as well as the categorisation of certain social manifestations as exotic or marginal.

In this sense, photography and video become the mediums through which the artist questions the very limits of representation, both with the angles, frames, cuts and editing she chooses to create the images with, and the relationships with the people portrayed by her camera. Therefore, Wagner's work also creates a place of doubt between documentary and fiction, giving complexity to the narrative aspects surrounding the direction or spontaneity of those portrayed. This sort of performativity has become a key point in her works, and has gained prominence in her latest projects. Wagner is interested in the analysis of this popular body in relation to the notion of social choreography as developed by researcher and musician Andrew Hewitt and the idea of choreopolitics, a concept addressed by essayist André Lepecki in his analysis of certain collective choreographies that are generated within groups, movements or segments of society, using the body to produce empowerment, dissent and protest.

Therefore, by documenting the universe of “funk” and “brega” MCs, as well as the backstage of this new type of celebrity in Brazil, Wagner and de Burca highlight the combination of reality and fantasy in the machinery of the spectacle, which drives a whole economy of desires.

——Bruno Mendonça

From the series Mestres de Cerimônias [Masters of Ceremony], 2016. Inkjet print on cotton paper.

80 × 120 cm (each).

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Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca. Estás vendo coisas [You Are Seeing Things], 2016. Video. 16’.

Video stills.

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Bené Fonteles

1953, Bragança, Pará, Brazil. Lives in Brasilia, df , Brazil

Bené Fonteles' life has seen many detours, which eventually took him to live in the cities of Fortaleza, Salvador, Cuiabá, Brasília, Belém, São Paulo and Florianópolis, where he experienced different landscapes and social groups. His career as an artist, which began in the 1970s, incorporates literature, music and exhibition making, as well as environmental and social activism. The artist comfortably amalgamates all these roles and treats them as a part of the whole of his activity as a player in the public sphere. In Cuiabá in the 1980s, Fonteles helped to found environmental organisations and in 1986 launched the Movimento Artistas pela Natureza (Artists for Nature Movement), a project aimed at promoting environmental awareness and a debate about the relationship between activism and art, using the neologism “artivism”.

Fonteles' production as a visual artist employs different languages, mainly sculpture, installation and his physical relationship with the viewer's body. His artworks stem from arrangements with found objects, organic materials and items taken from traditional cultures, which activate a critical point of view in relation to the ecosystems and the social structures in which we are inserted. Art itself is one of these ecologies. He also invites artists, musicians and cultural agents to co-create manifestos, songs, poems and essays. His prolific art practice is open to many routes encompassing images and words, objects and actions, poetic and political instances, materiality and spirituality, book history and oral traditions, art, nature and life.

At the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, the artist presents Ágora: OcaTaperaTerreiro (2016), an installation placed at the intersection of Brazilian cultures. Rammed earth walls under an indigenous straw ceiling occupy the ground floor of the Bienal Pavilion. The cluster of words in the title indicates different times and knowledge linked to different constructive matrixes. The artist proposes the overlapping of different cultures, ways of using the architectural space and forms of ritualising the human existence within a single structure. It is not about telling apart or categorising the cultures that compose Brazil but bringing them together.

This oca-tapera-terreiro also collates objects from different regions, collected on his many travels and encounters with the polyphony of voices, cultures, sciences and physical, material and spiritual productions that coexist in the Brazilian landscape. A religious altar, Saint John flags, fishing sediment from the raftsmen of Ceará and leather drums are some of the elements making up the display. Fonteles establishes an affective, experimental and imaginative approximation between territories and peoples, ignoring geographical frontiers. In the same way, barriers and hierarchies between erudite and popular cultures are dismantled. The artist is interested in the ability to call the viewer to reflect on their memories of affections and territories, as well as their identity, understood here as a political category. At the centre of the earth construction, a large circle made of soil, manioc flower and patchouli accommodates native headdresses and spears. Around the circle, a programme of meetings, talks “to postpone the end of the world” and presentations takes place establishing a direct dialogue between Bené Fonteles and the public, for an in-situ reflection on the state of affairs of past and present Brazil. The installation is then transformed into an agora, both as a site and a concept activated by the rituals and words introduced by the artist himself, his guests and the public, which are ultimately transmuted into a voice of power and resistance.

——Raphael Fonseca

Antes arte do que tarde [Rather Art Than Later], 1977. Ritual performance. Documentation of action at the Instituto Cultural Brasil-Alemanha (ICBA), Salvador, Brazil (1977).

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Ex-cultura [Ex-Culture], 1983. Rocks and water of the Manso River, Chapada dos GuimarĂŁes, Brazil.

Antes arte do que tarde [Rather Art Than Later], 1977. Ritual performance. Documentation of action at the Instituto Cultural Brasil-Alemanha (ICBA), Salvador, Brazil (1977).

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Carla Filipe

1973, Aveiro, Portugal. Lives in Porto, Portugal

The spaces and objects in Carla Filipe's work guide us through a discourse that depends on the perception of the detours and incompleteness of today's contradictions. Railway parts, graffiti on city walls, tunnels, underground shelters, and abandoned, decadent or peripheral places – all of them obsolete – work as a dialect in which the artist asks questions about time. The content of her artworks are a sort of residue that society tries to systematically disregard and that the artist claims as the catalyst of her production.

The tension generated between documents that become objects of art and objects of art that work as documents are at the core of Filipe's oeuvre. The archives that appear in many of her works, as documents recreated by hand or fragmented, allude to the fictional nature of historical narratives. Her incisions, overlaps and subtractions create new ways of reading them, feeding the relationship between myth and history. Filipe helps us see – through surfaces, gaps, holes and cracks in the city or in the documents – the possibilities of an “underground life” or of an unwritten narrative. Besides, she creates these gaps herself, burning documents with cigarette butts like wounds on paper. By doing so the artist reveals the contingent character of testimonies, archives and the city.

For the 32nd Bienal, Filipe expands on her research started in 2006, with artworks that deal with the relationship between public and private, amongst which are Periurbano I – uso privado sem cadeado [Periurban I – private use without a lock], Periurbano II – doação comunitária com cadeado [Periurban II – communitarian donation with a lock] and Permanência [Permanence], all from 2006. These are the result of her research into Portuguese railways using the public space for vegetable and flower gardens. On the same note, in Saloio [Yokel] (2011), the artist created a vegetable garden in a greenhouse that was used to display exotic plants. These projects have a temporary duration and the artist selects which community will receive their produce. She creates conditions for the common use of public spaces, introducing a debate about territory, property, spontaneity and improvisation.

In Migração, exclusão e resistência [Migration, exclusion and resistance] (2016), presented in the 32nd Bienal, the artist explores lesser-known edible plants that appear in unusual places, such as the crevices of buildings or floor cracks, raising questions about impermanence and survival. By focusing on plants that are rarely or never grown, the artist highlights the existence of spontaneous forces that can be seen as metaphors for elements in the political life of the city, such as the emergence of movements of resistance, which are symbolic statements of struggle, self-run cells that operate in the city's interstitial spaces.

Her proposition is linked to the activism of autonomist groups, and echoes guerrilla gardening initiatives or informal urban agriculture practices. For Filipe, today is the result of subtractions that are often irreversible, such as the disruption of cultural practices. It is not about understanding time as a conciliatory line combining past and present, but as a construction that also happens between gaps.

——Hortência Abreu

Saloio [Yokel], 2011. Performance and installation composed of vegetables, wood, earth. Installation view at Tapada das Necessidades Greenhouse, Lisbon, Portugal (2011).

Carla Filipe 111

Carlos Motta

1978, Bogotá, Colombia. Lives in New York, USA

Carlos Motta investigates forms of representing subjectivities and the construction of visual and cultural discourses based on them, with an emphasis on identities and policies pervaded by sexuality and gender.

In his work, which spans photography, video, installation, objects, drawing, publications, web pages, etc., memory and history do not just correspond to the past; they are critical tools of the present, with which we can question an oppressive notion of normality and make room for other practices, points of view, accounts and ways of knowing the world. It is in this intersection between historical research and the act of making art that Motta connects reading, reconstruction and the employment of archives to develop and invent narratives.

For the 32nd Bienal, Carlos Motta presents Towards a Homoerotic Historiography (2013-2014), one of the main axes of the project Nefandus (2013-2016), which questions the role of colonization in the processes of modernization and sexuality among indigenous peoples. By addressing the complex relationships between religion, law, sin and crime, Nefandus makes visible the manner in which violent practices and discourses were applied to the bodies and subjectivities of these populations, erasing customs and behavior that did not correspond to the Christian morals of the colonists. Motta surveyed pre-Colombian images that depicted homoerotic acts and reconfigured them, like a collage, into new representations, far from the moralizing accounts found in so many museums of archaeology. By assembling the small pieces, Motta has created a kind of exhibition which reproduces the well-known displays seen in archaeological collections, while, at the same time, telling a new story about the sexual practices of different ethnicities.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography is a fundamentally decolonial project, not only because it deconstructs a given hegemonic narrative, but mainly because it brings to light a fundamental paradox of colonialism: how to forge knowledge without the chains of the colonization process, if the very notion of knowledge we deal with was imposed upon us as a form of domination? The artist points to the need to seek formulations and strategies of thought that undertake the unsettling task of delving into these epistemological knots and to create, from them, places of resistance and criticism that have effects on concrete reality and the body's experience. Motta works through the connection between these theoretical questions related to language, history and thought and tangible social problems, like the marginalization of indigenous populations and exclusionary gender policies.

In this Bienal, the artist also shows a series of black and white photographs – Untitled Self-Portraits (1998 / 2016) – and explores, through his own body, images that create hybrid personifications of gender.

These are fictitious characters in constructed sceneries, which present the body as matter subjected to transformations that go way beyond binary logic. Motta also deals with the malleability of identity and the politics of difference and expands the horizons of representation, while, at the same time, questioning the parameters of so-called normality and pointing to other possible subjectivities.

——Marilia Loureiro

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1, 2013. Gold washed silver figures. 1.5 × 1 × 0.5 cm.

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Detail of the installation Towards a Homoerotic Historiography, 2013 at the exhibition Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015).

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 76.2 × 114.3 cm.

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 76.2 × 114.3 cm.

Carlos Motta 115

Carolina Caycedo

1978, London, United Kingdom. Lives in La Jagua, Colombia and Los Angeles, USA

Carolina Caycedo's artistic practice has a collective dimension to it in which performances, drawings, photographs and videos are not just the end result, but rather part of the artist's process of research and acting. Through work that investigates relationships of movement, assimilation and resistance, representation and control, Caycedo addresses contexts, groups and communities that are affected by developmental projects, like the construction of dams and its consequences on the lives of riverside communities, police repression and the resistance of groups confronted by systems of power.

Since 2012, Caycedo has been developing Be Dammed (2012- ongoing). The title is a pun, a play on the words dam and damn. This project consists of field studies, meetings with the riverside population, a gathering of objects and archival research, a surveying of data, maps and film footage that explore the impacts caused by the extractive economy and the privatization of waters. As developments in infrastructure, the dams and hydroelectric plants emerge as a promise of progress and the generation of energy resources that undermine cultures and traditions, generating contingents of homeless people, many of whom see the rivers as fundamental parts of their cosmologies. It is in this combination of dam and damn that the artist points to the separation between the manmade and the natural, the environmental problem and the persisting processes of oppression.

In this research, “geochoreographies” is the name which the artist gives to actions that use the body as a political tool, expanding it in a way that understands geography and territory as being parts of it. As such, the bodies of water are likened to the social body – each has it's own choreography, whether in the rituals of artisanal fishing or in the mass demonstrations that occupy the streets. Caycedo challenges this reality of socio-geographical transformations with images and performative actions developed alongside the communities with which she works. In this process, she proposes activities, initiates dialogues and supplies tools for the creation of other narratives regarding the impacts of these projects.

The research developed for the 32nd Bienal, A Gente Rio [The People River] (2016), is based on the Itaipu Dam, the second largest hydroelectric plant in the world, and whose process of land expropriation was a catalyst for the emergence of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST); the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River, whose process of environmental licensing has been marked by a series of irregularities and profound indigenous resistance; the Bento Rodrigues Dam, which collapsed, releasing hazardous waste from the mining company Samarco and causing an unprecedented environmental disaster in Brazil; and, lastly, Vale do Ribeira, where indigenou, caiçara and quilombola communities resist against the construction of a dam. Caycedo visits these sites and, back at the exhibition, armed with satellite images, documents and drawings, discusses the monumental environmental impact that these projects have on their surroundings.

The depositions, personal accounts and objects, such as fishing nets brought by the artist, point to the accumulated knowledge of the communities with which she works and which, as a collective body, are resisting the extinction imposed on them by these development-oriented projects.

——Fábio Zuker

Yaqui, Yuma, Elwha, 2016. Marker and paint on Canson paper. 150 × 45 cm (each).

Carolina Caycedo 117

Cosmotarraya Yaqui [Yaqui cosmofishing net], 2016. Dyed fishing net, ruana and maracas.

94 × 47 × 11 cm.

Research for Be Dammed, 2016. Handmade canoes and fisherman with his cat in the Iguaçu River in the state of Paraná. Fisherman Adriano Neves, of the Cardoso Island, waiting for a school of taiña fish.Spillway of the Itaipú dam over the Paraná River.

Carolina Caycedo 119

1979, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lives in Paris, France 1966, London, United Kingdom. Lives in London

Cecilia Bengolea & Jeremy Deller

Cecilia Bengolea is a choreographer, dancer and performance artist. Along with performer François Chaignaud she created the company Vlovajob Pru, which has been active since 2005. Of the many subjects she explores, what most calls attention is the dialogue established between a language institutionalized as “contemporary dance” and explorations of the body that arise from popular, mass culture contexts or specific social groups. For the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, she has developed a project with Jeremy Deller – an artist with whom she first collaborated in 2015 – which stems from numerous languages to take a critical and ironic approach to contemporary society and its relations to the economy, work conditions, political systems and references to popular culture.

Noticeably, their work contains instances of voguing (a dance originating from the queer culture in New York's underground nightlife in the 1980s) and twerk (a dance of African-American origin associated with American hip hop culture in the mid 1990s) as performed by bodies that also execute ballet, jazz and modern dance steps. Bengolea's investigation nullifies the hierarchies between the dance genres and active bodies, at the same time as it calls for a juxtaposition of movements and rhythms, viewing contemporary culture from an anthropophagic, multicultural and decentralized standpoint. The anthropological research in dialogue with the dances and settings in which they are performed is one of the driving forces in Bengolea's creative process. The results are presented in pieces designed for the stage, in actions that occur in the public space and in sites designated for performance as a language of contemporary art.

Created for this edition of the Bienal, Bombom's Dream (2016) is an extension of Bengolea and Deller's studies of the dance style known as dancehall, which is very popular in Jamaica. Bengolea developed the work Altered Natives' Say Yes To Another Excess – TWERK (with François Chaignaud) based on a syncretism of movements including dancehall, street dance and music with origins in dubstep, drum&bass, reggae and hip hop.

Like twerking, dancehall is characterized by body movements that reference sexual acts and are based on the accelerated tempo of the background music. What is of interest to the artists, more than the gender relationships between the masculine and feminine bodies involved in the dance, is the capacity of the dancers to imprint a specific signature on the movements of their bodies in step with the music. Through an investigation captured on video, the artists present the public at the 32nd Bienal with a work in which fiction and documentary are blended together in a study on the limits and standards of dance expected of dancehall culture.

Central to this work is the act of expelling any norms from this world and reflecting on the possibility of freedom between bodies. The development of the work consists in this movement between belonging and cultural otherness, inciting political questions surrounding the culture of the body, issues of gender and identity performed by the body in movement.

——Raphael Fonseca

Bombom's Dream, 2016. hd video. Video stills.

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Bombom's Dream, 2016. hd video. Video stills.

Cecilia Bengolea & Jeremy Deller 123

1943, Malmö, Sweden. Lives in Skanör, Sweden

Charlotte Johannesson

From analogue images to those generated by programming codes, the work of artist Charlotte Johannesson refers us to the constantly updated interval of this transition. From the loom conceived by the artist in the 1970s emerge “pixelated” images with references to punk culture and style. Her tapestries refer us to various issues such as the feminist cause (stressed by the use of a medium that is traditionally associated with women and in which Johannesson has had formal training), the crisis of representation in parliamentary politics (the work No Choice Amongst Stinking Fish is a commentary on the general elections in Sweden in 1976), the military coup in Chile in 1973 (cited in the work Chile eko i skallen), and the actions of Ulrike Meinhof, terrorist and leader of the German Red Army Faction (honored in the tapestries Achtung – Actions Speak Louder than Words and Frei die RAF). Johannesson's work is influenced by that of Hannah Ryggen, a mid-twentieth century Swedish-Norwegian artist who insisted on weaving as a medium of social satire and an epic format to replace history painting.

The Digital Theater, which Charlotte Johannesson founded and ran in collaboration with her partner, Sture Johannesson, between 1981 and 1985, was the first microcomputer graphics studio in Scandinavia and its story remains in the process of recovery. At the Theater she produced a large number of digital graphics, for which she had to teach herself to program, since the computers she worked on – her digital “actors” – came without a graphics program. The profound proximity of her artisanal digitalization and the automatic digitalization of computerized images makes us observe what could be defined as an “interval” space explored by the artist. In other words, something is bound to update itself in these tapestries and prints of designs made on the Apple II Plus computers Johannesson worked on in The Digital Theatre – with the same 239 by 191 “pixels” that the loom possesses. We normally juxtapose analogue and digital images; by establishing the loom and the computer as related machines, Johannesson placed them both in the lineage of the eighteenth-century mechanical Jacquard loom that can be seen as a precursor to the calculator and the computer. Women, by extension, can be seen as the first programmers, and the mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815-1952) is known as being the first writer of an algorithm to be processed by a machine.

The materiality of the tapestry and its way of concentrating and interlacing threads, revealing the strength of its intersections, are articulated in her work. It is also facing the proximity to computer images that the idea of authorship is put at stake. Yet, it is precisely because she does not refuse to put herself at stake, by engaging with the loom, that Johannesson reaffirms the ethical dimension of the social satire in her work.

Therefore, subject matter and technique, image and gesture, dissemination and resistance are interlaced in the oeuvre of an artist that is still relatively unknown in her own country.

——Paulo Carvalho

Achtung – Actions Speak Louder than Words [Attention – Actions Speak Louder than Words], 1976.

Tapestry. 150 × 100 cm.

Charlotte Johannesson 125

No Choice Amongst Stinking Fish, 1976. Woven textiles. 120 × 100 cm.

No Future, 1977. Woven textiles. 120 × 100 cm.

Charlotte Johannesson 127

Cristiano Lenhardt

1975, Itaara, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Lives in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil

The narratives that intertwine pop culture and mass culture, the construction of myths and legends and a reflection on the ways that human beings, animals and objects relate to one another are some of Cristiano Lenhardt's possible areas of interest. The artist's work does not privilege one medium above another and is capable of utilizing several at the same time: film, performance, installation, sculpture, photography, drawing and engraving serve as the material for the creation of works orchestrated by references to distinct sources, including folklore, art history, fantastical literature and science fiction. When executing his work, Lenhardt does not normally start from a pre-established concept to later come to a final form, but instead he is guided by a series of exercises in writing, drawing and manipulation of materials of different origins – found items, both organic and inorganic, discarded elements, raw materials that come from parts of other objects – which are gradually shaped, brought together, folded and animated.

For the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Lenhardt presents Trair a espécie [To Betray the Species] (2014-2016) and Uma coluna [A Column] (2016). In the former, sculptures made of yams creep through and occupy the exhibition space. These zoomorphic creatures inhabit the exhibition setting in groups and, when viewing them, it's impossible to distinguish the origin of the species represented – possibly something yet to be catalogued by science or cultural dictionaries. Though their presence there depends on humans, the tuber-sculptures resist the imposed classification as mere objects subjected to contemplation and continue on in their life's journey germinating sprouts – small arms and legs that are born out of other arms and legs – or proceed into decay and death. These beings demonstrate the passage of time, a condition intrinsic to all things. What is it to be human and what is it to be animal? These are the questions that pervade this project and the artist's work.

Created in the context of this Bienal, Uma coluna initially alludes to the maypole dance, a European folk tradition – practiced in several regions of Brazil – in which men and women dance around a pole to the sound of traditional music. In the performance proposed by the artist, the participants move as if they were drawing around the columns in the Bienal building. Armed with strips of distinct materials, the performers interweave with one another, and from this movement a weaving emerges which only ends when the strips cover the entire extension of the column. The choreography is distributed throughout the three floors of the pavilion and the column, which is usually seen in discontinuous form as it rises through the floors, reveals itself as a single structure cutting through the space. Thus, the work highlights this connection which, in the experience of the body, was divided. According to the artist, the circular design constructed by the choreography creates a magnetic field which is driven by a sound pronounced by the participants in unison, the frequency of which, charged with symbolism, connects the entire action to the sacred.

——Renan Araújo

Trair a espécie [To Betray the Species], 2014-2016. Sculpture made from cará with internal metal rods.

Text by the artist.

BETRAY THE SPECIES

1.

Western humans have always been afraid of being beasts, of

accepting themselves as animals. Everything that resembles this is hidden, excluded, and the animals themselves are enslaved or driven to extinction, serving only for human necessities. Supernatural manifestations are also treated with ignorance, so much so that they are considered something outside of life. In the big cities in which we live, we are distant from the constant presence of animals and spirits or occult manifestations. But the God is desired, the God is idealized, God is what human beings want to be and do not accept. Accept your hell! Betray your paradise. At the same time they don't realize that they already are and always were. Yet God is also the creature, the plant, the rock.

2.

Even in times of degeneration my pain is present. For many

people, celebrating misery is a way of being in accord with their time.

The positionings are discouraged not only for the deceptions but also for the illusions. It was up to me to choose between withdrawal or the machine. Nothing. A possible way out, to betray the species and let me grow to great heights or infinite abysses. But no such thing, the flatness is like the impression of a glimmer of light, and there it is, for those that also daydream. To walk around the city is what I can do to connect with a meditative practice from the body towards outside. In a state of attention, to look beyond the first layer of meaning, suspension of definitions. Freedom of form. In this way, in the softening of everything we see, before the attribution of values and meanings, we are able to access ourselves in the other, due to his or her hollow, open and transparent condition.

CriSTiano lenhardT 129

Sketch for the performance Uma coluna [A Column], 2016.

Cristiano Lenhardt 131

Dalton Paula

1982, Brasília, Brazil. Lives in Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil

Black and indigenous peoples have suffered violence since the beginning of the colonization of the Americas through the loss of their territories and forced displacement, the impracticability of their ways of life and the imposition of subordinate functions dealt with according to the interests of a small portion of society. However, this story did not go on without resistance and gave way to a form of direct conflict by the poisoning of oppressors, enabled by the knowledge of specific plants and herbs. Similarly, rituals involving smoke and drink, found in different Afro-Amerindian cultures, can be understood as ways of finding some spiritual and physical healing in the face of barbarism.

The artist Dalton Paula tells these stories of struggle less by language and the strategies of institutional activism and more by taking the time to unfold them in his paintings and performances. He represents sacred images with black skin color and closed eyes. In his performance actions, he too appears blindfolded, representing the black body prevented from seeing, silenced. With an individual act he hopes to reach the collective: by reflecting upon the ways in which ancestors resisted violence, he seeks to find images for the treatment of historical wounds that were inflicted upon the social body by slavery.

He recovers these traces researching objects and techniques on trips to the Quilombo Kalunga near Goiânia, where he lives; to Salvador; and, more recently, to Cuba and Cachoeira (Bahia). The path of research and experience, as opposed to encyclopedic and disciplinary knowledge, is a theme already dealt with in Retrato silenciado [Silenced Portrait] (2014), and revisited in Rota do tabaco [Tobacco Route] (2016), a series of paintings on ceramic bowls, created in the context of the 32nd Bienal.

Paula studies the guinea hen weed, a medicinal plant used in Candomblé for spiritual cleansing and healing, but which in overdose can cause poisoning – it was the main herb used to intoxicate slaveholders during the slavery period in Brazil. Tobacco, in its turn, according to the artist's interpretation, carries revolutionary information and narratives – the very Cuban revolution would have been partly funded by the sale of cigars. The artist is therefore interested in thinking of herbs and smoke as a way to counter the system in order to transmit non-hegemonic cultural information. The ceramic bowls are receptacles used in religions of African origin for “ritual food offerings.” In these receptacles they serve food, make offerings, carry plants – nourishment for both the body and soul.

At the 32nd Bienal, these paintings are installed as if on an altar – what the artist calls a “garden of new hierarchies” – connected by a narrative sensitive to the underlying antagonism of the apparently individual act of smoking. Dalton recovers the power of herbs and religiosity as healing techniques, as ways of decolonizing the body and mind, and as the empowerment of marginalized peoples in different regions of the Americas, connecting a struggle that has been conveniently fragmented. With this, he produces stories of past and present violence that are still very painful and difficult to tell, but which can also be communicated through the artist's craft.

——Guilherme Giufrida

Implantar Anamú [To Implant Anamú], 2016. Video. 50’14”. Video still.

Dalton Paula 133

From the series Rota do tabaco [Tobacco Route], 2016. Oil painting, gold leaves and silver on alguidar.

15 cm ⌀.

Dalton Paula 135

Dineo Seshee Bopape

1981, Polokwane, South Africa. Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa

The installations by Dineo Seshee Bopape evoke relationships between the times at which objects are formed, found and accumulated in a given territory. The act of manipulating materials, shaping them and merging them, brings with it an experience that is personal and political. A raised fist often appears in her works – taking this gesture's negative space as a mold and the words rebellion, struggle and insurrection in the imaginary linked to it.

This process can be seen in previous works like We Need the Memories of All Our Members (2015) in which Bopape collected, organized and juxtaposed several objects in space: gold leaf-lined provisional monuments made of stacked clay mortar bricks, ceramic pieces shaped by the clenching of a fist were scattered on the floor, over the monuments and amid electric wires, candles, plastic buckets and rods that are extended as if they were hoisting a flag. These amalgamations gradually gain layers of understanding in the mix between personal memory and the political; the assemblage technique becomes a method by which the artist investigates the potential of matter for rescuing the collective imaginary.

Presented as narrative elements in the installations produced by Bopape, the texts included at times in her videos are entries into the artist's thought flow. Phrases and words are articulated onto the memories, fictions and explanations about the objects before the public. Thus, Bopape's research becomes diverse, but it makes use of a certain selection of materials and shapes that are relevant to both her personal and collective history. Constructed or found, the objects and materials evoke identities and territorial relationships.

For the 32nd Bienal, the artist developed the work :indeed it may very well be the _____ itself (2016) borrowing from formal qualities of the Morabaraba (Mancala), a game played around the world, that draws from agricultural techniques for a playful approach to the acts of sowing and reaping. Bopape's installation consists of compressed sand platforms in which various objects are placed from one pit to the next. The artist is not so much attracted to the rules of the game, nor is she interested in aspects of winning and losing.

The game rather comes to represent emptiness, displacements and contested territories. The pieces of clay molded by her clenched fist, which are sometimes fired, sometimes air dried, are placed in the pits along with other objects. Molds of a uterus, gold leaves and other objects collected by the artist in the city of São Paulo bring new meaning to the Mancala pits – a dispute about land, voice, life – an eternal transformation implicit in the gesture of the clenched fist, which calls people to join it as it fights and strikes.

——Ulisses Carrilho

We Need the Memories of All Our Members, 2015. Gold leaf, ceramics, clay, bricks, artificial candles, buckets and chewing gum. Installation view at the Hordalend Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway (2015).

Dineo Seshee Bopape 137

We Need the Memories of All Our Members, 2015. Gold leaf, ceramics, clay, bricks, artificial candles, buckets and chewing gum. Installation view at the Hordalend Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway (2015).

Dineo Seshee Bopape 139

Donna Kukama

1981, Mafikeng, South Africa. Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa

Donna Kukama uses performance as a way of resisting established artistic practices, pulling apart well-known methods by inventing new procedures and moving away from the expected. She also creates texts, videos and sound installations that use the public sphere, adding voices and presences which are usually foreign to the art field. Articulating both major and minor aspects of history, Kukama undermines the hierarchy of official narratives and art canons. Thus, despite being part of the art canon, her work at the same time occupies and subverts it by proposing gestures that destabilise the way in which we look at reality.

Even though Kukama exhibits in several galleries and museums, her work is not intimately related to institutionalised spaces. On the contrary, she uses them simply as a way to give visibility to discussions and issues that lie outside the artistic landscape. Her concerns focus on current affairs and the construction of surrounding narratives, as well as the way in which they are ritualised and staged socially. It is in this context that Kukama introduces her body in order to create counter-ritual and counter-staging images that challenge hegemonic discourses. In the performance What We Caught We Threw Away, What We Didn't Catch We Kept (2015), the artist sits behind a Belgian colonial table and tells a continuous story to the exhibition visitors, without beginning or end, combining history, literature, personal memories, fabricated facts and a documentary in which 1950s' images of Léopoldville (currently Kinshasa), in Congo, relate to what is being said. Kukama uses real and imagined places, common people and select audiences, highlighting the tenuous – or perhaps inexistent – frontier between reality and fiction.

At the 32nd Bienal, Kukama stages three performances that have been thought of as book chapters. They are part of an ongoing project titled To Be Announced (2015-). The idea behind the book is not about the object itself; rather, it leans towards performance, drawing, sculpture, video, text and oral history. The parts of the “book” are not gathered together; they take place in different places and times, even though they belong to the same gesture. Every uncertainty in form carries the tension of not knowing and not understanding. Kukama dares to opt for things that are still only potential, instead of information that already exists, offering us a sort of pedagogy of unlearning.

The three chapters presented at the Bienal are C: The Genealogy of Pain, A: The Anatomy of History and B: I, Too, taking place on different days and in different places. The works are composed by a series of public adverts, combined with projections that evoke the making of other parts of the book, instead of trying to establish a linear and explicit narrative. Kukama has already produced two other parts in Berlin and Johannesburg respectively, in response to very distinct issues as they are inscribed in different realities.

——Marilia Loureiro

What We Caught We Threw Away, What We Didn’t Catch We Kept, 2015. Performance. Antwerp, Belgium.

Donna Kukama 141

What We Caught We Threw Away, What We Didn't Catch We Kept, 2015. Performance. Antwerp, Belgium.

Donna Kukama 143

Ebony G. Patterson

1981, Kingston, Jamaica. Lives in Kingston, Jamaica and Lexington, Kentucky, USA

Ebony G. Patterson's research is based on her everyday experiences in Kingston, her hometown, and the observation of expressions of popular culture. Whether in two-dimensional – paintings, drawings and collage – or three-dimensional forms – sculptures, installations and performances –, her work is guided by an ample use of color, ornament and large scales, in gestures that value the forcefulness of the accumulation of elements. The artist makes use of photography and transposes captured images onto tapestries. To the surfaces of these pieces she applies objects which highlight certain areas of the photographic compositions and which, ultimately, blend into the architecture where the works are placed. The relationship between figure and backdrop is dissolved in a proliferation of colorful details that invite spectators to engage in careful observation.

Her first works, which date from the early 2000s, reflected questions of gender and the place of black men and women in an official process of identity recognition in Jamaica, a country which only gained its independence from England in 1962. A regular of the dancehall scene, fueled by the variation of reggae music which rose to popularity outside Jamaica in the 1990s, the artist began to use elements of dancehall iconography in works that centered on body language, beauty and identity.

For instance, Patterson questions the aesthetic concerns of male members of these musical groups. When posing for photos, the men flaunt their heteronormative values, as well as name-brand clothing, shiny accessories and a technique of facial lightening formerly only used by women: bleaching. The images created denote the use of bleach to self-whiten and produce a tension between masculinity, vanity and racial prejudice.

For the 32nd Bienal, Patterson presents works resulting from recent investigations of childhood and youth in the black population. In late 2015 in Rio de Janeiro, five young people were murdered by police officers who fired over 100 shots into a moving car. Events like this also have a strong presence in the context of Jamaica. The criminalization of social groups, a result of the racism practiced by the State, targets this vulnerable group of citizens, children and teenagers.

Em ...they were discovering things and finding ways to understand...(...when they grow up...) (2016), the artist combines images of young people in an absorbed state and pastes upon the tapestry's surface patterns and plastic toys for children from different visual cultures. Far from an active posture commonly associated with childhood, these bodies seem to express indifference toward their surroundings and the future which awaits them. A third piece shows a gigantic toy car with a variety of colorful objects that normally populate the consumerist dreams of children and adolescents. In this way, the artist presents a visual narrative of black youth in a state of doubt. Just as some bodies seem to observe the toys in their hands with sorrow, others are engaged in reading – but what are the stories they are consuming? Patterson points to an identity in construction and a material culture competing for their imagination. To what extent are the imagination and the act of play able to develop a knowledge of the world, such that they rewrite hegemonic narratives?

——Raphael Fonseca (opposite page and next spread) …they were discovering things and finding ways to understand... (...when they grow up...), 2016. Hand cut Jacquard woven tapestry with beads, appliques, embellishments, broaches, plastic, glitter, fabric, toys, embellished knapsack, book and handmade shoes.

208.28 × 287.02 cm.

Ebony G. Patterson 145

Eduardo Navarro

1979, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina

In his works, Eduardo Navarro explores different levels of perception and the alteration of reality and time.

At times his work fits into the delicate relationship between art and the spiritual, with the same freedom with which he makes use of apparatuses and information relating to science to create drawings and devices that explore the observer's sensory capabilities. In some of his works, Navarro leads participants or himself into a kind of trance, through mental states capable of exploring non-rational forms of communication and going beyond verbal language. Navarro seems to test the praised and challenged transformative potential of art, creating situations in which behavior, ways of thinking and belief systems are put to the test or driven to exceed their limits.

In Timeless Alex (2015), the artist inquires about the nature of a turtle's sense of time, based on the assumption that animals think through images. His performance consisted of dressing up in a sculptural model of a tortoise from the Galapagos and moving around as slowly as possible in order to alter his own awareness of time. In this and other works, such as Horses Don't Lie (2013) and Octopia (2016), the artist seeks to interpret the meaning of inhabiting other life forms through the observation of interspecies relations. He creates devices that symbolize and produce, through imitation, a possible relationship of reciprocity between humans and other beings.

In addition, Navarro seeks to test the limits of the frameworks and formatting of the artistic experience, creating situations or spaces – sculptures, as he calls them – that reflect on the relationship between art and life. In the environments created by Navarro, people are invited to engage in activities related to their personal or professional histories, as in the case of Estudio Jurídico Mercosur [Law Firm Mercosur] (2012) – in which the artist built a law firm to give support to people living on the border between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay –, or in the case of Colleagues (2006) – where he hired a psychologist to provide therapeutic assistance to his colleagues at an artistic residency. Therapeutic practices are recurrent in his work – such as treating a river with homeopathic medication – and they seek to expand the psychic interactions between individuals and the world or interfere in the way we experience contemporary life, often reduced to the demands of capitalism and the urgency of social expectations.

Navarro's work for the 32nd Bienal is a kind of musical instrument similar to a tuba, built for mutual listening between a palm tree and the Bienal Pavilion. The plant and the spectators are placed in an equivalent position, a sonorous exchange that challenges the meanings of communication and listening. As in other works, the artist calls for a reflection on the sentiments and actions that are triggered by art, pointing to the permeable relationship between spectators, actors and art objects. The results of Navarro's works lead sculpture to be perceived as an action and strategy, not restricted to a space or to the object generated from his projects.

——Hortência Abreu

Sketch for Sound Mirror, 2016. Hydrographic pen on printed paper. 29.7 × 21 cm.

Eduardo Navarro 149

Sketch for Sound Mirror, 2016. Hydrographic pen on printed printer. 29.7 × 21 cm.

Sketch for Sound Mirror, 2016. China ink on printed paper. 29.7 × 21 cm.

Eduardo Navarro 151

Em'kal Eyongakpa

1981, Mamfe, Cameroon. Lives in South West Region of Cameroon and Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Through installations, videos and performances, artist Em'kal Eyongakpa creates settings in which visitors find themselves in the midst of a dense forest or an enormous city. After all, the sounds of cicadas and car alarms are not as different as they might seem. This is also the case with the palpitation of the forest and the metropolis, living organisms in movement and constant change, and Eyongakpa explores their coinciding features in a body of a work which dissolves the divisions between modernity and tradition, subject and object and nature and culture. Educated in botany, ecology and biology, the artist decided to abandon his doctoral studies in ethnobotany to concentrate on art. Still, far from completely abandoning biology, Eyongakpa endeavors to explore other forms of knowledge arising from human experience.

The installations Breathe I and Breathe II (2013) are based on two parallels. The first is established between the alveolus – the smallest pulmonary receptacle which takes in oxygen from the atmosphere – and the tree – the largest organism capable of absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The second parallel is between human lungs and the geographic silhouettes of Africa and South America, continents whose vast and distinct biodiversities, which include the Amazon and the Congo Basin, provide the planet with oxygen and whose inverted silhouettes coincide with that of the human respiratory organs. Breathe I is comprised of television screens assembled in imitation of the continents' shapes. Breathe II consists of two LED illuminated mixed-media sculptures spread across the floor. In both pieces, cables and wires act as bronchial tubes, connecting these lung-continents and conjuring the idea of a system, a constant in the artist's work.

Produced for the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, the installation Rustle 2.0 (2016) consists in the creation of a setting whose walls and floor are covered in mycelium, containing components which interact with one another. In Rustle 2.0, Eyongakpa confronts living materials with elements considered artificial, produced by human beings or resulting from human actions in the environment. In this way, the artist seeks to evoke the relationships of a network similar in configuration to the internet – where different instances interact through connectivity or interference, resulting in updates to the system as a whole.

Starting from the idea that we are living in the geological epoch known as the Anthropocene, which began when human beings became active agents in the Earth's climate, Eyongakpa explores manmade updates to the terrestrial biological system. The “2.0” addendum to the piece's title points to the idea of cybernetic upgrade, which the artist applies to a biological organism. Notions of equilibrium, connection and interference are explored in this installation through the objects that comprise the setting – much like Breathe I and Breathe II. The installation's audio component features rhythmic breathing patterns, urban sounds, traditional songs from people of the Congo Basin and the sounds of falling trees (which in turn bring down other trees with them), thus immersing the public in an environment where the borders between the manmade and the natural – cybernetic networks and mycelium, social organizations and a dense, interconnected forest – break down and reveal a strange mutual familiarity.

——Julia Buenaventura

Breathe II, 2013. Mixed media installation.

Em'kal Eyongakpa 153

Erika Verzutti

1971, São Paulo, Brazil. Lives in São Paulo

Erika Verzutti began her career in the mid 1990s and her work includes drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. The artist's body of work contains a reflection on the nature of real objects, the everyday and the formats that surround us. It seems that the intent of her work is to establish a de-hierarchization of the objects and their forms based on successive compositions and groupings of apparently incompatible elements – fruits and vegetables, geometric patterns, materials used in artistic practice, such as paintbrushes, and references to art history.

Verzutti's sculptures are born out of gesture and molding, resulting in volumes that border on oddity and resist immediate identification. These works have a spontaneous, unfinished aspect, bearing the marks of her hands. Aside from traditional materials like clay, concrete and bronze, in recent years the artist has started utilizing iron, styrofoam and papier-mâché. These works are like exercises in which she allows the materials to assume formats in an ambiguous space somewhere between abstraction and representation.

During the process of research and execution, accidents along the way are often incorporated into the work.

Error – an extension of the gesture of sculpting and molding – becomes a form that is not contained, but rather expands into juxtapositions of contrasting elements, like styrofoam and metal in a single piece.

While, at times, the artist seeks references in organic elements capable of denoting eroticism, violence and humor, at others, her investigations are based on figures present in historical works of art, which she appropriates and subverts, using a singular sense of color and form. For the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Verzutti proposes an enormous “wall sculpture,” in her words, a “commentary on the large scale paintings” normally exhibited at art biennials. Serving as a reflection on monumental works of art and their powers of enchantment, the abstract composition is able to accommodate various readings: it resembles the surface of the moon, the face of a rock, a desert landscape or even a representation of space with the planets in bas-relief. Created from diverse materials, the painting is attached to the wall and assumes a virtuality sensitive to the present time which simultaneously evokes nature and the material. Indeed, it is about not knowing, about calling into question certainties related to the dilemmas of art history and, conversely, about enjoying the presence of an object which, in turn, evokes an image to be imagined by us.

——Camila Bechelany

Ouro branco [White Gold], 2015. Papier-maché, styrofoam and wax. 51 × 76 × 11 cm.

Dark Matter, 2016. Papier-maché, styrofoam. 51 × 76 × 11 cm.

Erika Verzutti 155

Artist and team preparing work for the Bienal; artist’s studio (2016). Standing at the bottom, from left to right: Amarildo Nunes Pereira, Erika Verzutti, Vinícius Massucato, Francine Chang, Tatiana Gomes de Mattos. Standing on top, from left to right: Marina Verzutti, Elton Verzutti Fonseca.

Erika Verzutti 157

Felipe Mujica

1974, Santiago, Chile. Lives in New York, USA

Felipe Mujica's artistic practice spans different formats and approaches. Since the 1990s, he has been creating works of art, organizing exhibitions, designing furniture, diagramming books, and managing the project Galería Chilena (1997). All of Mujica's roles are directly linked to his research as an artist and, in some cases, there is no separation between them, since blurring these categories is part of his operational strategy. His works follow the same logic. Some of his paintings, prints, sculptures and installations are not limited to their abstract-geometric visuality, they may also serve as curatorial or mediating support, depending on the context in which they are inserted. His works create a space for dialogue, so that the public and others involved in the exhibition – curator, gallerist, manager, museum staff and other artists – may decide on the uses and functions of the objects.

The Cortinas [Curtains], fabric panels that the artist has developed throughout his practice, are emblematic of this reasoning. Presented in different ways – alone, against the wall like paintings or hanging from the ceiling, covering windows and passageways – these panels activate the space in which they operate, be it by the relationship they establish with other works, with the architecture or with the way the public circulates through the space. The geometric shapes of the curtains are directly linked to a constructivist tradition, these are colors and elements combined by the artist or designs appropriated from art history, from the Russian to the Latin-American vanguards. However, this abstract-geometric composition is subject to a collective effort, in which seamsters and artisans work closely with Mujica to create other combinations within a pre-established grid.

In the artist's production, fabric appears as a fundamental element, a support for subsequent interventions – cutting, stitching, joining. There is a manual facture and a domestic dimension implicit in the entire production process of the Curtains, which are almost always performed collectively. It is impossible not to think about the contrast between this artisanal and spontaneous production in relation to the large-scale production of the textile industry.

For the 32nd Bienal, Mujica partnered with Brazilian artists Alex Cassimiro and Valentina Soares in addition to a group of about forty embroiderers, called Bordadeiras do Jardim Conceição [Embroiderers of Jardim Conceição], residents of a neighborhood by the same name in the city of Osasco, São Paulo. The work Las universidades desconocidas [The Unknown Universities] (2016) occupies several floors of the Bienal Pavilion, in the form of curtains that divide the environment, creating a dynamic space and diluting Mujica's work itself into the institutional functionality. Visitors are welcomed by the geometric banners, as pennants representing no territories, flags without nation-states, and curtains without the requirement of blocking the sunlight. Both the shapes used by the artist as well as those found on the flags come from a graphicgeometric representation that, through colors and symbols, has the function of defining territories, uniting people and associations, or bringing about an intense civic movement.

——Renan Araújo

Untitled (para Cuenca), 2014. Fabric and thread. 8 panels, 280 × 148 cm each. Installation view at the XII Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador (2014).

Felipe Mujica 159

Untitled (El Quisco), 2013. Fabric and thread. 4 panels, 200 × 120 cm (each). Installation view of the exhibition Ways of Working: The Incidental Object at the Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy (2013-2014).

Felipe Mujica 161

Francis Alÿs

1959, Antwerp, Belgium. Lives in Mexico City, Mexico

A catastrophe is not something that can be easily represented. Nevertheless, for the 32nd Bienal, Francis Alÿs produced In a Given Situation (2010-2016), a project that examines contemporary endemic problems through the creation of three types of image: painting, drawing and video. The mirrors, placed in the panels that support the exhibition's artworks, partially display notes on the back of the pictures and create echoes between the works. At the same time, they expand the perspective on the installation and introduce the outside to the inside – the spectator, the park, the exhibition – creating other images.

In the paintings, we can see heavy storms and muddy skies, dramatic landscapes and situations. In turn, the drawings are collections of exercises and attempts to categorise and understand a given situation.

The video examines the possible causes of these catastrophes. However, Alÿs doesn't usually mimic the ordinary. Opposed to easel painting, his unique and autonomous artworks are devices that only make sense in a set: artwork, space and public.

In this sense, the mirror functions as a synthesis and frontier, a tri-dimensional line demarcating the portrayed and the reflected, involving the public and the context. The reflections on the mirrors materialise the tension between the prospect of catastrophe in the artworks and the visualisation of the surroundings.

As an important element of Alÿs' daily practice of investigation, his drawings have been part of his work for years. They are mental maps, graphic – almost mathematical – models of social, biological and linguistic phenomena, microcosms in which he tests the relations and tensions between words, shapes and images.

They are at the same time fable-like and scientific, puerile and technical, lending fantasy to reality, making visible and elastic – even if for a single moment – processes of organising and negotiating the narrated crisis.

Questioning the representation of catastrophe is an element that can be traced in his previous works, such as Tornado (2000-2010) – exhibited at the 29th Bienal de São Paulo – which is the record of years of trying to get inside tornados in search of images of chaos, of the acceleration of history's pace and the unsuitability of calculation as a way to give meaning to the world. The same happens in the video A Story of Deception (2003-2006), shot in Argentinean Patagonia as a long-take loop of a road on the desert that disappears in a mirage of fascination and distance from a promised future, with particular resonance in Latin America.

Alÿs' works are a practice of knowledge in which he untangles the opposition between narration and demonstration, prioritising testing over reflecting. What is the relation between present-day catastrophe and the deception historically promoted by the discourses of progress and modernising projects? How can we link the reflections on the mirrors with the landscapes on the paintings, tensions on the diagrams, rumours on the scenes hidden in the back of the frames? His aim is not to impose a diagnosis on the catastrophe, but to create a brief space where the forces at play are suspended, using the world's image-remains to question the nature of representation.

——Guilherme Giufrida

Untitled, 2016. Oil on canvas. 25.3 × 32.3 cm (each).

Francis Alÿs 163

Back Drawings, 2016. From the series In a Given Situation, 2010-2016. Oil and pencil on tracing paper.

43 × 32.3 cm.

Back Drawings, 2016. From the series In a Given Situation, 2010-2016. Oil and pencil on tracing paper.

32.3 × 43 cm.

Francis Alÿs 165

Frans Krajcberg

1921, Kozienice, Poland. Lives in Nova Viçosa, Bahia, Brazil

Frans Krajcberg emigrated from Europe to Brazil in 1948 after losing all his family in the Holocaust, and found in the country and its environment a place of resistance. The artist managed to reach the first years of the twenty-first century with an eloquent mimesis between art and life, guided by the itinerant and ascetic manner in which he dealt with community life and embraced the revelry of nature. One might say that the artist empirically assumes, in his poetic experience, the condition of the ecologist.

His public appearance on the Brazilian art scene dates back to the 1950s, first as an art handler at the 1st Bienal de São Paulo and especially as an artist at the 4th Bienal, in 1957. It was precisely in the contact between the local and the global that his attributes for recognition and, subsequently, the transformative and changing power of his work and legacy flourished. On that occasion, he was awarded the national painting prize by the jury, blurring the debate between the formal and intuitive freedom of abstract expressionism and tachism and the restrained elegance of concretism in Brazil. In the words of the critic Mário Pedrosa, the painting exhibited showed an “expressionist impetus” and a plasticity that was “temperamental and hot.”

Mindful of the natural world, he would find a form of artistic expression through his interaction with fauna and flora. Since the 1970s, when he decided to live in Nova Viçosa, on the coast of Bahia, this confrontation has occurred fundamentally with nature's raw material itself. In other words, the artist will respond to the exuberance and diversity of the local environment, sometimes denouncing aggression, other times transmuting the elements extracted from it – which places the artist in opposition to the main trends of the local vanguard.

Three sets of sculptures made from tree trunks, from his prolific production, are installed on the ground floor of the Bienal Pavilion. Lacking titles or definite dates, these sets were created from the artist's unyielding collection of remnants left behind by man's predatory action. Scraps of charred wood, vines and roots are transformed by the artist through whittling, carving, decomposing and painting. The pieces seem to create a collision between weight and lightness, robustness and sinuosity, rooting and elevation. The magnitude of these works reveals the potential to rise up to the paradigmatic ambience of modern architecture. They are placed exactly in the transitional area between the interior and exterior of the building, promoting a temporary form of reconciliation between the landscape of the park and the constructed space of the pavilion. Krajcberg's work breaks, albeit temporarily, the spatial orientations given by the scale and monumentality of that modern architecture.

Along with Pierre Restany and Sepp Baendereck, the artist also signed the “Manifesto Rio Negro” in 1978, which proposed the establishment of an art that is in fact sustainable and integrated with progressive and democratic thought. The artist, therefore, strategically takes on a new behavioral condition for life, one that is attentive to minorities, the environment, common welfare, and to social justice.

——Diego Matos

Untitled (Gordinhos), n.d. Sculptures composed of wood of burnings and natural pigments.

Frans Krajcberg 167

Untitled (Bailarinas), n.d. Sculptures composed of wood from burnings and natural pigments.

Frans Krajcberg 169

Gabriel Abrantes

1984, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. Lives in Lisbon, Portugal

The project presented by Gabriel Abrantes for the 32nd Bienal deals with a set of pressing issues in the public sphere in Brazil that persist in the early 21st century: indigenous peoples, threats to the environment caused by large infrastructure projects, the extinction of tribes, cultures and biodiversity, and political disputes.

In Os humores artificiais [The Artificial Humours] (2016), a movie filmed in Brazil between the Amazon and the city of São Paulo, the artist tells the story of Jô Yawalapiti, a young indigenous woman who is ostracized from her tribe due to cultural and generational conflicts and who tries to make a life in São Paulo, where she also fails to fit in. Jô goes to the big city to follow a career as a comedienne after becoming disenchanted with Tunuri, her father and the tribe's chief, who puts the community in danger by giving in to pressures from white businessmen. Claude Laroque, an anthropologist who studies humor among indigenous peoples, is the agent who enables Jô's move to São Paulo. Also featured is Coughman, a robot who does stand-up comedy and who always appears alongside the researcher. With a dark sense of humor combined with a political tone, Abrantes assembles this cast of characters to address sociocultural and environmental issues, like the presence of humor among various indigenous groups, the relationships of conflict in virtue of projects of unbridled progress, local antagonisms and artificial intelligence.

Moving between movie theaters and art exhibition spaces, Gabriel Abrantes' productions blend postcolonialism, gender, sexuality and art history. He contrasts historical debates and narratives of mass culture, and also confronts dystopian scripts and scenarios with the visual resources of Hollywood cinema.

In his films, absurd situations are discussed with a humor that alternates between irony and sarcasm.

Genres well-established in the movie industry – action, melodrama, documentary, science fiction and comedy – serve as starting points to drive wedges and create dissent, which function not just as criticism or a constant attempt to add tension to the categories, but also as a strategic posture and attempt to shuffle the narratives by making use of the very methods utilized by the industry.

Abrantes takes a collaborative approach to his projects, operating in multiple roles: from producer and screenwriter to actor. In addition, he often chooses actors and non-actors to appear in scenes together and characters represented by people, in contrast to those conceived of and manipulated digitally in post-production. By discussing the transformations imposed by globalization in social, political, economic and cultural contexts in countries like Brazil, Portugal, Haiti and Angola, his films challenge common sense and good taste. The future seems desolate and oppressive and the colonial past is always present.

——Renan Araújo

Os humores artificiais [The Artificial Humours], 2016. S-16 mm film, transferred to HD. 25’. Video stills.

Gabriel Abrantes 171

1928-2013, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil

Gilvan Samico

Artist Gilvan Samico's work leads us to ancient cosmologies, to their concerns and radical uncertainties – the creation and reconstruction of worlds, the human implications in the balance of nascent and decaying cosmos –, as well as an awareness of the essential fragility of the present. Generally vertical, two-dimensional, designed through a meticulous, rhythmic and symmetrical alternation between traces and void, his woodcuts reveal a tenuous dialectic balance. Man and woman, nature and culture, universal and individual, sacred and profane, Amerindian scatology and biblical narratives all interact in his work in a unique manner.

Samico is one of the main purveyors of modernist engraving in Brazil, alongside Oswaldo Goeldi and Lívio Abramo, two artists with whom he perfected his techniques, as well as Carlos Oswald, Iberê Camargo, Renina Katz, Marcelo Grassmann and Fayga Ostrower. In 1971, he became a part of the Movimento Armorial, deepening the dialogue with cordel art and the popular culture of Northeastern Brazil.

The pieces gathered at the 32nd Bienal reaffirm the notion of a “relational multiverse” in Samico's body of work, as proposed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in which experience and existence are inseparable, or even in the sense that it is impossible to conceive of a world without humanity – an Amerindian certainty which the artist fortifies through a reading of Eduardo Galeano in the 1980s. The blank, negative space engraved in wood appears as a necessary contraindication to the desire for indetermination in this experience. In this way, prophecies of the fall of heaven and successive destructions of the Earth and humanity by gigantic animals, as well as natural reconstructions with the blessings of sacred animals, are the emerging narratives of this constant territorialization and deterritorialization at play in the imagery created by Samico.

His woodcuts deal with non-specular dreams, with openings that constantly appeal to the negotiation between radically different agencies – men and animals always take on new attributes. And while the idea of reconstructing worlds is associated with cosmographies lined with various overlapping heavens and earths, precipitated in constant cycles, perhaps we can also suggest that it is precisely what is not drawn that sets the transformation in motion. It is the potential of indetermination, of depersonalization, that inhabits every subject. Hence the infinity claimed by Samico (to continually devastate and reconstruct the world is to also extend this negation and affirmation to humanity) is of a restless nature.

From the drawing to wood engraving and printing, all activities were completed by the artist himself, in processes that lasted up to a year. From the 1970s up until his death in 2013, Samico created one woodcut per year, almost systematically, as if he were counting the time. For the blocks, he preferred the timber of Aspidosperma desmanthuma, a predilection shared with Goeldi. The number of prints per work could number up to 120, with each having a unique, contingent mark on the rice paper. The distinct references compiled through Gilvan Samico's studies are found in his work in a syncretic manner, crossing generations and reverberating in different cultures. Each one of his woodcuts can itself be read as a synthesis of his entire body of work, or as an archetype for shared existence, which does not exclude humanity.

——Paulo Carvalho

O Outro Lado do Rio [The Other Side of the River], 1980. Woodcut. 90 × 47 cm.

Gilvan Samico 173

Fruto Flor [Flower Fruit], 1998. Woodcut. 90 × 50.2 cm.

Rumores de Guerra em Tempos de Paz [Rumors of War in Times of Peace], 2001. Woodcut.

91.5 x 50.5 cm .

Gilvan Samico 175

Grada Kilomba

1968, Lisbon, Portugal. Lives in Berlin, Germany

Grada Kilomba is a Portuguese writer, theorist and artist with family roots in Angola and São Tomé. She deals with decolonial themes and transposes the frontiers between gender, race and class by exploring possible places of expression. In her work, the artist creates a hybrid space between art theory and practice, through publications, spoken word, performances, video-installations and texts. A significant point in her production is the book Plantation Memories – Episodes of Everyday Racism (2008), in which she analyses racist violence internalised on a day-to-day basis. Kilomba's narrative is at the same time subjective and social as the questions raised, albeit singular, are the result of a collective trauma generated by the colonial rationale of domination.

If to decolonise knowledge means to create new knowledge and power configurations, then Kilomba decolonises it by subverting content and undoing standard practices. She challenges excluding forms of knowledge sharing, which are preserved in official curriculums and that determine what is or isn't knowledge, who can and cannot teach it, who can produce it and who can learn it. By stating that knowledge is the mirror of social and gender relations, the artist reflects on the political interests of a white, colonial and patriarchal society. In this sense, it is urgent to invent new methods and places of expression away from academia and hegemonic curriculums, mobilizing knowledge physically and affectively. Therefore, her work is an attempt to deconstruct the hegemony of Western thought by proposing that decolonisation and accomplishment of knowledge walk hand-in-hand. From this double gesture, Kilomba jumps from text to performance and begins to give body, voice and image to her writings.

In this Bienal, the artist exhibits two projects that maximise this interchange of practices: The Desire Project (2015-2016) and Illusions (2016). The first is a video-installation divided into three moments – While I Speak, While I Write and While I Walk – and explores the trajectory of silenced narratives. In these videos, the only visual element is the word that, accompanied by the rhythm of drums and background voices, builds phrases whose meaning suggest the emergence of this enunciating subject, historically deleted by colonial narratives. In turn, Illusions is a performance that draws upon African storytelling traditions and brings it to a contemporary and minimalist context of text, narration and video projection. The reading evokes the myths of Narcissus and Echo as metaphors of a colonial past and their relationship with politics of representation and expression, in which the recovery of non-dominating stories is overshadowed by a society that mirrors itself. Immersed in projections that cover her body, Kilomba creates a narrative in which images, memories and words overlap.

——Marilia Loureiro

The Desire Project, 2015-2016. Video installation. 2’36’’ loop.

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Illusions, 2016. Performance. Approx. 45’.

Grada Kilomba 179

Güneş Terkol

1981, Ankara, Turkey. Lives in Istanbul, Turkey

Güneş Terkol's drawings, paintings, fabric collages and embroideries are informed by personal and collective stories. Composed on pieces of material, her images do not rely on a linear narrative or pre-established characters – they stem from shared stories and work as fragments of a narrative to be filled in by the viewer. Embroidery, a domestic craft culturally regarded as female, is re-signified by gaining a public and political layer. At times, her works are economic in the use of colour and brief in the use of form: lines are drawn or sewn to distinguish the image from the raw material background.

Her works are a reflection of the imagery of women who have experienced conflict situations and with whom the artist engages in workshops. They add different narratives of socio-political events according to women's imaginative and affective points of view, subverting the logic that confines them to the domestic environment, isolated from one another. Through this process of collective invention and representation, Terkol provides a platform resulting from the power of imagination in order to build the basis of a live resistance.

At the 32nd Bienal, the artist presents two series of drawings and embroideries. In Couldn't Believe What She Heard (2015), Terkol uses the colour red to create images that are frequently associated with the stereotypical female world – painted nails, hairdos, shoes – in contrast with fragments of body parts without a defined gender – ears, fingers – as well as women's faces and naked bodies. The series The Girl Was Not There (2016) addresses nature's idyllic and mystical character. Colours are extracted from organic matter – onion, tobacco leaves, walnut shells, avocado, beetroot, etc. – to compose scenes, landscape fragments and representations that resemble textile ornaments or empty frames. The compositions are made on raw cotton fabric, a rustic material that can be used to clean the house but that also evokes the raw material used in gazes and bandages, like a second skin. The fabric's transparency allows the public to look through the pieces inviting them to make up their own narrative whilst walking around the images.

Terkol's paintings seem to split a story into several frames. From parts to whole, we see the complexity of personal memories, the subjective construction of the body and the multitude of voices that constitute the category of “female”.

In parallel with her individual production – but still connected to it – Terkol is part of a performance group called Ha Za Vu Zu, which, since 2007, has been carrying out interdisciplinary actions mixing music, video and visual arts. At the 32nd Bienal, Terkol is performing with GuGuOu, a trio formed with Güclü Öztekin and Oguz Endin. The collective has performed social and political critical acts, one of which involved teaming up with a group of workers from a textile factory in Istanbul, who occupied the plant and established a self-management system as a way to resist their employer's practices of exploitation and usurpation of the workers. Collective intelligence is one of the intersections with the artist's individual work.

——Cecília Bedê

From the series The Girl Was Not There, 2016. Embroidery and drawing on fabric. 100 × 80 cm.

Güneş Terkol 181

From the series The Girl Was Not There, 2016. Embroidery and drawing on fabric. 87 × 110 cm.

From the series The Girl Was Not There, 2016. Embroidery and drawing on fabric. 160 × 100 cm.

Güneş Terkol 183

1978, London, United Kingdom. Lives in London

Heather Phillipson

Heather Phillipson's multimedia production shifts between visual arts, literature and music. Her installations are collections of photos, videos, sound pieces, performances, sculptures, paintings and books, amongst other elements. Using collage as a language and as a concept, she approaches installation as a composer approaches music. Her environments are highly elaborated as if mediating rhythmic structures, counterpoints and textures. Phillipson has been producing experimental videos combining music, text and images since she was an art student.

Phillipson's installations or environments are full of drama, involving the spectator and giving the idea of an overflow of languages and emotions, moving from the virtual to the physical space. Her works articulate information by juxtaposing, crossing and colliding content from different sources within the field of culture.

At times we feel like we are in another dimension, as if our computer screen has exploded, and sites, tumblrs, blogs or search pages have become tri-dimensional. For the artist, the frontier between real and virtual – which she approaches consciously – is a condition of our time, and therefore cannot be ignored.

Phillipson refers to her installations as “places” both because of their physicality and the reference to affective concerns and layers, which they bring to the fore. For the artist, these “places” are like nervous systems or ambiguous territories, where at every new edition she applies a different self. This narrative, metaphorical and imaginary power stems from the anarchic way in which she deals with language, both through her word-image dynamics and the autobiographical, confessional and critical tone her texts adopt.

A constant reflection on gender in the capitalist, consumerist and technological system is amongst the central themes of her research.

In TRUE TO SIZE (2016), exhibited at the 32nd Bienal, Phillipson appropriates a marketing slogan to create an animated video-installation, using emojis and gifs, as well as fragments of images extracted from the Internet and adverts. In this composition – of a bittersweet humour – she reflects almost apocalyptically on a potential process of de-bodying or de-subjectifying the contemporary subject, from the perspective of consumption. Life as a commodity is an issue that the artist frequently tackles in her artworks, as well as our relationship with technology and virtuality. Phillipson throws wide open the daily and the banal in all its depth, questioning consumption society, the body and sexuality, beauty ideals, aesthetics and politics, as well as the binomial man/nature.

——Bruno Mendonça

TRUE TO SIZE, 2016. Mixed media installation. Video stills.

Heather Phillipson 185

TRUE TO SIZE, 2016. Installation view at Plymouth Arts Centre, England (2016).

Heather Phillipson 187

Henrik Olesen

1967, Esbjerg, Denmark. Lives in Berlin, Germany

A starting point for understanding Henrik Olesen's work is his book What Is Authority (2002), which questions the patriarchal and heteronormative European democracy. Such inquiry largely resonates in his productions since the mid-1990s. The aesthetic universe of Olesen's art is composed of collages mixed with writings, graphic and conceptual maps, image files, documentary research from primary sources, as well as the press and the cultural history of homosexuality, critical readings of art history and literary texts, from symbolism to science-fiction, immersion in LGBTQ culture, and the production of precarious and ordinary sculptural objects. Facing the inescapable presence of his works you can feel it pulling at history itself, rearranging normative discourses and displacing thresholds of power and definition.

Olesen's production creates a space between, a place of resistance, tension, demystification and deconstruction of a Western tradition surrounding the modern and universal man. Two projects are noteworthy: the 32 unframed collages in the series Papa-Mama-Ich [Father-Mother-I] (2009), in which he deconstructs the family structure, giving prominence to the homosexual body; and the Alan Turing Project (2008) where he advances the understanding of the figure of one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, the father of computer science, as the precursor himself of the machine man, paving the way for the production of new bodies. To the artist, his job is a search for finding how we produce our own bodies as well as the space around them, or rather, one's own space. In this sense, rather than a biographical project, Olesen's works on Turing make for a deconstructed portrait in which different histories, genealogies, categories, and genres are cross-read and reconsidered in search of survival and self-regeneration.

This possibility of subverting a place or removing a single canonical condition seems to be the motto for the new works that Olesen has produced for the 32nd Bienal. In a small series of dark collages, he has printed various motifs with ink on transparent plastic, thereby creating a minimal effect of black images that vanish into a black background. These works find their visual and thematic counterpoint in a large, colored, maximalist collage. Regarding the darkness and tension that Olesen explores in these works, he quotes the opening lines of Dante's Inferno from the fourteenth century: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” This declaration marks the point at which a life becomes confused, or confusion becomes a sort of guide or way forward – a confusion that is existential, aesthetic, as well as temporal. The loss of a straightforward pathway is also the undoing of progress, of linearity, of given directions. There is a loss of control and certainty when life turns out to be precarious and unpredictable. At the same time, this condition holds new possibilities: once you renounce your desire for an ideal horizon or a master narrative, confusion can become a driver, something generative.

Being lost is an adventure, too.

——Diego Matos and Lars Bang Larsen

2, 2016. Inkjet print on photo paper, self-adhesive film, edding marker, acrylic paint, oil paint, highdensity fiberboard. 243 × 210 cm.

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5, 2016. Inkjet print on photo paper, self-adhesive film, edding marker, acrylic paint, oil paint, high-density fiberboard. 210 × 830 cm.

4, 2016. Inkjet print on photo paper, self-adhesive film, edding marker, acrylic paint, oil paint, high-density fiberboard. 210 × 193 cm.

Detail of Some Illustrations to the Life of Alan Turing, 2009.3o computer collages, framed. 31 ×22.5 cm.

Henrik Olesen 191

Hito Steyerl

1966, Munich, Germany. Lives in Berlin, Germany

Hito Steyerl is an artist, writer and filmmaker. In the 1990s, after studying cinema and philosophy, she began to produce documentary-essays, a genre that she has been expanding on and innovating ever since.

Her texts, conferences and images span the borders between theory and art practice, forming an effective, provocative and witty analysis of the speed at which images and data propagate in contemporary society.

Central to her work is the premise that this accelerated propagation has a powerful impact on individuals' understanding and decision-making, as well as on subjectivity, on the use of cultural meanings and on the economy.

Steyerl's works draw on her research involving collected images, archives and interviews subsequently used in installations, video compilations, computerised images and voice-overs. According to the artist, her films explore the aesthetics of the ‘poor’ image, reflecting on the process of digital image distribution, in which they are endlessly reconfigured, manipulated and modified. Her themes vary from the relationship between museums and the industry of war (Is the Museum a Battle Field?, 2013) to possible ways to make onself invisible to the world (How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013), as well as videogame and the interaction between the virtual and the real (Factory of the Sun, 2015), all articulated in such a way as to question late capitalism's social, cultural and financial notions, always with a touch of irony.

Her installation for the 32nd Bienal is a reflection on the spirit of our time: a state of constant euphoria and violence driven by the Internet. Its title Hell Yeah We Fuck Die is a combination of the five most used English words in songs over the last decade according to an Internet compilation by an unknown source.

The words evoke a sort of hymn of this decade, marked by violence, war and battles by proxy and an endemic uncertainty.

By exploring this idea, Steyerl designed a structure made of panels and metal bars similar to a gym circuit.

In each panel, a screen plays a different video and the set of videos is synchronised in a way that the viewer must complete the ‘circuit’ in order to see the artwork in its entirety. Her architectural invention explores the interaction between spectator and artwork, leading the public through a machine-like movement analogous to the training of athletes and robotic machinery. Individually, her videos show robots subjected to resistance tests in labs, being dragged, pushed and crushed to the sound of a composition created specially for the artwork. On the back side a single screen video called Robots Today (2016) revisits the site where a musical robot band was invented in the 12th century by engineer and inventor Al-Jazari and reflects on the recent destruction and occupation of the area.

Despite their dose of humour, Steyerl's videos suggest a latent violence and deal with the ambiguity of images, something inherent to the medium, of which the artist is fully aware. Here, art is action and image is the agent, the power driving resistance.

——Camila Bechelany

Factory of the Sun, 2015. Single channel HD video, environment. 23’. Video still and installation view at 23rd Venice Biennale, German Pavilion (2015).

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How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013. Single channel HD video, environment. 15’52”. Installation view at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2015).

Hito Steyerl 195

Iza Tarasewicz

1981, Kolonia Koplany, Poland. Lives in Bialystok, Poland and Munich, Germany

Iza Tarasewicz's artistic practice explores states of permanence and ephemerality in the transformations generated by time and space. Her artworks explore matter and its plasticity by placing themselves in the blurry zone between natural and artificial, ordinary and extraordinary. Her process often consists of breaking up, deconstructing and reconstructing objects and materials in an effort to contemplate other forms of existing within space and relating to the world and the body.

TURBA, TURBO (2015) takes her research further with the use of organic and mineral materials to compose an installation whose structure is based on different references, from a 1930s flower stand to Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider. Tarasewicz is precisely interested in how difficult it is to imagine a machine that can accelerate invisible particles at the speed of light and to grasp the idea of chaos to explain the origins of the Universe. In her installation, the artist aims to materialise chaos, in which turbulence and collisions are understood as the cause of constant change.

In Mbamba Makurek (2016), Tarasewicz investigates the rhythm and dance of the Mazurka. Originated in a rural area of a small Polish territory in the 16th century called Mazovia, the Mazurka is a folk dance where there is no hierarchy between musicians and dancers and its rhythm replicates the cadence of work in the fields. For local people, music and dance played a crucial role in preserving their communities, bringing them together and building their collective sensibility. For Tarasewicz, it is equally important that, even though the Mazurka's metric structure is rigid, the ways in which it is played and danced varies from place to place.

Over the centuries, the Mazurka spread across Europe. In the 19th century, it conquered the salons of the rich French elite with the help of its appropriation by Frédéric Chopin's compositions, moving on to Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia, Holland, Spain and Portugal. No matter where it went, the Mazurka was integrated and combined with local popular tunes, plunging local communities into high-spirited parties without losing its essence, and this has strengthened its reputation of resistance.

The Mazurka finally crossed the ocean, reaching the Azores, Cuba, Mexico, Philippines and Brazil. The exact origins of the Mazurka in Brazil are unknown but it is believed to have arrived with the Scots and the English and was transformed into forró by blending it with other unconventional rhythms in the process. The reference was immortalised in the voice of singer, songwriter and musician Luiz Gonzaga – the king of forró: “Mazurka, good old Mazurka / We're still dancing to it in my hinterland / When I hear the Mazurka / Outside or in the ballroom / Boys and girls / Get their feet moving on the floor / Play it, singer, play it 'cause it's good / Play the Mazurka in my hinterland”.

Tarasewicz is attracted to the way in which local cultures are connected to elements from distant places in an attempt to resist globalisation. In the same way the use of materials is transformed in TURBA, TURBO, in Mbamba Makurek the language of folk music is appropriated, translated and displaced without losing part of what it is as a mechanism of resistance in the face of life's instabilities and uncertainties.

——Fábio Zuker

TURBA, TURBO, 2015. 25 metal hoops connected to 75 shelves and frames supported by stranded wire hung from the ceiling. 1.000 × 1.000 × 150 cm. Installation view at Deutsche Bank Award, Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Warsaw, Poland (2015).

Iza Tarasewicz 197

TURBA, TURBO, 2015. 25 metal hoops connected to 75 shelves and frames supported by stranded wire hung from the ceiling. 1.000 × 1.000 × 150 cm. Installation view at Deutsche Bank Award, Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Warsaw, Poland (2015).

Iza Tarasewicz 199

Jonathas de Andrade

1982, Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil. Lives in Recife, Permambuco, Brazil

Sometimes with irony, other times with nostalgia, Jonathas de Andrade turns to a modern past that dreamed of a utopian future through a body of work that uses different media and formats to investigate some core issues. First, a complex web of relationships between word and image; second, the artist's interaction with different communities, an exercise which can become the work in itself, rather than a result to be displayed in a museum or gallery; and third, a permanent reflection on the worker and labor, where the male body, seen as a fetish, stereotype, or identity, is widely approached.

Several works manage to tie these issues to discussions related to class struggle and the utopia of the modern project. Nostalgia, sentimento de classe [Nostalgia, A Class Sentiment] (2012) is an installation derived from the wall tiles of a modern house in Recife, which at the time was for sale due to real estate speculation and would possibly be torn down. The wall tile design is an example of Brazilian geometric abstraction, triangles and squares in primary colours; shapes that in the work are blended with ideological discourses on the conception of the modern city in Brazil.

In Educação para adultos [Education for Adults] (2010), Andrade revisits the Paulo Freire literacy method, which bases its teaching on dialogue and the formation of a class consciousness. During the process, the artist established a dialogue with a group of laundresses and seamstresses from Recife through periodic meetings, an exercise that resulted in a series of posters in which the word-image relationship goes far beyond the illustration, forming a whole universe of meaning. However, it also raised the question, says Andrade, of what could be made of all that “class consciousness” nowadays.

The 1ª corrida de carroças no centro do Recife [1st Horse-Drawn Cart Race in the Center of Recife] is part of the video titled O levante [The Uprising] (2012-2013). The race was organized by the artist as a unique opportunity for opening up streets and avenues to carters, whose work, despite being prohibited, remains common in the city. With a soundtrack featuring repentista songs, a Brazilian regional improvisation tradition, which chronicle the difficulties that men and horses face in the midst of urban life, the video shows how horseshoe and asphalt coexist, how two different time periods interact with the city's present.

In O peixe [The Fish] (2016), a video presented for the first time at the 32nd Bienal, the camera follows several fishermen on the Northeast Coast of Brazil. Canoes advance through tides and mangroves, and men cast nets or shoot spears, alone, using fishing techniques passed from one generation to the next. Thus, the viewer is transported to an era that is different from that of the city, scenes of today could be from many years ago, and the patient wait for the prey is part of the day's agenda.

Once the fish are caught, the fishermen wait for them to die in their arms, a kind of ritual that, forged by the artist, involves a pact between life and death, the hunter and his prey, and even more so between man and the product of his labor, like the reconciliation dreamed of by so many modern men, but that the artist seems to perceive as an old tradition rather than a utopian future.

——Julia Buenaventura

O peixe [The Fish], 2016. 16 mm film transferred to digital HD. 38’. Video stills.

Jonathas de Andrade 201

O peixe [The Fish], 2016. 16 mm film transferred to digital HD. 38’. Video stills.

Jonathas de Andrade 203

Jordan Belson

1926, Chicago, Illinois, USA – 2011, San Francisco, California, USA

Originally hailing from Chicago, the life and career of Jordan Belson unfolded in the San Francisco Bay Area. After graduating from the University of California Berkeley, with a degree in painting, he worked with forms of non-objective art. In 1946 and the following years, he attended the Art in Cinema film series at the San Francisco Museum of Art, which introduced him to the work of Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, and Hans Richter, artists linked to abstract cinema combining painting, graphic design and music in non-narrative films. From these references, Belson expanded the concept of abstract art to film and in the following year, 1947, completed the first of his approximately 33 films produced in the subsequent decades.

Between 1957 and 1959, Belson and his friend Henry Jacobs produced the legendary Vortex Concerts, a series of events at the San Francisco Planetarium that brought together electronic and avant-garde music, film projections, light displays and visual effects. The Vortex Concerts had a big impact on the way the psychedelic multiple-projector light show later developed in the Bay Area.

Called cosmic cinema by some, Belson's own films explore the dynamic relationship between form, movement, colour, and sound. The fundamental relationship between sound and vision is evidenced by his ambient-style sound compositions as well as the highly experimental equipment and special effects that he designed for his films. The artist used optical printing, frame-by-frame and basic animation techniques, mirrors, kaleidoscopes and a variety of low-tech equipment. His lesser-known graphic works were often studies for scenes in his films, such as the use of “scroll paintings” in his early works.

The 32nd Bienal presents a series of drawings – never shown before – ranging from scroll paintings, depictions of mystical or mythical creatures (Abraxas and Phoenix, c.1950), elaborate optic-kinetic experiments (for example Horns of Unplenty, unknown date), and a series of rudimentary Brain Drawings (1952). What's more, the film Samadhi (1967) will be presented for the first time in Brazil. Samadhi is a term that in Buddhism and Yoga refers to states of concentration or deep meditation. In the film Belson explores the relationship between spiritual perception and scientific theory, drawing from Hinduism and Buddhism as well as Johannes Kepler's astronomic theories. He called Samadhi “a documentary of the human soul that shows a little more than human beings are supposed to see.” Rings, textures, and smoky colours continuously fade and reappear, evoking both immense sidereal dimensions and the molecular level of reality.

Belson's experimental attitude, and his non-hierarchical combination of Eastern and Western epistemologies, posit scientific and symbolic codes as languages that are not mutually exclusive. Never simply a form of Op Art, Belson's exploration of the human senses, especially the potentials and manipulability of the gaze, was based on a free exchange between technologies and knowledge forms to dramatize bio-astronomic events, the birth and death of worlds. Belson forged alliances with the imperceptible, the more-than-visual and the less-than-visual.

——Lars Bang Larsen

Samadhi, 1967. 16 mm film transferred to digital HD. 5’. Video still.

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Brain Drawings EW.0120, 1952. Paper and ink. 22.22 × 22.22 cm.

Brain Drawings EW.0117, 1952. Paper and ink. 22.22 × 22.22 cm.

Jordan Belson 207

Jorge Menna Barreto

1970, Araçatuba, São Paulo, Brazil. Lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Throughout his artistic career Jorge Menna Barreto has been exploring site-specific works not only as a method but also as a device aimed at activating public awareness of each site's specificity. The artist expands the concept by incorporating the narratives and contexts that make up a place and, more recently, has begun to consider food produced locally as an element of its specificity. Therefore, Menna Barreto resignifies the idea of site by suggesting new places to be appropriated critically, artistically and politically, including one's body.

Since Café educativo [Educational Cafe] (2007) – which consists of setting up a café in an exhibition space – Menna Barreto's work has interwoven different agents: the public, the institution, the exhibition and the artists. To this end, he uses a service often present in cultural institutions to not only serve coffee and snacks but also to play the role of a spontaneous mediation space, where the baristas are actually educators. This work has been performed on different occasions and has engendered the discussion of issues such as ecological awareness and nutritional choices (Café educativo: Campo neutral [Educational Cafe: Neutral Field], 2013) or taste and the impact of consumption on health and the environment (Café educativo: o alimento no campo expandido, [Educational Cafe: Food in the Expanded Field], 2012).

In the context of Turning a Blind Eye by artist duo Bik Van der Pol, presented at the 31st Bienal de São Paulo, in 2014, Menna Barreto incorporated Sucos específicos [Specific Juices] to the exhibition restaurant, a project that consisted of making juice with non-conventional edible plants found in Ibirapuera Park. Since then the artist has been focusing on what he calls environmental sculpture. As well as offering healthy foods, these works encourage the politicisation of our tastes and eating habits, with the understanding that by eating you are part of a production chain. Today agriculture is the human activity with the greatest impact on the planet, particularly in Brazil, as crops and pastureland are to blame for 80% to 90% of the deforestation in the Amazon. Therefore, what we eat shapes the landscape that surrounds us.

With Restauro [Restoration](2016), the artist proposes a restaurant with recipes based on plants. It will operate throughout the duration of the 32nd Bienal. Set up on the pavilion's mezzanine, the project activates food production networks, such as agroforestry, a sustainable production system that protects the soil and biodiversity. The project mobilises a group of collaborators that help him come up with the menu, run the restaurant, set up the ambiance and relate to the public. By using food the artist brings the forest into the exhibition building and invites the diners to become players in the farming system.

More than a restaurant, Restauro is a mediation space within the biennial as a platform, adding different layers to the concepts of digestion and metabolism, thinking of food not only in terms of solid matter but also as a complex mediator in the relationship between exhibition, society and environment.

——Cecília Bedê

Research for Restauro [Restoration]: Marcelo Wasem records the sounds produced by the agroforesty biodiversity in Sítio Paraíso Agroecológico, Sepé Tiaraju settlement, region of Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil (2016).

Research for Restauro [Restoration]: Passion fruit grown in the agroforestry system, Agnaldo Vicente de Lima, Sítio Paraíso Agroecológico, Sepé Tiaraju settlement, region of Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil (2016).

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Research for Restauro [Restoration]: Agroforestry joint effort on Sítio Saci Pererê, Sepé Tiaraju settlement, region of Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil (2016).

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1955, Medellín, Colombia. Lives in Medellín

José Antonio Suárez Londoño

José Antonio Suárez Londoño's drawing production is vertiginous; not only for its quantity but also for everything that his drawings make visible. By focusing on the detail and using a within-arms-reach scale, his works demand proximity. Words and images are given the same value, evoking a possible but no less challenging interpretation.

His drawings and etchings are like a compilation of everything in the world, even though each one of his small sketchbooks could be a project of an imaginary universe or a handmade atlas. This perhaps allows us to see the biologist that the artist could have been. Despite having started his studies in Biology – an area of knowledge that depends on classification and annotations – his notes, written or sketched, prioritise the imagination, which Charles Baudelaire defined as the capacity to draw analogies between things that are apparently not connected. Therefore, his work is a form of organising the visible, not so much as scientific ordering but implying, first and foremost, the prevalence of invention. The artist makes space for the recording of small things or the representation of large things in small scale, for literary works and references to Western Art, which flow into the pages of his notebooks pocket-sized.

This personal labyrinth is a record of collective events: memories of what he has seen, shared symbolic remembrances, details of images around one's existence. They are annotations of the world's impermanence and mutability or of the passing of events. His artworks are a sort of illustrated inventory populated by bodies, landscapes, boats, annotations on a terrorist attack in London or homage to Edgar Degas.

At times there is no continuity between the notebooks, the pages or even the elements on the same sheet of paper. Londoño's drawings show us shocks of fragments, without any hierarchy between experiences or words, as if they were collages. In one of the pages, we see the print of one of his stamps: Hacer siempre lo mismo y hacerlo siempre distinto [Always do the same thing, but always do it differently] – a fitting motto for someone who spends so much time doing the same task but not producing the same object or image, even though we can see the repetition of some elements in his vast oeuvre.

In 1997, the artist started to work on a series of diaries based on authors such as Franz Kafka, Paul Klee, Eugène Delacroix and Arthur Rimbaud. Three years before, he had produced the series 365 (1994-1995), whose title refers to the number of days in the year. The new reading proposed for someone else's diaries recreates the echo of an internal voice taking us through only traces of the authors' intimacy. In the same way we saw in the series Yoloveí [I saw it] (1991-2000), Londoño's drawings play with the image's testimonial value, whilst turning the interpretation of such a personal alphabet into something questionable.

——Hortência Abreu

Planas: del 1 de enero al 31 de diciembre del año 2005 [Exercises: from January 1 to December 31 of the year 2005], 2005. Mixed media on paper.

José Antonio Suárez Londoño 213

Planas: del 1 de enero al 31 de diciembre del aĂąo 2005 [Exercises: from January 1 to December 31 of the year 2005], 2005. Mixed media on paper.

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José Bento

1962, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Lives in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

José Bento's career began in the early 1980s, and the artist has developed a process in which he intensifies an intimacy with wood and its possible uses for the creation of symbolic objects. Though at first Bento used ice cream sticks to construct small scenes and sculptures, in the 1990s he began carving objects out of wood that address conceptual and philosophical issues, like the cycles of life and death, permanence and ephemerality, and which, at times, reflect the artistic practice itself. The artist works with different kinds of primary materials and languages, but he is uniquely skilled at manipulating wood, and consistently transcends the apparent limits of this material. His work, which creates intricate relationships with mystery, seems to take place with a corresponding awareness that the Portuguese word for wood, madeira, originated from the Latin “materia” (the substance from which a body is made), which, in turn, was derived from mater (meaning “mother” or “origin”). In one of his most illustrious series, Árvores [Trees] (1991-ongoing), he utilized this material to display the transformation of the raw material into a representation of itself.

In Chão [Floor] (2004/2016), a version of the installation created on a smaller scale at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha (Belo Horizonte) in 2004, Bento uses wooden boards from demolitions and residential renovation projects to build a large strip, a passage, extending from one side of the second floor of the pavilion to the other. Though invisible to the eye, some of these boards have spring mechanisms underneath that make them function as little trampolines. Since the passageway constructed for the work requires elevation in relation to the ground, this work could be understood as a kind of hill, in which the boards, architectural elements, once again become nature, topography.

The piece entitled Do pó ao pó [From Dust to Dust] (2016) is comprised of 25 compositions, each featuring a structure resembling those employed by many of the street vendors who occupy public spaces throughout Brazil, a rectangular board and a set of matchboxes. Each of these sets is carved entirely out of the wood of a different species of Brazilian tree. “From dust to dust” is an expression used in the 17th century by the philosopher-priest Antônio Vieira in his “Ash Wednesday Sermon,” in which he said, “Remember man, that dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.” This phrase indicates the cycle of material existence and, as such, the relationship between being and time. The fact that the matches are in full view and ready to be lit emphasizes their potential to be transformed into dust. The variety of woods used in this work, a result of the artist's longlasting collecting process, is a tribute to the coexistence of diversity.

Chão, like Do pó ao pó, lauds the indistinct powers of the present. While one places people in a state of doubt regarding the solidity and working conditions of the very floorboards upon which they walk, the other turns to dust our certainties about that which we see.

——Bernardo Mosqueira

Chão [Floor], 2004/2016. Slats of various woods, iron, steel cables and springs. Installation view at Galeria Bergamin, São Paulo, Brazil (2006).

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Do pó ao pó [From Dust to Dust], 2015-2016. Woods from the Brazilian biome that were and are marketed. 25 parts of 91 × 57 × 42 cm (each).

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Kathy Barry

1969, Christchurch, New Zealand. Lives in Auckland, New Zealand

For the 32nd Bienal, the Kathy Barry created a series of large-scale watercolors featuring strongly colored abstract patterns and a single-screen digital video. The works deal with the natural world outside the narrow reality of the human sensorium. With Barry's own concept they aim to depict and communicate “dimensional ecologies” in more-than-human realms: as such, her work departs from a quantum-understanding of the world defined by multiple dimensions and energy fields which cannot be seen, heard or felt, but demand a process of attunement in order to be picked up. Barry emphasises that her artistic method entails forgoing agency by having her conscious self step aside. That does not mean allowing her unconscious to take over (as in the Surrealist method of automatism), but to accede to an aspect of herself that exists at an energetic level in different dimensions, or in folds and pockets of time and space. From an art historical perspective the work of Kathy Barry maintains a certain affinity with the works and research of artists Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin, who explored abstraction at the edge of visuality and in relation to forms of transcendence.

Accessing alternative planes as a condition for creation, Barry's drawings anchor energetic frequencies, which could be encountered as flickering gateways to multidimensional subjectivities. The watercolor series 12 Energy Diagrams (2015-2016) develops an unfolding narrative that diaristically traces her evolutionary processes, and in doing so aims to open up spaces of potentiality for the viewer. Essentially diagrammatic, they operate as a form of notated choreography, corresponding to the sequence of movements represented by the artist in the video called 12-minute Movement (2016). This dance-like sequence engages physical movement to funnel and manipulate energy in the process of building and activating a “Merkaba energy field”. According to Jewish mystical tradition, the Merkaba energy field surrounds the human energy field and creates a spinning, high-frequency vortex of energy that allows human consciousness to access higher dimensions and other moments in time, thereby disrupting linear time. This rotation, close to the Sufi way of creating energy vortexes by spinning, also releases a power that is meaningful in the process of world-making.

In the schema of Barry's watercolors there is no separation between the representation of this energetic aspect and the activity that produces it, visualized diagrammatically. So, for instance, in the succession of vivid monochromes, two discrete clusters sit one above the other: signifying energetic tetrahedrons that are created by the channeling upwards of electromagnetic energy from the Earth, and the drawing down of energy from the Universe. When the two points of the tetrahedrons intersect they engender an amplification of energy and light, forming a rotating star-like formation – the Merkaba.

Kathy Barry's watercolours aim to work their effects on us by entering into an energetic relationship with our bodily frequencies and with our imagination of what lies outside of the narrowband of human perception. The expanded sense of subjectivity that the watercolours tap into carries a utopian aspiration: in this way, Barry's works are portents of possibility and hope, produced in a multidimensional field of time and space beyond the normal matrixes of power and control.

——Lars Bang Larsen

From the series 12 Energy Diagrams, 2015-2016. Watercolour and pencil on paper. 72 × 70 cm.

Kathy Barry 221

From the series 12 Energy Diagrams, 2015-2016. Watercolour and pencil on paper. 72 × 70 cm.

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Katia Sepúlveda

1978, Santiago, Chile. Lives in Cologne, Gemany and Tijuana, Mexico

Katia Sepúlveda's work is based on today's currents of thought self-defined as decolonial feminism and its trans-feminist and mestizo feminist offshoots, which transcend the political subject of woman and extend into white feminist theory, thus evoking not only the question of gender, but also of race, class and subjective practices. Through videos, performances, collages, drawings, photographs, posters and sculptures, the artist confronts the notion of normality with modern history and its forms of life, including the body, desire, language and work in this approach. Sepúlveda questions the construction of images and uncovers the patriarchal narratives of art history, exposing the arbitrary nature of the discourses that establish the truth of certain contents.

Dispositivo Doméstico [Domestic Device] (2007-2012/2016) is a series of collages made from issues of Playboy magazine published between 1953 and the 2000s. Of these collages, only eight have already been displayed to the public. At the 32nd Bienal, this work unfolds into two other new parts: a video piece and an installation. The video The Horizontal Man (2016) features fragments of a film in which Hugh Hefner appears years before funding Playboy magazine. The installation, on the other hand, is based on connected architectural floor plans: those of the White House, the Playboy Mansion and a single guy's apartment advertised in old issues of Playboy. These ads build the identity of a young man whose apartment is designed not only for sexual recreation, but also as a station for control and production of subjectivities contrary to those of the American nuclear family. By juxtaposing these three blueprints, Sepúlveda reveals the similar ways in which some interior spaces are configured, shaping languages and normative practices.

Significant for the artist, the idea of political fiction brings into focus the fact that the body, power and truth consist of socially produced ideas and that, even managed by colonial capitalism, they are susceptible to transformation.

The other piece presented is Feminismo Mapuche (2016), a second stage of the project initiated in 2013, in which the artist travels to Temuco, a city in southern Chile, and interviews five Mapuche women, questioning them about feminism and the place that they occupy in their community. Using Bolivian community feminism as a starting point, the artist wonders if there is such a thing as Mapuche feminism, thus also applying the term “feminism” to other struggles, other spaces for utterance from the glocal south.

At the 32nd Bienal, Sepúlveda promotes, in person, the dialogue between two activists – Margarita Kalfio, a representative of the Chilean Mapuche people and Maria Celina Katukina, from a Yawanawá community in Acre, Brazil. In this space of speech and enunciation for local communities, problems of translation and understanding are addressed and the limits of this dialogue are outlined. By calling these two voices, the artist takes on the role of researcher and promotes a discussion which demonstrates the vigor and uncertainties of this new feminist strand, which unfolds into the Latin-American context.

——Marilia Loureiro

Dispositivo doméstico [Domestic Device], 2007-2012. Mixed media collages. 70 × 140 cm (each).

Katia Sepúlveda 225

Dispositivo doméstico [Domestic Device], 2007-2012. Mixed media collages. 70 × 140 cm (each).

Katia Sepúlveda 227

Koo Jeong A

1967, Seoul, South Korea. Lives in Berlin, Germany, and everywhere

Koo Jeong A's production began in the early 1990s. Her interventions, drawings and installations result from a deep awareness of the five senses and demonstrate a way of thinking that is highly sensitive to the present time. By working with different scales and materials – from a crushed aspirin to the construction of skate ramps – each project approaches displacement as a method. The lines in her drawings, a fundamental element to understanding her production as a whole, are also lines of a different class: the lines separating the tangible and the intangible, the comprehensible and the unattainable. The strokes in her watercolours underline the parts composing the whole, revealing their interdependent relationship. This is also present in her installations, in which Jeong A carries out subtle interventions in specific elements of the site – such as smell, light and scale – in order to change our perception of space and time.

In her work ARROGATION (2016), commissioned for the 32nd Bienal, the artist built a skate park activated by photoluminescence. Through the use of pink – the colour of twilight, the moment when day turns to night – her work is also transformed, gradually emanating the light absorbed during the day. As an artwork that becomes urban apparatus and is incorporated into the park, Jeong A rearticulates Ibirapuera's social ecosystem by interfering in its landscape and creating a new space for the skateboarders who habitually use the marquise next to the Biennial Pavilion.

ARROGATION is the third work in Jeong A's oeuvre that involves the construction of a skate park. Similar works were EVERTRO (2015), in England, and OTRO (2012), in France, in which the design for the ramp resulted from the random exploration of the movements of a compass on a piece of paper. Its concave surfaces provided skateboarders with a different perception of the interaction between their bodies and the space. In ARROGATION, the shape emerged from a drawing in which two circles were overlapped, suggesting a continuous spiral. The pigment's photoluminescence mixed with the concrete gives the skate park's industrial material a live feel, in consonance with the landscape and the light. At night, the work invites us to experience a state of suspension, as the concrete surface appears uncertain, like a luminous crater in the dark.

In this sense, Jeong A sees nature in a phenomenological way. Time is one of her central themes. Either by using light to evoke different times of the day or by creating indefinite periods of contemplation, the impermanence of matter is always at play. This impermanence is also observed in her use of everyday objects. Their ephemeral presence reveals the ruins of the day, of matter that is transformed by use and the passing of time.

——Ulisses Carrilho

Project for ARROGATION, 2016. Installation.

Koo Jeong A 229

EVERTRO, 2015. Installation view at Everton Park, Liverpool, England (2015).

Koo Jeong A 231

Lais Myrrha

1974, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Actions of displacement and deviation serve as tools which Lais Myrrha uses to reflect on issues of a historical and social nature. Her research focuses on the workings of devices that organize, catalogue and measure – such as maps, flags, clocks and textbooks. These elements are understood as mechanisms by which forms of power and domination are implemented: the control of territory by countries and their representational symbology, and of time by a mercantile logic, the instruction of people by school education and the relationship between architecture and power. Lais Myrrha's interest in architecture also pervades her studies of ruins.

In Projeto Gameleira 1971 [Project Gameleira 1971] (2014) the artist addresses one of the least known and most marginalized chapters in the relationship between modern Brazilian architecture and the dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. It deals with an accident during the construction of the Gameleira Palace of Exhibitions, commissioned by the then governor of Minas Gerais, Israel Pinheiro, and designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer to commemorate the seven-year anniversary of the installation of the military regime. The collapse of part of the structure left 117 construction workers dead and missing. Both the celebratory function which this building was to serve and the accident itself are proof of dimensions that are widely overlooked, but indeed inherent to this architectural project and the oppressive, authoritarian system responsible for it. By reclaiming the image of the accident and depicting the destruction, the artist also discusses the potential ruin present in these projects, conceived of as monuments.

In Incerteza viva, this research is connected to the fact that, in our industrial and building tradition, the quantity of material utilized is practically the same as the ruin produced. Modern architecture in Brazil, while it occasionally refers to a vocabulary of indigenous and autochthonous cultures, does little to incorporate their construction methods and instruments. It is to create a comparative discussion and stress the idea of equivalence that Myrrha presents the work Dois pesos, duas medidas [Double Standard] (2016). The artist proposes the construction of two towers equal in size and volume, each making use of a variety of materials: one with elements often used in indigenous structures, the other with raw materials characteristic of modern Brazilian buildings.

The fact that the weight of the two towers is definitely uneven is clear from the nature of the materials.

However, the relationship between the measurements, seemingly equal, but listed as different, emerges as a question. The work's title – a popular Portuguese language expression – refers to the adoption of distinct criteria to judge two similar situations. Thus, by creating a comparison between the stacked materials, Myrrha demonstrates the inequality with which the indigenous construction tradition is treated, when compared with the modern. Despite the technology of the work methods, the intrinsic relationship with the community that will inhabit them, the sophistication in the use of natural resources, and even their ability to be incorporated back into nature when no longer necessary, these structures and the cosmologies of their creators are relegated to footnotes in Brazil's social and cultural history.

——Fábio Zuker

Geometria do acidente [Geometry of the Accident], 2014. Wood, drywall, latex paint and footbridge.

Installation view at Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil (2014).

Lais Myrrha 233

From the series Estados Intermediários [Transitional States], 2014- ongoing. 35 mm photography, inkjet printing, mineral pigment on cotton paper. 75 × 110 cm (each).

Lais Myrrha 235

1937-1987, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Leon Hirszman

Cantos de trabalho [Work Songs] (1975-1976) is a documentary short film trilogy directed by filmmaker Leon Hirszman, composed of Mutirão [Collective effort], Cacau [Cocoa] and Cana-de-açúcar [Sugarcane], that records rural workers singing in the towns of Chã Preta (Alagoas), Itabuna and Feira de Santana (Bahia) while working on the construction of taipa (rammed earth) houses and corn farms, and in the cocoa or sugarcane plantations, respectively. Observing through the camera, Hirszman uses a voiceover to point out that the labour songs emerged from the solidarity of people who come together to perform a common task, but they are songs that are at risk of disappearing.

A life-long militant of the Brazilian Communist Party, Hirszman was one of the founders of the Centre for Popular Culture (CPC) in Rio de Janeiro in 1961, the hub of so-called national-popular art. He was also part of the Cinema Novo movement, but his work was concerned with creating a language that was more accessible to the general public, condemning the contours of experimentalism, hermeticism and personalism of the vanguard.

He thought of his films as instruments for debate and political awareness that would serve as ideological input in struggles for social transformation. However, in Cantos de trabalho, Hirszman moves toward a film thought out as a device for ethnographic observation and the preservation of traditional ways of life.

Instead of a sociological critique focused on worker exploitation, he finds joy and communion in the same setting, while making a film that denounces this reality and raises awareness.

He considered labor to be the expression par excellence of the way of life of a group. This theme recurs in several of his films, especially in ABC da greve [ABC of Strike] (1979-1990). The strike movement and rural songs are both recorded as forms of activism and resistance by urban and rural workers, respectively.

On the other hand, unlike the disciplined and salaried work of the automobile factories in the Greater São Paulo region, in Cantos de trabalho the results of the collective activities are clearly shared amongst the community.

Hirszman is also interested in the musicality of the rural workers as an exercise in improvisation – he went on to film the urban rhythms in Partido alto (1976-1982) in a similar way. They are sounds that overlap each other, erratic and barely distinguishable from one another. There is no prior arrangement or planning of what they will sing, and it is the tempo of the collective activity that dictates the rhythms sung. He films the spontaneity of the collective songs, an antithesis of individual and authorial art. Thus, he records, in images, the creativity and experimentation of these workers.

In some parts, the singing is overlapped by the interpretation of the narrated texts, providing a possible explanation for the complexity of what is being witnessed. The imminent extinction of these songs seems to encompass, in addition to the cultural form itself, a kind of work that mobilizes gestures and customs related to mutual support and involvement with the land, undermined by modernization. In the end, it is not just the rural songs that die, but the communication and fraternity that give strength to a life of hardship.

——Guilherme Giufrida

Cantos de trabalho – Mutirão [Work Songs – Joint Effort], 1975. Documentary film. 12’. Video stills.

Leon Hirszman 237

Cantos de Trabalho – Cana-de-açucar [Work Songs – Sugar Cane], 1976. Documentary film. 10’.

Video stills.

Cantos de Trabalho – Cacau [Work Songs – Cocoa], 1976. Documentary film. 11’. Video stills.

Leon Hirszman 239

Lourdes Castro

1930, Funchal, Portugal. Lives in Ilha da Madeira, Portugal

When Lourdes Castro was fourteen years old, she experienced something that would change the course of her career: she was taken to a shadow theatre that, using a stretched white sheet, told the story of a woman's day-to-day life. Years later, the artist would create her own teatro de sombras. Among its records, one scene has a particularly interesting or unusual effect: the artist's shadow is duplicated using two lights; one of the shadows runs its “finger” over the outline of the other. This playful act poses a fundamental question: what is the matrix of the shadow? After all, the traced shadow looks like the shadow of a shadow and not the projection of a body.

Castro has studied shadows for many years, focusing more on the implied presence of bodies than on the absence of light. Translucent and coloured shadows on Plexiglas; shadows cast over cellulose; silhouettes projected on fabrics and walls; shadows created by objects. Her research began in serigraphy, the printmaking technique used for the KWY magazine by the homonymous group that Castro belonged to for many years. To them, adopting a name made up of letters alien to the Portuguese alphabet was synonymous with declaring the intention to evade the academic and social rules.

Printmaking is the source of many of the artist's investigations. Serigraphy is essentially a printed shadow, an aspect that brings up a range of issues: the establishment of an outline in the design; the relationship between background and figure; the two-dimensional character that a once three-dimensional object acquires. These are matters which ultimately refer to representation. Castro transgresses this very aspect of Western art through a work that prefers to present rather than represent. In lieu of a sign or image, the artist displays the world before the viewer's eyes. Thus, the work she considers to be a masterpiece is an area of garden-grove at her country house on the island of Madeira, where she moved to in 1983.

The series entitled Sombras à volta de um centro [Shadows Around a Center] (1980-1987) is set up like an herbarium – not of plants, but of shadows. Castro collects a variety of plant specimens from her garden using the following method: she places a piece of paper under the plant's vase and uses a pencil to trace its shadow. Therefore, the artist does not represent the plant, but rather reveals its trace, like a footprint that daffodils and tulips leave on paper.

Her extensive production of artist's books, consisting mostly of single copies, includes Un Autre livre rouge [Another Red Book] (1973-1974), produced in partnership with Manuel Zimbro. The work humorously borrows its title from The Little Red Book, a collection of quotations by Mao Tse-tung, and gathers a series of the most diverse images with a common denominator – the color red. The images merge into the red in such a way that even the most distant subjects start to reveal points of convergence: connotations of love and communism, of passion and revolution.

——Julia Buenaventura

Salsa, 1980. From the series Sombras à volta de um centro [Shadows Around a Center], 1980-1987.

China ink and cut out on paper. 61 × 39 cm.

Lourdes Castro 241

Details from Un Autre livre rouge [Another Red Book], 1973-1974. Cut-and-pasted paperboard.

47 × 35 cm (each).

Lourdes Castro 243

Luiz Roque

1979, Cachoeira do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

In Luiz Roque's body of work, the image is the fundamental raw material. The artist produces mainly videos and films, but also photographs and installations. His works demonstrate an intimacy with the artifices of cinematic language, while circulating in an artistic context. His first videos, produced in the early 2000s, feature abstract landscapes and uncertain human figures, in a speculative exercise on the places and conditions of the subject, in a suspended time – evoking both the past and the future. These works also give rise to questions surrounding the nature of the images, which include the use of analogue media like Super 8 and 16mm as resources to qualify the time, deconstructing the idea of the image as a precise register of things. Roque suggests doubt regarding stability and historical truths and seeks, in the gaps between appearance and reality, to develop counter-narratives.

His films and videos provide the opportunity for a climax – an expectation is created just to be frustrated shortly after, representing a kind of failed utopia, a question that the artist addresses confronting modernism. In Modern (2014) and O novo monumento [The new monument] (2013), Luiz Roque places modern sculptures in scene, treating them like characters and relating them to other bodies that dance and express themselves, activating sculptural thought and giving life to the works, removing them from their state as foreign bodies. In O novo monumento, the narrative takes place in a town of arid flatlands. We see a group of people who have a totem which resembles a sculpture created by Brazilian artist Amílcar de Castro, perversely silvery and shiny at the center of the image. In his more recent work, the artist has gone on to write scripts, create characters and dystopian scenarios, discussing not only art history, but also questions of gender, of a hybrid body, of an identity split by overlapping temporalities and systems of power. The film Ano branco [White Year] (2013), for example, contains ideas stemming from the queer studies of philosopher Paul B. Preciado (1970-), in a future where changes in gender are incorporated into the healthcare system, making the individual the only one responsible for choosing his or her gender.

HEAVEN (2016), a new film commissioned for the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, addresses the trans/ transexual/transgender issue, connecting it to the possibility or impossibility of exercising individual liberty. Set in the second half of the 21st century, HEAVEN depicts the state announcing the existence of a disease transmitted by saliva, an imminent epidemic in Brazil which puts the trans community at risk.

Activists reject this theory, claiming it is the invention of a new discriminatory group, in a déjà-vu of the strategies of social segregation common during the 1980s. The ambiguity between the information and the disputed narratives, which fluctuate between scientific information and oppressive political speculation, permeates the entire film. In an urban world driven by beauty and violence, people coexist with drones and other distinct apparatuses of vigilance. Sexual liberty and autonomy regarding the body, subjects of various topical issues in 2016, reappear in this future as devices for a discussion of desire and power.

——Camila Bechelany

HEAVEN, 2016. HD video, sound, color. Video still.

Luiz Roque 245

HEAVEN, 2016. HD video, sound, color. Video still.

Luiz Roque 247

1988, Auckland, New Zealand. Lives in Auckland

Luke Willis Thompson

The main artistic process employed by Luke Willis Thompson in his work is a displacement of objects or the public itself from their familiar places to other contexts, in an attempt to enable an understanding of the elements of the world as vestiges of the bonds of exploitation. His works inspire a state of investigative activity capable of denaturalizing the products of culture and finding crystallizations of problems of a moral, ethical and historical order. The artist's practice falls somewhere between identifying and marking the vestiges of historical, political and social traumas normally silenced by colonizing narratives.

In some of his works, he proposes situations in which visitors move throughout the city to examine, with the inquisitive attitude characteristic of art, that which is normally trivialized by the way things are assimilated.

In Inthisholeonthislandwhereiam (2012-2014), for example, Thompson evacuated an art gallery in Auckland, New Zealand, and offered the public free taxi rides to a suburban house in Epsom, which, in contrast, was filled with the material accumulations of a family of immigrant laborers. The domestic setting, whose inhabitants were mysteriously absent, presented the visitors' eyes with details indicating their social class and aboriginal origins. In Eventually they introduced me to the people I immediately recognized as those who would take me out anyway (2015), Thompson took visitors to the New Museum through the streets of Manhattan following a silent black performer, while unwittingly going through areas in which historical racial conflicts had taken place.

For the piece Sucu Mate / Born Dead (2016-ongoing), nine tombstones are lined up on the floor of the Bienal Pavilion. The tombstones were taken from an area of the state cemetery of Balawa, Lautoka, in Fiji that was designated for immigrants coming from India, China and Japan to work on sugar cane plantations.

Oftentimes, these immigrants were kept in conditions akin to slavery, eternally indebted to their masters.

There, the burial grounds are divided hierarchically according to race, ethnicity and social status. The erosion of the stones and the anonymity suggested by the absence of information about the dead denote the inhumane treatment they were subjected to, even in death.

At the 32nd Bienal, the tombstones function as cenotaphs, funereal monuments built far from their bodies' actual burial sites. The process of extracting the tombstones was informed to the local community and, according to an agreement made with the Fiji Museum Board of Trustees, the Fiji Museum and the National Heritage Trust, the objects will be restored and brought back to their original sites in September 2017. The artist will replant the headstones with a slightly modified system that includes flood-proofing and newly grown trees, possibly of sugar cane. The stipulations of this agreement are part of the piece's scope, and, with them, the artist confronts the relationship of colonial domination present in the international system of cultural institutions, questioning the ethical and moral bases of the recurring practice of keeping and exhibiting cultural assets that resulted from cultural pillage.

——Bernardo Mosqueira

Research for Sucu Mate / Born Dead, 2016. Old Balawa Estate Cemetery, Lautoka, Fiji.

Luke Willis Thompson  249

Sucu Mate / Born Dead, 2016- ongoing. Installation, concrete headstones. Installation view at Hopkinson Mossman, Aukland (2016).

Luke Willis Thompson  251

1965, New York, USA. Lives in New York

Lyle Ashton Harris

Lyle Ashton Harris began working as an artist in the mid 1980s, a period marked by significant changes in the cultural, political and social scene around the world – like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first global financial crisis of the information age, the emergence of the debate on themes like multiculturalism and globalization, the appearance and spread of the HIV virus and the subsequent activisms that rose around AIDS, especially how it affected queer and black communities. For Harris, the exploration of body politics, gender constructs and sexuality is, like in many artists of his generation, considered side by side with daily struggles of the communities affected by the disease.

The photographic medium is central to Harris's work, which also includes collages, videos, performances and installations. The world of pop culture, its icons and the underground culture are often featured in his work, with references to imagery of masculinity, race and gender. In the images created, assembled or manipulated by the artist, as well as performances, directed for the camera or otherwise, desire emerges as a political element.

The 32nd Bienal features Uma vez, uma vez [Once, once] (2016), an audiovisual installation made of photos and slides from the Ektachrome Archive (1986-1996). These photos are registers of the lives of people, communities and groups that resisted in the context of oppression, stigma and prejudice, in contrast to the economic upswing that came with the development and consolidation of the neoliberal system. In these images, we see people close to the artist – activists, lovers, as well as other artists from his generation who were part of the same circles. The records, gifted with a strong emotional charge, have a domestic and spontaneous quality, revealing a fleeting aesthetic.

By making these personal memories public, Lyle Ashton Harris attributes a political tone to the layer of affection which pervades these pictures. This political content is expressed through the visibility given to these characters, fundamental elements of the American counterculture, supplying another kind of representation and subverting the stigma projected on them by the hegemonic, white and heteronormative culture. In this sense, Uma vez, uma vez also functions as a living archive, a performative memory which resists deletion from history and the invisibility imposed on this community. The work pulsates in the present, pointing to the urgency of these memories, which are reconfigured in each context resisting the obscurity imposed by the dominant discursive forces.

And though he portrays a scene from decades ago, the issues of gender, race and sexuality addressed

by Lyle Ashton Harris remain alive in the debates regarding these groups to this day. The presence of Ektachrome Archive at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo introduces new questions in the light of the present day and the local context, where prejudice is tirelessly reiterated and new layers of exclusion are constantly created.

——Bruno Mendonça

Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs: Ektachrome Archive: Self Portrait, Los Angeles, early 1990s, 2015-2016. Photography.

Lyle Ashton Harris 253

Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs: Ektachrome Archive: Nan, Berlin, 1992, 2015-2016.

Photography.

Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs: Ektachrome Archive: Truce between Crips and Blood, Los Angeles, 1992, 2015-2016. Photography.

Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs: Ektachrome Archive: Malcolm X T-shirt, Rome, 1992, 2015-2016. Photography.

Lyle Ashton Harris 255

1961, São Paulo, Brazil. Lives in Berlin, Germany

Maria Thereza Alves

In Uma possível reversão de oportunidades perdidas [A Possible Reversal of Missed Opportunities] (2016), Maria Thereza Alves proposes an exercise in counterfactual history and imagination – presenting fictitious conferences with the presence of indigenous people that challenge the status quo imposed by the colonial context of Brazil. For this work, the artist invited indigenous college students to reposition events with issues related to their fields of study, including healthcare, engineering, education, science, art, culture and philosophy. In these conversations, the artist put into perspective the indigenous presence in the visual arts through readings of texts written by artists and indigenous theorists like Richard Hill (Cree), Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish) and others, unraveling conceptions of “indigenous art” and “indigenous aesthetics”; also discussed were such issues as metaphysics from the perspective of Vine Deloria (Dakota) and education, according to Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou iwi). From these came a series of posters, displayed in educational institutions throughout Brazil and presented as from meetings that did in fact happen. In this way, the work positions the imagination as a potent political tool.

Maria Thereza Alves's practice seeks to question the place of indigenous peoples and rural women through practices and discourses employed by academic institutions of knowledge. While studying in the United States in the 1970s, Alves acted as an activist for indigenous rights. She developed her earliest works in the 1980s, registering the community to which her family belonged and which at the time lived in conditions of poverty, as exemplified by the series Recipes for Survival (1983). At the 29th Bienal de São Paulo (2010), she presented a Portuguese translation of a Krenak-German dictionary from the 19th century and the film Iracema (de Questembert) (2009).

What is at play in Alves's work is not merely the question of whether indigenous subjectivation is capable of dealing with the advances of other cultures on their physical and cosmological territory. As a more urgent concern, we see the way by which this advancement is conducted, with the law falling squarely on the “naked life” of these populations – without any mediation of the subject or the knowledge. Consequently, the political struggle surrounding the self-definition of indigenous identities does not only call into question the “transformation of Indians into poor people,” into a labor force, but also the exercise of police-law perversely masquerading as judicial-political order. The indigenous people clearly demonstrate how the law besieges us, within democracies, never as subjects, but rather treated as objects in relation to it. Ours is always a “naked life” before the law.

Maria Thereza Alves also invites us to consider if, on the one hand, Amerindian culture is not based on any stabilizing idea of being, and, on the other, whether we cannot refuse other narratives, or myths, that enable “finding oneself” in the middle of the territory. Amerindian imagery cannot be captured or localized; it is the productive experiences of indetermination that make each encounter with the contingent a complete rearrangement of the subject. The opposite of this subjectivization would be that of consumer capitalism, stabilized upon a specular, super-invested and accumulating “ideal I” – which is not always displaced by institutionalized knowledge.

——Paulo Carvalho

Uma possível reversão de oportunidades perdidas [A Possible Reversal of Missed Opportunities], 2016.

Maria Thereza Alves 257

1975, Mexico City, Mexico. Lives in Berlin, Germany and Mexico City

Mariana Castillo Deball

Mariana Castillo Deball's artworks are the result of her multidisciplinary investigations in fields such as archaeology, literature and science. By appropriating methodologies from different areas of knowledge, Deball creates installations, sculptures, videos, photographs, publications, performances and drawings as possible ways to understand the orchestration of historical narratives. The artist facilitates objects, fictions, stories and methodologies, and often works in museums and archives in order to understand how certain narratives determine the imaginary so she can uncover alternative readings. In her practice, objects function as performance instruments, able to reveal a territory of iconographic constructions that convey how time becomes history. In her works, Deball endeavours to give back to time – typically seen as definite – a certain degree of uncertainty, strangeness and fiction. Thus the artist obliterates the boundaries between cultural objects and natural elements, human and non-human, organic and artificial, factual and fictional.

At the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Deball presents the installation Hipótese de uma árvore [Hypothesis of a Tree] (2016), a large-scale suspended spiral structure made of bamboo. Its shape resembles a phylogenetic genealogic tree, which she uses to illustrate the evolutionary relationship between species. The installation invites the visitors to walk through the spiral labyrinth and encounter the records of species and landscapes from different eras, following the passage of time and their transformation and extinction. We can see the physical similarities and differences in the 97 frottage pieces made on Japanese paper, a method used in palaeontology to record fossils and stone formations by rubbing pencil or other materials over a piece of paper placed on top of them. The image matrices are fossils and geologic materials found in Brazilian archaeological sites. In this project, the artist worked in partnership with the Institute of Geosciences of the University of São Paulo, in São Paulo, and Geopark Araripe, in Ceará.

Deball organised the frottages into three categories: fossils from existing institutional collections; images made from landscapes in which you see only the geological marks; and façades and urban elements of the city of São Paulo. Combining methodologies from phylogenetics and palaeontology – two sciences devoted to understanding the past through the analysis of fossils or the study of evolution –, the artist raises questions regarding the impact of time, the notion of life and the categorisation employed to distinguish beings.

The spiral suggests continuity – without a beginning or end – that can be expanded both ways ad infinitum.

By juxtaposing human constructions, animal and plant fossils, memories of natural and urban landscapes, and joining them under the same storyline, the artist puts the ideas of time and species into perspective, proposing new narratives about the history of extinction, survival and transformation.

——Fábio Zuker

Detail of Uncomfortable Objects, 2012. Plaster, pigments, stones, shells, masks, fabric, glass, wood, clay, and diverse objects mounted on a steel frame.

Mariana Castillo Deball 259

You Have Time to Show Yourself Before Other Eyes, 2014. Installation view at 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014).

Estas ruinas que ves [These Ruins You See], 2006. Installation view at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico (2006).

Mariana Castillo Deball 261

Maryam Jafri

1972, Karachi, Pakistan. Lives in New York, USA and Copenhagen, Denmark

The construction of imaginaries and devices based on narratives of power is one of the central themes in Maryam Jafri's work. The artist's production includes videos, installations, photos and texts, which often use the sensibility of drama to question their own creation. Jafri articulates dates, images and objects originated from archives and mass culture in an effort to investigate structures through which certain narratives remain hegemonic or end up in failure.

In some of her most exemplary pieces of work, such as the short film Mouthfeel (2014), Jafri explores the relationship between narratives produced by publicity and marketing and the development of tastes, consumer trends and industrial production. In the film, a couple – a senior brand manager, the husband, and a leading food technologist, the wife – are talking in the back seat of a limousine about products recently developed by the food company they both work for. An argument is triggered when the wife raises her concerns about the negative impact on health of the company's latest launch, information that it is the husband's job to omit. The conversation between the characters is interrupted by “commercial breaks” featuring large corporations, revealing images that evoke wellbeing and health but that are as artificial as the affective relationship between the couple. By employing irony and an aesthetic that alludes to TV series, the film raises questions on how capitalist narratives have been shaping our subjectivity.

Product Recall: An Index of Innovation (2014-2015), a project presented at the 32nd Bienal, evokes the failure of big industries and marketing agents in establishing perceptions, creating desires and inducing demands. In an installation that includes objects, photos and texts, Jafri presents, in an almost museumlike way, the packaging of food products that were removed from market circulation by their companies, either because of poor sales or lack of consumer appeal, such as Pepsi's baby bottle, or unfortunate and unexpected coincidences, such as Ayds candy, which was a strong seller in the 1970s until their market dried up when AIDS became a worldwide epidemic, in the early 1980s. The failed relationship between supply and demand shows how socioeconomic contexts and consumption habits are interlinked, in the same way there's a two-way relationship between desire and power, mediated by the product.

Furthermore, the collection of these objects question the role of a mass of anonymous subjectivities (brought together under the questionable idea of consensus) in the construction of a rejection illustrated by the absence of these products in the market as a manifestation of a collective desire. These failed items in the “innovation index,” unsustainable as products, are exhibited as odd fictions. At the same time, they expose the fragile, even comical, face of a capitalism that uses the concept of evolution to emulate possibilities of choice. In this sense, labels, images and brands function as indicators of the dubious relationship between consumption and subjectivity, demand and ways of life.

——Cecília Bedê

Product Recall: An Index of Innovation, 2014-2015. Installation composed of framed photos, texts, plinths and objects. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2015).

Maryam Jafri 263

Product Recall: An Index of Innovation, 2014-2015. Installation composed of framed photos, texts, plinths and objects. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2015).

Maryam Jafri 265

Michael Linares

1979, Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Michael Linares works with installation, video, painting and sculpture. His oeuvre often introduces ontological questions proposing a reflection on the way in which an object can become art or cease to be art. Linares investigates artistic narratives that use appropriation by revisiting other authors' ideas and reactivating them in a good-humoured or critical way. His actions also extend to the diffusion and democratisation of access to Western art theory, with the creation of a site (La sonora, 2010), in which he plays the audio of important art criticism and history texts translated to Spanish.

Museu do Pau [Museum of the Stick] (2013-2016), exhibited at the 32nd Bienal, displays a collection of sticks with multiple meanings: weapons, power-imposing instruments, prostheses, and objects used to drive, eat, lean against, conduct, hurt, make fire with, support or play. These material references are also present in the video Uma história aleatória do pau [An Aleatory History of The Stick] (2014), which is also part of the installation. The duration of 53’ is the same as the world-record longest time anyone has ever balanced a stick on one finger. These works stem from questioning the nature of art. By establishing that a metaphor can be a basic unit in any artistic product, Linares searches through archaic manifestations to find the material evidence for the relationship between the production of tools and symbolic creations. His research deals with experimental aspects derived from the use of objects, as well as historical data, to build a narrative around a specimen of so-called occasional tools, found at the frontier between things collected in nature, utensils and important cultural symbols.

For the production of the video Uma história aleatória do pau, the artist employed the archaeological method of prospection normally used to recognise the surface of an area. This was applied to Internet sites in the same way as it is used for digging sites. With extracts from videos related to different ways of using sticks, collected from YouTube, Linares created an overlapping montage, organising the fragments on image layers. The actions performed with the objects emphasise the potential energy preserved in the museum's artefacts, which is reactivated as soon as they are placed in specific contexts and for specific purposes.

The creation of Museu do Pau refers not only to ready-mades but also the collecting practices of Marcel Broodthaers' Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968). Linares' gesture shows that artists are not indifferent to the aesthetic organisation systems or classifying norms that guide museum work. As well as being a collector and archivist, the artist is also an anthropologist, as an interpreter of culture and its objects. In the museum, objects are taken away from their ethnic, ritualistic, artistic, sportive and aesthetic contexts in order to be articulated in a new space. By placing them under the aura of the museum or private collection, Linares deactivates their original properties, recovers or adds aesthetic value and gives them almost magical powers, whose symbolic value goes beyond their use value.

——Hortência Abreu

Museu do Pau [Museum of the Stick], 2013-2016. Installation composed of various materials collected by the artist. Installation view at Casa del Sargento, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2015).

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Museu do Pau [Museum of the Stick], 2013-2016. Installation composed of various materials collected by the artist. Installation views at Casa del Sargento, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2015).

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1973, Tel Aviv, Israel. Lives in Tel Aviv

Michal Helfman

Michal Helfman's oeuvre includes performance, installation, drawing, film and sculpture. Her research has been developed amidst the prolific contemporary dance scene in Tel Aviv. Capitalism as a totalitarian system and economy as a science of exchange, production, distribution and consumption of goods and wealth are her conceptual premises. She stages situations in which the idea of value and workforce are performed by the body. These are issues explored, for example, in CHANGE (2013), an installation in which the artist transforms the gallery's façade into a bureau de change. Visitors interested in exchanging money are led to the exhibition room where currencies from countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Israel and Egypt are available for exchange. The division between real experiences, understood as the truth, and the encounter with representation, as fiction, is a tenuous line in constant tension in Helfman's work.

In this sense, the film Running out of History (2015-2016), exhibited at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo starts with the character G. acting out the moment in which she reveals her identity as an Israeli activist, and not Syrian as her colleagues had believed. G. works for a humanitarian institution, and even though it is assumed she is working for the Syrians, her new identity reconfigures the narrative: her name, occupation and things she had said are now false, subscribing her to a new socio-political landscape.

Built out of dialogues, the film script was based on real interviews with Israeli activist Gal Lusky, in which she said “the smuggler finds alternative paths within existing orders.” The NGO founded by Lusky works in contexts where local political regimes make the access to international humanitarian aid very difficult.

These are populations facing extreme situations, such as natural disasters, geopolitical conflicts, civil wars and deep-rooted tensions. Lusky's work aims to discuss practices such as smuggling in the context of activism, a theme also very dear to Helfman. Artists – like smugglers – are able to promote exchanges between unsuspicious agents, connecting contexts and realities that would not normally be related.

It is also through smuggling, performed by her main character, that Helfman intercepts a 3D printer intended to create prostheses in Syria to manufacture a pair of dices. Each dice produced by the artist comes with the following words printed on each side: “We will not forget” or “We will not forgive”, largely referring to the Holocaust but also attributed to Barack Obama at the time of Osama bin Laden's death.

Turned into a game of chance, the words are shuffled to create other narratives. The artist examines how these sentences have been used as a subterfuge for acts of violence condoned and promoted by governments. Either by using the mathematical probability of the dice or other ambiguous narratives, Helfman's works look at spaces of social negotiation, when conceptual and operational strategies are incorporated by the fields of art and activism.

——Ulisses Carrilho

Running Out of History, 2015-2016. Video. 21’. Video still.

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Running Out of History, 2015-2016. Video. 21’. Video stills.

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Misheck Masamvu

1980, Mutare, Zimbabwe. Lives in Harare, Zimbabwe

Mischeck Masamvu's work developed from explorations in the mediums of drawing, sculpture and painting.

Generally produced in large or medium scale, the artist's oil paintings contain a physicality whose effect seems to defy the body of the specatator. Masamvu's images can be experienced from a distance, but also invite viewers to a detailed contemplation of their narrative and formal proposals. His figurative studies present representations of human anatomy, animals, objects and portions of landscapes. In his paintings, the body is presented in a fragmented manner. Far from any sense of tranquility, the artist places his characters in scenes that convey agony, immobilization and discontinuity. Masamvu tends to utilize a large amount of colors which add movement and vigor to his images, with rough brushstrokes that reveal the energy of his constructions. Despite the brightness of the palette used, the unquietness of the human experience is always present.

Masamvu's artistic practice emerges as a form of an expression that conveys and discusses the restlessness of a generation born in the era of Zimbabwe's independence in the 1980s. In his paintings one witnesses this unrest as it intensified alongside an unfolding political situation, in which Zimbabwe's bitterly contested land redistribution question took a more forceful direction, two decades after the country's independence. The dismembered bodies and fractured landscapes in his work remind us of the intricacies of the post-colonial project. Nothing seems immediately resolved. Using layers of colours as a way of suggesting the layering of time, Masamvu brings to the fore questions pertaining to exiled bodies, the erosion of the family and the self and the loss of economic stability, all of which reflect a precarious near future. This precarious future is captured in Masamvu's poem/manifesto titled “Still” (2016), denoting a stagnant situation and, at the same time, serenity. The poem/manifesto acts as a repertoire of realities and contradictions inherent in post-colonial Zimbabwe, all which find their way on Masamvu's canvases. To a larger extent, the verses capture a collective pain experienced by black people in many parts of the world.

For the 32nd Bienal, Masamvu has created two large paintings entitled Spiritual Host (2016) and Midnight (2016). The paintings feature abstract forms in which human limbs and supernatural beings emerge from a cacophony composed of a decaying natural environment overlaid with elements from the subconscious world. In Spiritual Host, an ancestral figure lies vertical, choking from a polluted political atmosphere. In Midnight, an arm with a clenched fist forces itself out of the rubble of uncertainty, reminding us that the so-called “post-colonial condition” has yet to come.

——Raphael Fonseca

Poem Still by Misheck Masamvu, 2016.

Still crying in the rain Still hiding pregnancies Still holding the wound Still hiding the scar Still waiting Still burying evidence Still running away from the police Still pointing at failing states Still in prison Still filling the potholes Still standing in the queue Still border jumping Still flipping channels Still under the knife Still unpaid Still still Still masturbating Still evading tax Still oppressed Still hungry Still loving 'n hating Still rockin' second hand Still stuck Still unemployed Still vending Still resentful Still on drugs Still at mum's house Still on the toilet seat Still hearing voices Still asking “Hanziyi?�

Still revolting Still in darkness Still a hypocrite Still hammered Still losing Still ignoring you Still back biting Still seeking asylum Still digging trenches Still under the spell Still in hurting Still bitching Still on death bed

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Heavy Weight Champion, 2016. Oil on canvas. 170 x 260 cm.

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Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi

1943, Marapyane, South Africa. Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa

Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi has been working as an artist since the late 1960s, when she began experimenting in different mediums including painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture. Sebidi's work is born out of research processes involving spending time and conversing with older members of her community. It brings together traditional skills such as those of house painting practiced by women of her clan and lessons learned from her peers and teachers on the various paths down which her life has taken her. Her questions unravel from complexities experienced within a racially divided political landscape that became riddled by uneven economic realities, land expropriations and disappearances that have led to fractured families and communities.

The 1980s in South Africa were a period of intense political turmoil; the government-imposed curfews had escalated and a state of emergency had been declared in order to neutralize political dissent (1985-1990).

This unrest is evident in works created by Sebidi during that time. In a pastel drawing titled The Child's Mother Holds the Sharp Edge of the Knife (1988-1989), the artist highlighted the central role of women within a family structure and, by extension, community. The burden carried by women in the context of a repressed society is one of Sebidi's recurring themes. In the drawing, a woman surrounded by figures cramped into a space pulls a chain emerging from above in a gesture that indicates an intention to dismantle it. The figures' fragmented faces seem to speak of a “double consciousness” [W.E.B. du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903] which in this instance is symptomatic of an in-between-ness black people were forced to operate within; between the city and the countryside, between knowing oneself to be one way but being seen in another, “two unreconciled strivings.”

In Sebidi's recent solo exhibition They Are Greeting (Johannesburg and Cape Town, 2016) the artist returned to her enquiries about intergenerational relationships. The body of work addresses lost ancestral knowledge systems and proposes a renewal of traditional forms of spiritual guidance through exemplary masculinities and reconsidered relationships with the controversial question of land redistribution. Here, the post-apartheid “double consciousness” becomes even more convoluted and reveals an undefined soul-eating “enemy” that needs to be fought from within.

For the 32nd Bienal Sebidi presents Tears of Africa (1987-1988), a collaged black and white diptych that represents a rupture in the artist's career. The artist takes the occasion of the Bienal as an opportunity to consolidate lessons contained in Tears of Africa, a work that compresses historical conflicts dating from slavery to the present. Her new work, created during an artist-in-residency period in Salvador, Bahia, proposes a dialogue with Tears of Africa and extends it to a dialogue that connects Brazil and its historical, spiritual and symbolic relationship to Africa. Sebidi's confrontation with a kind of collective amnesia led her to rummage through archives, memories, religious practices and present-day struggles that have their roots in the colonial era and the Atlantic slave trade. Created approximately three decades apart, the two works hang facing each other in a dialogue that seems to bear the accumulations of a lifetime.

——Gabi Ngcobo

Mangwano Olshara Thipa Kabhaleng [The Child's Mother Holds the Sharp Side of the Knife], 1988-1989. Acrylic on canvas. 186.5 × 280 cm.

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Tears of Africa, 1987-1988. Mixed media, charcoal, pastel on paper. 195 × 195 cm (each).

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Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

1978, Guatemala City, Guatemala. Lives in Berlin, Germany and Guatemala City

Moving between engravings, drawings and performances, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa confronts imagery and historical narratives with personal memory, testimony and mythology. His work, in dispensing with an archival or documental character, exposes the relationship with the past, especially that of Latin America, through the transformations experienced by the artist and through reference to myths, which give the work an atmosphere of strangeness approaching the absurd and the fantastic.

Memory is revealed not only as a reaction to temporal events, but also as a force that shapes the works, becoming literally sculptural and visual. In his actions, the body and, in specific cases, that of the artist himself, is of central importance, updating occurrences or acting as painting and painter (Abstracción azul [Blue abstraction], 2012 and Rainbow Action, 2011). Occasionally, the body also becomes part of the sculpture (Breve história de la arquitectura en Guatemala [Brief History of Architecture in Guatemala], 2010-2013) or calls upon the spectator to participate in it (Beber y leer el arco iris [Drinking and Reading the Rainbow], 2011).

Corazón del espantapájaros [Heart of the Scarecrow], (2015) is a series of aquatints inspired by the tragicomedy of the same name by Hugo Carrillo, written in 1962 and staged in Guatemala in 1975 by students at the Universidad Popular. The play was censored due to its questioning character and the mention of the figure of a government minister in the 1975 version, which resulted in violent actions and threats against the participants that culminated in one death. Many of those involved in the staging of the play took up guerrilla activities, or were forced to go into hiding or exile. Ramírez-Figueroa's series was produced as an attempt to imagine the scenes from 1975 based on eyewitness accounts from his uncles, given the lack of photographic records. Although they also show similarities with illustrations from children's stories, the nine images possess a somber, perhaps daunting character, revealing a dark landscape and eyes that gaze out at us from a black background. They seem to reflect a childhood world that has come brutally up against tales of violence and censorship. For the artist, that year's repression had a profound effect on the way theater was done from that point forward in Guatemala, the repercussions of which may still be felt today.

In the 32nd Bienal, Ramírez-Figueroa revisits Carrillo's play to come up with a project of the same name.

The artist invited writer Wingston González to pen a new work of fiction based on some of El corazón del espantapájaros's original elements: an oligarch, a dictatorial president, a soldier, a cardinal and a series of scarecrows. In partnership with artisans, costume designers and actors, Ramírez-Figueroa created masks, a wardrobe and props, which are present in the exhibition in a state of repose. Over the course of the 32nd Bienal, these objects will be activated by the actors, who will reenact passages from the play in the pavilion and in Ibirapuera Park. With this project, Ramírez-Figueroa not only uses the memory of the censorship, but also revisits the contents of the play itself, vital to the history of theater and of the political resistance on the part of the artistic left in Guatemala.

——Hortência Abreu

Sketch for costume Corazón del Espantapájaros [Heart of the Scarecrow], 2015-2016. Pencil on paper.

29.7 × 21 cm.

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Corazón del Espantapájaros [Heart of the Scarecrow], 2016. Aquatints. 37 × 29 cm.

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1968, Kaunas, Lithuania. Lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 1966, Vilnius, Lithuania. Lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas

The artist duo highlight the investigative powers of art as a form of aesthetic and political experience, promoting collisions and ruptures in the social space in which they operate. Born and raised in Lithuania, the two artists' life trajectories have been underlined by the failure of socialism. The rearrangement of post-soviet societies favoured a unique space-time relation in their artistic work, which mirrors the ambiguity experienced in their place of origin, of belonging and displacement, of trauma and change, amongst other dichotomies.

With this in mind, some aspects of the duo's work deserve attention. Firstly, they have developed an idea of project that is not concerned with authorship or an end in itself, but with establishing a guiding work methodology. Therefore, they think of and design devices aimed at mobilising communities, promoting collaborative actions. Moreover, by exploring technologies and fomenting research, they incorporate several fields of scientific knowledge. They also radicalise architectural thought and, consequently, its ways of operating and constructing. Ultimately, they strive to establish a suspended place, a ‘between’.

Since proposing an alternative space in Vilnius called Jutempus (1993-1997) and carrying out a set of projects – from Transaction (2000-2004) to Pro-test Lab (2005) and Villa Lithuania (2007) –, the duo have become mindful of a notion of space described by philosopher Michel Foucault as based on the structural triad ‘space, knowledge and power’. Fully aware of the predatory nature of the current global environment, their more recent research led to the project entitled Zooetics (2014) which aims to establish a new platform of survival and coexistence between all species, guided by a political and ethical reorganisation, paving the way to what they call “bio-mimesis”.

The configuration of this project at the 32nd Bienal is the construction of Psychotropic House: Zooetics Pavilion of Ballardian Technologies (2015-2016), inspired by the fiction of J.G Ballard's Vermilion Sands (1971). Here, the duo – in collaboration with writer Tracey Warr and researcher Viktorija Siaulyte – define new ways of representing the world and establish brand new work methodologies, according to which art and science's production of knowledge become interchangeable. The artists make use of biodiversity's specific dynamics – in this case, the farming of fungi as a technological and construction apparatus – through the systematisation of a collaborative action amongst all members of society, which takes place in a lab built in the exhibition space itself. In this place of experience, the aim is to work towards new possible prototypes or interfaces that, in principle, originate from nature, maximising and integrating new alternative ways of coexisting ecologically.

In Zooetics, instead of being contaminated by device models and controls, the duo propose the inversion of the perverse logic of the technological apparatus, re-establishing in the complexity of the natural world, a bordering and mutant place: a temporary artistic space governed autonomously in which reality is tensioned and fictions and dissent are created to ultimately formulate a meta-politics.

——Diego Matos

Detail of Psychotropic House: Zooetics Pavilion of Ballardian Technologies, 2015/2016. Installation composed of mycelium, coffee, agricultural waste, metal and PVC. Installation view na XII Baltic Triennial, CAC, Vilnus, Lithuania (2015)

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(This page, top, and opposite page) Psychotropic House: Zooetics Pavilion of Ballardian Technologies, 2015-2016. Installation composed of mycelium, coffee, agricultural waste, metal and PVC. 350 × 2000 cm. Installation view at XII Baltic Triennial, Vilnus, Lithuania (2015).

(Above) Zooetics Pavilion: Mycomorph Lab, 2015-2016. Installation composed of mycelium, coffee, agricultural waste, metal and PVC. 350 × 2000 cm. Installation view at A Million Lines, Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, Poland (2015).

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2016, São Paulo, Brazil

Oficina de imaginação política

Oficina de Imaginação Política [Workshop on Political Imagination] is an initiative that emerges with the 32nd Bienal, considering the social, political and cultural context in which both are inserted. A group of collaborators – Rita Natálio, Valentina Desideri, Jota Mombaça (Monstra Errátika), Thiago de Paula, Diego Ribeiro and Amilcar Packer – will come together to work on an installation (the Oficina) inside the Bienal Pavilion, during the 3 months of exhibition, relying on the contribution of speakers invited for debates, presentations and public workshops. Amilcar Packer, the agent of the action departs from some inflections on the chosen terms – workshop, imagination and politics – and the practices raised by them. Through open discussions, he proposes the unraveling of conceptual territories and the formulation of tools for interventions in the public sphere (city, park and media) during the period of the Bienal.

The term workshop retrieves the idea of studio and craft, uniting learning, research and production within one space. It also reinforces the importance of the physical working space and conviviality in the pavilion.

The objective is to find renewed tactics to reformulate questions and create other narratives, rethink the way in which exhibitions are associated to public spaces and empower them as instruments of ethical and experimental intervention in the world. It also seeks to investigate the word imagination (image and/ as action), mainly through performing activities, namely, actions that can infiltrate the city to relocate the understanding of categories such as “human” and “politics” through the idea of protocols for the future.

In face of a current conservative configuration of the world, the Oficina de Imaginação Política points to the urgency of new articulations and ways to subvert macro-political capture and control systems through autonomous collective actions.

Amilcar Packer has been an exhibiting artist since the 1990s. For a few years now, he has been engaged in debating, in public presentations, the boundaries between the semantic fields – especially between art, education and politics – in short, he questions concepts, incorporating them and testing them in the public sphere. This desire for desubjectification, as he understands his recent creative process, led him to develop projects related to the production of knowledge – such as, for example, Doris Criolla (since 2011), Máquina de escrever [Typewriter] (2013, with Manuela Moscoso and part of the Capacete Entretenimentos program) and P.A.C.A.: Programa de Ações Culturais Autônomas [Autonomous Cultural Actions Program] (since 2014, with Suely Rolnik, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz and Tatiana Roque) where research gives rise to residencies, classes, researcher orientation, strolls, meetings, conversations, meals and tours.

Packer defends the production of knowledge as an artistic perspective and art as a territory conducive to ethical experimentation, that is, a kind of critical and experimental view, that seeks to invent specific devices to conceive and act upon the world. He understands conversation as a practice and oral vector for thought, an idea present in other cultural traditions, and as a means of promotion and affirmation of democratic participation in post-colonial contexts. The purpose of Oficina de Imaginação Política is to offer these temporary states for dynamics that are less hierarchical, in which the construction of horizontality, critical debate, coexistence, mutual learning and political fables predominate.

——Guilherme Giufrida

Research for Oficina de Imaginação Política, 2016.

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2005, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

OPAVIVARÁ!

Opavivará! is an artist collective from Rio de Janeiro that makes use of everyday elements to modify the dynamics of the spaces in which they are found. The group's work is characterized by the occupation of sites of conflict in the city, using interactive objects which are able to congregate all sorts of public around them. Based on the conversations, disputes and pacts created out of these encounters, the actions of Opavivará! temporarily dismantle antiseptic and normative social arrangements established by discourses of power and point to other possible forms of interaction.

The collective creates interventions in everyday objects and habits, altering their ordinary functions and proposing other purposes that require us to unlearn what we take for granted. In this way, we see office chairs grouped together and placed in a circle turn into a merry-go-round (Carrossel breique, 2015), beach towels transform into a space for slogans of protest (Cangaço, 2013), a habitually private setting of the kitchen extended to the public square (OPAVIVARÁ! Ao vivo!, 2012), a loud and clear karaoke session in the middle of an art fair (Sofakaraokê, 2015) and others. These objects are created both through the use of the idea of collage, which consists in the addition or juxtaposition of one or more everyday items, as well as their displacement, separating certain practices from their most common locales and inserting them into other contexts. By reconfiguring day-by-day elements, Opavivará! is able to break the automatism of the routine itself.

But the creation of such objects takes on meaning at the moment they are brought to the public and inhabited by participants, resulting in situations, encounters and experiences. In other words, the work does not consist in the objects per se, but rather in what is created out of them. And while it is not known beforehand what the encounter between these ephemeral communities of unknown participants will produce, suffice it to say that the actions of Opavivará! attempt to short-circuit the values, protocols and consensuses of systems in the locales in which they operate, whether this be a gallery, a city square or a museum.

For the 32nd Bienal, the collective presents a set of mobile devices that interact with the public, circulating inside the exhibition pavilion, the park and, occasionally, specific spots throughout the city. As an extension of the project Eu <3 camelô (2009), the work Transnômades (2016) reflects on the conditions of the city's street vendors: their situation which alternates between law and improvisation, makeshift resourcefulness as a means of livelihood and permanent migration. In this context, Opavivará! redefines the man-powered wheeled carts, conferring upon them uses based on the needs of the vendors and cart operators during work breaks, transforming these devices at times into a bed for nap time, a cabin where one can sleep, a table for lunch, a library of books found in the trash or even a portable sound system. As such, the collective seeks to establish a direct dialogue with the forms of expression of street commerce and make these portable devices available to be appropriated, used and activated by all.

——Marilia Loureiro

Transnomaden [Transnomads], 2016. Relational mobile device. Action at Projeto Brasil Musonturm, Frankfurt, Germany (2016).

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Transnomaden [Transnomads], 2016. Relational mobile device. Action at “Projeto Brasil”, Musonturm, Frankfurt, Germany (2016).

Research for Transnômades, [Transnomads] (2016). Collectors carts of the Cooperativa Glicério and CEASA carriers.

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1928, São Paulo, Brazil-1976, Stockholm, Sweden

Öyvind Fahlström

Öyvind Fahlström spent his childhood in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In July of 1939, his Scandinavian parents sent him to Stockholm to visit family: World War II began on September 1 and he was unable to return home. In 1959, he was one of Sweden's official representatives to the 5th Bienal de São Paulo with the painting Ade-Ledic-Nander II (1955), which won honourable mention. On this occasion his work was summarised in the catalogue as “more or less Surrealist.” However it is important to know that Fahlström was a concrete poet as much as a surrealist. He has been credited as the first to use the term concrete poetry in his 1953 text, “Hätila ragulpr på fåtskliaben: Manifest för konkret poesi” [Hipy Papy Bthuthdth Thuthda Bthuthdy. Manifesto for Concrete Poetry], which borrows its title from A.A. Milne's Winniethe-Pooh. In Incerteza Viva, the genealogy of his Concretism was organized in collaboration with Sharon Avery-Fahlström.

Brazilian artists Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari were inspired by modernist architecture for their Concretist project to pare down Portuguese language and created visual poems to be seen like painting. Fahlström's point of departure was Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrete. He created sound poems to be read aloud like music and laboured to make the Swedish language more complex.

Den svåra resan (The Difficult Journey, 1954), here performed by a voice choir, is an early example of concrete poetry that takes language as its material and distills it into syllables Mao-Hope March documents a 1966 performance in New York City. Friends recruited by the artist carry placards with photos of Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Hollywood comedian Bob Hope. An interviewer asks passersby if they are happy. This can be read as a reference to the US Declaration of Independence which declares “the pursuit of Happiness” an unalienable right.

Fahlström invented variable painting in 1962 shortly after moving to New York: painted elements could be attached to a panel with magnets or string or inserted in slits in the panel, and could theoretically be arranged in any configuration. By 1965 he had extended variability to a three-dimensional structure, Sitting…Blocks. The vocabulary of character-signs that the artist developed for and in the Sitting… series refers, among other sources, to Batman, the masked avenger fighting corruption in Gotham City. Another variable painting, Packing the Hard Potatoes (Chile 1: Last Months of the Allende Regime. Words by Plath and Lorca) (1974), falls somewhere between Surrealism and Concretism, and between art and politics, his tribute to Salvador Allende's short-lived socialist government in Chile integrates images and text on shapes derived by automatic drawing.

Invited to show his work in later Bienals de São Paulo, Fahlström refused all invitations extended during Brazil's military dictatorship. His deep attachment to his birthplace prevented him from ever returning to it under these circumstances.

——Lars Bang Larsen & Sharon Avery-Fahlström

Garden – A World Model, 1973. Acrylic and India ink on vinyl, wood dowels, 16 flowerpots, potting soil and green carpet. Dimensions variable, 127 × 152.4 × 228.6 cm approx. Installation view at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (macba) (2015).

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Section of World Map – A Puzzle, 1973. Silkscreen (5 colors) on vinyl, magnets and enamel on metal panel; edition of 100 printed by Styria Studio, New York (Adolph Rischner, master printer) and published by Multiples, Inc., New York. 81.3 × 50.8 × 0.6 cm.

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Park Mc Arthur

1984, North Carolina, USA. Lives in New York, USA

Park McArthur's work belongs to a continuum of questioning and dialogue around the processes that configure the social spaces where we live, exist and define ourselves as subjects. Her production is an organic flow of writing, teaching and sound experimentation. Her interventions, installations and performances reveal the categories and structures that organise our bodies and shape subjectivity, as well as question the possibilities of expression created by them.

Her work examines the materialisation, in everyday objects and social spaces, of the politics that govern the movement of individual and collective bodies. Industrial materials, their current use and appropriation are combined and displayed in installations and interventions in order to call into question the relationship between synthetic, aseptic and regular matter and the organic body, unequal and replete with fluids. Her actions occupy bordering zones and uncover tensions and negotiations of power between inside and outside, public and private, eroding discourses of accessibility, inclusion, protection and care. Doors, ramps, stairs, beds, pyjamas, baths, rubber protectors, stainless steel handles, shower chairs, waterproof mattresses, electric heaters, solidifying gel and insulating foam – these are all part of a plethora of objects that mediate the relationships between body and space.

The intervention Sometimes You're Both (2016), taking place at Ibirapuera Park, is comprised of 25 stainless steel columns dotted around the Biennial Pavilion and the park. The columns hold items designed for situations of contact and intimacy between two bodies. There are sterilized latex gloves and finger condoms, amongst others. The columns are up to 90 cm high and stand on bases of different heights, meaning that the access to the objects varies depending on the visitor's height and position. The original materials are not replaced and all that remains is the stainless steel structure, now subject to spontaneous use. The intervention represents points of meeting and separation between the body and the material and other bodies, between the institution and the park, and between the artwork and the public.

Adding other voices and bodies to her art is one of the cornerstones of the artist's practice, which includes collaborations with researchers and professionals from different fields. McArthur prioritises dialogue by approaching the politics of mediation exercised by institutional and institutionalised spaces without resorting to approval or disapproval of such politics, but rather by questioning forms of knowledge, thought and subjectivity, as well as the societies produced, shaped and guided by these institutions. The artist also highlights the power systems that unequally facilitate or restrict the use of material and immaterial assets by both exploring the possibilities available and questioning the denied physical access to certain spaces.

——Sofía Olascoaga and Ulisses Carrilho

Contact A, 2015. Prophylactics, catheters, HIV test kit, latex gloves and stainless steel. 42.55 × 30.48 cm, height variable. Installation view at Chisenhale Gallery, London, England (2016).

Park McArthurâ&#x20AC;&#x192;301

Contact S and Contact C, 2016. Installation view at Chisenhale Gallery, London, England (2016).

Park McArthurâ&#x20AC;&#x192;303

Pia Lindman

1965, Espoo, Finland. Lives in Fagervik, Finland

Pia Lindman's work Nose Ears Eyes (2016), created for the 32nd Bienal, is informed by the artist's research in the Kalevala, a Finnish epic that unites ancient songs, narratives, and popular myths. Compiled and written down in the 19th century, the medical part of this oral and musical tradition – still in the process of being recorded – consists of knowledges based on the centuries-old life practices of agrarian communities, including anatomical studies and different healing practices.

The main activity in Nose Ears Eyes revolves around Kalevala bone alignment therapy, a type of massage focused on the joints and the bones that Lindman has learned to give. But her project goes beyond the treatment of the individual body: at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, she designed and built a hut out of cane, straw, and clay, from which se will offer treatments to Bienal visitors. The production of drawings with ink and oil pastels is part of the work, sometimes done in collaboration with the participants. The resulting images and diagrams represent a process of attunement to energy flows – halos, movements, and blockages of energy, as Lindman sees them during the treatment. She will also lead a programme of shared musical and exploratory experiences related to questions of environmental sciences and (alternative) body technologies.

For the Lindman, art is not subordinate to architecture. With its tentacles and “sensory organs”, Nose Ears Eyes reaches across the interior of the pavilion and out through its windows into Ibirapuera Park, in order to allow for the real and imagined circulation of air and other vibrant matter between different spaces.

Nose Ears Eyes exceeds both therapy as we know it and the artist as a healer by way of expanding agency to include non-human agents at bacterial level, whether they are invasive toxins and pollutants, or all the micro-organisms that help our bodies to function normally. The human body's affective and somatic relations are addressed beyond its perceptual capabilities, and the self is seen as an ecology that is already inscribed in systems other than itself.

Proposing an expanded notion of the senses and skin to include species memory and genetics, Lindman writes: “For instance, my knee is hurting because I am no longer running bare-foot on the sandy surfaces of a savannah. Yet, the bone structure of my knee supports that kind of movement rather than sitting in a chair all day. In other words, my bones include information of former life forms tens of thousands of years back in time.” The sensed world and the information that each of us embody include dimensions and temporalities beyond our historical self and the spaces it inhabits.

Lindman focuses on processes of self-education and artistic research on natural phenomena, native methodologies and unofficial knowledge. Drawing on environmental activism and a politics of care, her project also more or less explicitly critiques built space and the scientific authority of established medical “facts.” In these ways she sets her projects to work at the levels of the individual human body, natural and urban environments, and the body politic.

——Lars Bang Larsen

A Kalevala Duo, Playing Bones, 2015. Kalevala bone setting, music by Wooden Cities Orchestra, score

by Nathan Heidelberger and Brendan Fitzgerald and vocals by Esin Gündüz. 60’. Action at Kleinhans Music Hall, Buffalo, eua (2015).

Pia Lindmanâ&#x20AC;&#x192;305

Project for Nose Ears Eyes, 2016. Felt pen and pencil on paper.

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Pierre Huyghe

1962, Antony, France. Lives in Santiago, Chile and New York, USA

If René Descartes defines man as the animal that thinks, and Henry More – his constant challenger – prefers the animal that laughs, then we could say that Pierre Huyghe sees man as the animal that pretends.

Simulation, imitation and fiction are key themes in Huyghe's installations, films and sculptures.

In A Forest of Lines (2008), Huyghe inserts some woodland inside the Opera House in Sydney, Australia.

Over the course of 24 hours, the vegetation eroded the limits of the theatre, voiding the line between the place of the spectator and the place of the spectacle. More than an opposition between nature and culture, the artist is questioning the paradox between reality and fiction. The artwork makes it clear that “nature” is a cultural invention; otherwise that opposition would not exist. The public walks around the woods, surrounded by mist, without an established path to follow, only guided by a recorded voice that indicates the exit.

Many of Huyghe's key narratives are encapsulated in the film The Host and The Cloud (2009-2010). This time the site is another place of theatre: the museum. The film shows the unfolding of a social pantomime: judgements, coronations, fashion shows, birthday cakes and orgies, in a game where masks, puppets and shadows come and go across the frontier between what is real and what is acted. In some scenes, animals appear without knowing they had been turned into characters in the farce, such as Human, the pink-legged dog known for the installation Untilled (2011-2012) at Documenta 13, in Kassel, Germany.

Something similar happens in the video Untitled (Human Mask) (2014). Huyghe hired a Japanese restaurant, in which the main attraction is a monkey that can follow basic instructions and acts as a waitress, often wearing a woman's mask. After swapping the original mask with a more inexpressive one, the artist recorded a day in the empty restaurant, leaving the monkey free, without having to complete any tasks.

The result has a strong impact as it questions our capacity to see and imagine, as even though we can see a monkey, we imagine a girl, revealing the inherent difficulty human animals have in removing the mask to see reality.

De-Extinction (2014) is a video shot using special lenses that take extreme close-ups. At the beginning, the images appear to be of planets and stars in an intergalactic future. However, we slowly realise that we are viewing a drop of resin thousands of years old. In a journey through the layers of resin, we see several insects, the great-grandparents of many of today's mosquitos, until we get to two that were caught exactly at the moment of mating, that is, the moment of reproduction of a species that is today extinct. At the 32nd Bienal, the video, which is being projected on a large screen for the first time, makes the viewer feel small in relation to the insects shown. From the projection room, viewers are led to another room with insects flying around and a view of the park, bringing them back into their time.

——Julia Buenaventura

A Forest of Lines, 2008. Installation view at Sydney Opera House (2008).

Pierre Huygheâ&#x20AC;&#x192;309

Research for De-Extinction, 2016. Digital photography.

De-Extinction, 2016. Film. 12’38”. Video stills.

Pierre Huygheâ&#x20AC;&#x192;311

1988, Santiago, Chile. Lives in Santiago

Pilar Quinteros

The topological fantasies evoked by Pilar Quinteros' video Smoke Signals do much more than carry us to the founding narratives of the Americas, rich in mythical places, promised lands and terrestrial paradises. The Chilean artist's geographical imagination leads us to remains that allow for a new relationship between past and memory: extemporaneous “signs” that anticipate another life and another time and that operate within the confrontation between past and present forms. Smoke Signals is based on the expedition on which the English colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett disappeared, in 1925, while searching for an unknown city which he called “Z” in the Roncador Mountains in Mato Grosso. The artist travelled to the region where the colonel disappeared to rebuild the city with “remains” from the forest itself.

More than whole structures and formations, these remains are loose items that return from the past but are able to perform a fundamental and unforeseeable detour. Quinteros reminds us that “the forgotten” gains momentum in the more fragile materials, such as cardboard (Fuente de la amistad de los pueblos [Friendship of Peoples Fountains], 2014), plastic (El último de los ídolos, [The Last of the Idols], 2013) or tree bark in the construction of the Smoke Signals portal. The fictional recreation of a lost paradise puts the image at stake and not the meaning of the architectural forms that emerge from this and other examples of her works. In her reconstructions, we understand the limits of archaeology: there is no complete destruction, restoration or exhumation. In other words, traces cannot be totally deleted and nothing comes back the same way. It is not about revitalising the past, but recognising the ephemeral nature of creation (the portion of the artwork that is already destined to perish). Exhumation and burial at the same time. Quinteros reasserts: the true act of remembering longs for much more than preserving the past; and she buries the past (a lime-painted portal made of materials from the forest in the middle of the Roncador Mountains) in order to highlight the possibility of mourning whilst carrying on with life.

Thereby she introduces a new presentation of the past, confronting its current narration, its long-established and habitual image, domesticated by a sort of stabilising transmission. A desire to save an authentic, fragile, involuntary, unconscious and neglected image from the past, forgotten by habit, by sense: promises that were not fulfilled, that come back to the present, and that do not last more than an instant, as intermissions on the prevailing narrative flow.

In this sense, we see in Quinteros' works a desire for uncertainty, for shaking the present's convictions. Her expedition to Roncador Mountains also brings us the echoes of others who have disappeared, ghosts from every side of Latin America's political spectrum, and above all, another way of facing the issue of nature and culture in this land of inconstancy in which (Colonel) Percy Fawcett disappeared. Roberto Bolaño's question “how can we follow someone who isn't moving, who is trying, apparently successfully, to become invisible?” is directed to all these ghosts (our own).

——Paulo Carvalho

Sketch for Smoke Signals, 2016.

Pilar Quinterosâ&#x20AC;&#x192;313

Sketches for Smoke Signals, 2016.

Storyboards for Smoke Signals, 2016.

Pilar Quinterosâ&#x20AC;&#x192;315

Pope.L

1955, Newark, New Jersey, USA. Lives in Chicago, Illinois, USA

Pope.L makes works that arise out of the contradictions of social structures and denaturalize privileges and exploitations by way of transgression, challenges and irreverence. He also appropriates sarcasm and humor in order to discuss themes such as the issue of race and the construction of identity in the United States.

Particularly emblematic in his series of works eRacism, which he began in the late 1970s, are the performances in which Pope.L crawls from one side of a city to the other, generating discomfort among authorities and passersby alike. One of the more than thirty actions, Tompkins Square Crawl (1991), took place in New York. In it the artist, dressed in a suit and tie, crawled along the ground holding a yellow daisy.

He intended to call attention to the huge number of street dwellers ignored by public authorities, but the performance was interrupted by police. These actions were conceived by the artist to be carried out in the public sphere, in order to investigate the construction of the body and its physical relationship with the city and the sociopolitical implications of this construction. They invest in the visceral quality of experiences by understanding that transforming the body's memory generates new bases of social responsibility.

For the 32nd Bienal, Pope.L developed the performance Baile [Ball] (2016), in which alternating pairs of people dressed in Festa de Debutante – inspired costumes are hired to walk and dance in a mapped-out route, highlighting political and social circumstances through the city of São Paulo. The four-day long 24-hour trajectory is based on research Pope.L carried out in the city in which he sought to deal with the theatricality of the recent political frictions and how they have made even more visible social inequalities in Brazil.

Baile may be understood as the continuation of the research for Blink (2011) that took first place in New Orleans (USA). Following the city's devastation by hurricane Katrina in 2005, Pope.L gathered together volunteers to pull a truck on the back of which photographs of the city were projected. The images were an answer on the part of the population to a provocation by the artist on the meaning of work. Giving visibility to collaboration or collective work meant responding to the specific context of a city that needed to be rebuilt. In his proposal for the 32nd Bienal, Pope.L is interested in the power and work relations that are established in the way the city is organized. In moving between areas characterized by class distinctions, the ways through which society deals with the physical exploitation of work in contrast with different urban landscapes are made evident.

——Bernardo Mosqueira

Documentation of the performance Pull!, 2013. 3 days. Cleveland, USA (2013).

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Documentation of the performance Pull!, 2013. 3 days. Cleveland, USA (2013).

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Priscila Fernandes

1981, Coimbra, Portugal. Lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Associated with the modern art tradition, Priscila Fernandes' work reflects on the impact of industrial and post-industrial contexts on the lives of individuals and their sensorial perception. By using videos, publications, drawings, paintings, performances and sound installations, the artist brings into focus the social disputes and political motivations that are at the core of the aesthetic choices of different modern movements, despite these often being hidden behind formal discussions. Her pieces touch on issues related to workforce procedures, leisure time, the role of education and the creation of habits and values linked to productivity. The debates sparked by Fernandes' work open the way to re-interpretations of art and add different elements to the current artistic production through a prolific combination of historical research and contemporary thought.

In this 32nd Bienal, the artist presents the installation GOZOLÂNDIA E OUTROS FUTUROS [Cuckoo-land and Other Futures] (2016) that includes three photographic images, a set of furniture and the film Gozolândia [Cuckoo-land] (2016). The images were created by printing negatives that were exposed to light and manipulated through painting, holes or scratches. Their abstraction provides a state of contemplation, often evoking a landscape, such as in Uma vista em fuga [A Vanishing View], or suggesting an action through form, such as the laughter in Ahahah or the splash in O salto, splash [The Jump, Splash]. The tension generated by the bordering relations between work and free time comes to light when contemplating the images and using the furniture: a set of beach chairs that invite the public to take a break. Even though chairs are objects linked to the idea of rest, there is an ambiguity in the spectators' position inside the exhibition space. Whilst looking at the artworks, they are in an oscillating point between contemplation and analysis, distraction and attention, rest and work. The film Gozolândia (2016), commissioned specially for this exhibition, is a reference to Cocanha, a medieval myth about a place of abundant food and fine weather where work was unnecessary. Installed in Ibirapuera Park, Gozolândia articulates the relationships between idleness and abstract art, in an attempt to place side-by-side the developments of this artistic movement and the different forms of leisure from the same time. Leisure as a political tool and as creative process is a relevant concept in this discussion, and Gozolândia raises pertinent questions about 21st century leisure options, including useful (working out), social (the role of the park in the city), contemplative, spiritual and regenerative activities. The history of modern art has many examples of this discussion, from the time of the industrial revolution and Neo-Impressionist painters, to the different schools of abstract art.

However, Fernandes is not trying to pass judgment on the relationship between rest and work. On the contrary, she is aware that both are charged with harmful or beneficial energies, depending on the dominating forces at play. Therefore, thinking about forms of leisure is an analogy to thinking about forms of work: the main issue here is how both have been changing society and the individual.

——Marilia Loureiro

Gozolândia [Cuckoo-land], 2016. Video. Video stills.

Priscila Fernandesâ&#x20AC;&#x192;321

Ahahah, 2016. Inkjet Fine Art print. 200 × 150 cm.

Uma vista em fuga [A Vanishing View], 2016. Inkjet Fine Art print. 200 × 150 cm.

Priscila Fernandesâ&#x20AC;&#x192;323

Rachel Rose

1986, New York, USA. Lives in New York

Rachel Rose's work draws on the free circulation of images and the subjective association of information.

With pieces that combine music, cinema and video, Rose employs editing techniques that overlap, splice images and combine video and audio into dense layers in the cadence of sudden cuts. By using a treatment often applied to textures, colours and forms, the composition of her artworks evoke processes that are typical of painting a language that forms the basis of her academic background.

In the films presented at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Rose explores issues related to the relationship between man and nature, mediated by technology and the senses. In A Minute Ago (2014), the artist appropriates a YouTube video in which we see how people on a tranquil beach react to a sudden change in the weather. Serene weather is quickly engulfed by a hailstorm, bringing a sense of impotence in the face of nature's unpredictability. These images are immediately juxtaposed by images of the Glass House, the renowned building fully integrated with its surrounding nature, designed by modern architect Philip Johnson in 1949. A phantasm-like picture is created with holograms of Johnson's image as he moves around the house measuring the space with his body. Little by little, the relationship between man, nature and technology unravels a game of comings and goings. The modernist house – calling forth the ideal of harmony and integration with the surroundings by the means of glass – is also revealed as a mausoleum.

In the video Everything and More (2015), Rose is interested in the perception of time and space. The artist tries to convey a notion of unusualness in relation to the surroundings by making a radical change in the space to challenge the way we understand weight, colour, smell and sound. To this end, she interviewed NASA 's astronaut David Wolf about his experience of living in a space station and returning to Earth. Wolf describes the feeling of experiencing the Universe's immensity, the stars and the planet as a counterpoint to smelling the grass as soon as the spaceship doors opened on his arrival back on Earth. The video simultaneously shows overlapping planes and moving spheres and liquids that resemble our galaxy and the Milky Way. Micro and macroscopic perspectives, as two dimensions of human experience, are continuously rotated, communicating the idea of relativity and completeness.

In her video-installations, the space onto which the image is projected is as important as its content, reproducing the structure of the film, editing and engaging the architecture and the public in an experience similar to the theme being presented. Rose celebrates the potential of image and sound to question the way in which we read the world and relate to it with our senses.

——Camila Bechelany

A Minute Ago, 2014. HD video. 8’43”. Video stills.

Rachel Roseâ&#x20AC;&#x192;325

Everything and More, 2015. HD video. 10’31”. Video stills.

Rachel Roseâ&#x20AC;&#x192;327

Rayyane Tabet

1983, Ashqout, Lebanon. Lives in Beirut, Lebanon

Every translation is somewhat precarious; therefore an authentic understanding of the source always implies a historical understanding of this reconstruction. In Rayyane Tabet's Sósia [Double](2016- ongoing), we are faced with the transformative gesture that is at play in every translation. The novel Um copo de cólera [A Cup of Rage] (1978), by Brazilian author Raduan Nassar, son of Lebanese immigrants, is translated into Arabic to be published in Beirut. Aligned with Tabet's proposition, Nassar's text becomes an examination of the myth surrounding the return of those who migrate to a distant country in South America – a circular movement such as in the chapter titled “The arrival” with which the author both starts and ends his novel. The translation was done by Mamede Jarouche, who translated the first full Portuguese edition of One Thousand and One Nights. Tabet's work can be seen as a triangle between the artist, the translator and the author; an encounter in three different times, between three narratives and three people.

Tabet explores the limitations of translating personal experiences and Lebanon's social and historical context, along the lines of Architecture Lessons, Part of Five Distant Memories: The Suitcase, The Room, The Toys, The Boat and Maradona (2012). The video and installation of Architecture Lessons mobilise such notions as historicity, representation and power from the perspective of translation, through small-scale architectural forms and fragments of the artist's memory. Using blocks he played with as a child, Tabet restores the spatial dimension of these traces, transcending the discourse they typically facilitated. In the gap between mediation and interruption, transmission and censorship, communication and silence, we see the emergence of the irreducible difference between the recalled traces and the new forms. In the gap between ways of expressing and articulating content, the truth in these memories becomes apparent. In one go they condense violence, the incorporation of differences, permanence and the rupture with traditions.

The novel Um copo de cólera is unique in 20th-century Brazilian literature. Written in 1970 and published in 1978, the text is divided into seven parts, culminating in the chapter “The Explosion”, which is presented at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, read in Arabic by the artist himself. In this passage, the narrator has a heated argument with his partner mobilising issues related to the repression and authoritarianism typical of that era in Brazilian history. In this sense, the intense hostility between the couple becomes indiscernible from its lines of power, inviting the reader to distinguish – in its torrent of words – the political stance (engagement or individualism), the clash between genders and the de-subjectivation linked to the new configurations of capitalism in the periphery.

——Paulo Carvalho

Text by Rayyane Tabet for Sósia project, 2016- ongoing.

Rikke Luther

1970, Aalborg, Denmark. Lives in Copenhagen, Denmark and Berlin, Germany

Developing her artistic and teaching practices since the 1990s, Rikke Luther was the co-founder of the collective N55 (1994-2003) and founder of Learning Site (2004-2015), an initiative aimed at collaborative art and site-and-place-related projects. The work she created for the 32nd Bienal constitutes her first solo project in many years.

Acting on the border between art, the everyday, and political participation, Luther creates projects in dialogue with collective spaces and alternative, intelligent architectures. Audible Dwelling (2013), for example, is a giant mobile sound unit; a kind of walk-in amplifying and broadcasting system, placed in the public space where it plays sound works and montages. Comparable to the agit-trains of the Russian revolution that were sent to the provinces as classrooms and exhibition spaces to enlighten rural populations, Audible Dwelling produces sonic interventions that activate urban as well as historical spaces.

Luther's work for the 32nd Bienal is titled Overspill: Universal Map (2016). The installation – a large four-panel mural with drawings printed on tiles, vitrines, a concrete bench, the first found fossil of the bacteria that produced oxygen, and a visualization of the giant prehistoric fungus, Prototaxites – seeks to establish a dialogue between the present and the post-World War II era. Specifically, the work focuses on the UN Global Commons agreements that established international legal limits for private property and resource exploitation. The four Global Commons are the ocean, Antarctica, the atmosphere and outer space; common pool resources that directly affect the resources that sustain all life on earth, whether human or non-human.

In the manner of educational posters, her picture-panels map out how the Global Commons are incorporated into international conflicts, business interests, and environmental struggles. While there are legally binding international agreements such as Law in Space and Law in the Ocean, there are still vast absences.

For example fishing rights are well established, rights to physical material in outer space are not. Another example is the Arctic ice sheet, which is not protected by such agreements. In the Arctic, nation-states and private corporations now compete for control of resources that may, or may not, become accessible due to global warming.

Overspill: Universal Map can be seen as a sort of history painting which refers to juridical, economic, and biological events, exploring the organic and concrete nature of the world and the intellectual systems that we use to define them. None of the elements drawn by Luther are fictitious: all are results of her research into the Global Commons. In this way she has depicted actual facts to create a network of relations in which the local event – like Brazil's biggest ever environmental disaster, the avalanche of toxic mud into the Rio Doce – is shown to be entangled in a global web of life.

——Camila Bechelany

Overspill: Universal Map, 2016. Drawings for installation. 3.88 m. x 30.59 m (each).

Rikke Lutherâ&#x20AC;&#x192;331

Detail of Overspill: Universal Map, 2016. Drawings for installation.

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1982, Lima, Peru. Lives in Mexico City, Mexico

Rita Ponce de León

In her work, Rita Ponce de León constantly explores the notion of the interval, a “space between” that can be understood either as a bridge or the distance between two points. From this stance, and based on her research deeply rooted in dance and drawing, the artist makes often unnoticed subjects seem tangible: the furniture where we rest our bodies, the air we breathe, the ground we walk on. Ponce de León sees these as a “bidding continuity”.

In this context, the artist has explored the table – as a place of conversation and communication but also as an obstacle – on many occasions. If objects play the role of mediators in our experience in this world, then this relationship is subverted in Ponce de León's works. In the exhibition Nuestros nosotros [Our ourselves] (2015), three tables serve as examples of her rationale: the first one is a sketch in which an upside down table holds a person on top of each leg – four individuals that look at each other without the horizontality of the table top as an obstacle with only the void preventing them from reaching each other.

The second table causes strangeness, as its surface, instead of flat, is a structure with rectangular holes where users can insert their heads, resulting in a different experience of their own bodies and, more so, of the distance between those sharing the table. The last table is a sort of stepped triangle where the width and height decrease as it moves away from the wall, such that the relationship between the people facing each other changes according to their chosen seat. The issue of place is also approached in the exhibition Endless Openness Produces Circles (2014), in which unframed drawings fixed straight onto the wall create interferences in the architectural space, and gestures in the form of sculpture blur the boundaries between body and architecture.

Ponce de León added to these experiences through her participation in the Study Days held in Lama, Peru, as part of this Bienal's public program. The main theme, amongst others, was the notion of “pedagogy of uncertainty”. In developing her project for the 32nd Bienal, the artist focused on communities that have land at their core. In her installation En forma de nosotros [In the Shape of Ourselves] (2016) – which can be thought of as a sculpture-site – Ponce de León displays a series of audio recordings, drawings and clay blocks containing gaps that can fit bodies, feet and hands in different positions. The receptacles invite the visitor to make contact, to lie down, facilitating a very unusual experience; in the artist's own words, “to touch with your whole body”. By letting go, the body becomes landscape or collective body, in an operation where the senses are the mediators. The elements emerge from the floor and the visitors place their feet into the world, in a game where graphic images, body language and stories about the life of seeds are fundamental.

——Julia Buenaventura

From the series Intercambios [Exchanges], 2015-2016. China ink and colored pencil on paper.

Rita Ponce de León 335

From the series Intercambios [Exchanges], 2015-2016. China ink and colored pencil on paper.

From the series Intercambios [Exchanges], 2015-2016. China ink on paper.

Rita Ponce de León 337

Rosa Barba

1972, Agrigento, Italy. Lives in Berlin, Germany

In the city, bodies move around far above the ground. The archaeology of built elevations reopens the history of human intervention in a given territory. Rosa Barba's films evoke this accumulation of layers in the urbanization process, both in relation to her research themes and her attention to materials and ways of constructing and projecting. Her films record landscapes from fissures and structures accumulated in the process of domestication of the soil for economic purposes, giving way, therefore, to a history of modernization.

For the 32nd Bienal, Barba created the film Disseminate and Hold (2016) about the city of São Paulo, a landscape of consumption and chaos that juxtaposes the extractive and desert-like environment of her previous works such as Definition Landfill (2014) and Bending to Earth (2015). In this latest work, the artist asks the questions: How can you film São Paulo geologically? How many layers of history can you see in a flight over a city of multitudes?

For this work, Barba chose the iconic elevated flyover Minhocão (“The Big Worm”). Built during the military dictatorship, the Elevado Costa e Silva – its official name – created a radical physical and mental geography in the city center – violently open to the bustling flow of traffic during working hours and restricted to pedestrians at other times. In the film, the artist dialogues less with the region's present and more with the contents and imaginary meanings imbued in the construction. As part of the process in realizing this film, the artist spoke to locals and people who frequently use the vehicle-free overpass on the weekend.

However, in her productions people tend to appear only through their traces solidified in the buildings. In this sense, Barba's film examines what and where the mental landscapes of a space such as the Minhocão are. They are images about memory and the subconscious of physical spaces.

In Barba's films, spaces are narrated from the perspective of their potential configurations, visible as immanent images of affective places. Here, she creates a mental state of suspension, similar to Minhocão's elevated position, from where it is possible to catch sight of new cartographies that are not obviously visible; and that – as in a time machine – produce the city's future with only images or create new spaces through them.

The artist's choices of exhibition mode are noteworthy. In many of her works, mainly when presented in film, the artist favors a sculpture-like display of the projectors, which assume a central role by becoming cornerstones of the artwork. More radically, this strategy that equally examines the layers of construction and perception in the cinematographic image is employed in the work White Museum (2010- ongoing), also exhibited at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo. This is a set of interventions in museums and landscapes that use the projection of light onto a certain site. The pieces are exclusively made of a 35 mm or 70 mm projector and the landscape. At the Bienal, Barba projects her blank frame onto the ramp leading to the Pavilion's first floor. The framing – typical of photography and cinema – becomes a physical presence, an open picture that allows the space to be experienced through projection.

——Guilherme Giufrida

White Museum (Vassivière), 2010. 70mm white film, projector. Installation view at Centre International d'art et du paysage de l'île de Vassivière, France (2010).

Rosa Barbaâ&#x20AC;&#x192;339

White Museum (Vassivière), 2010. 70mm white film, projector. Installation view at Centre International d'art et du paysage de l'île de Vassivière, France (2010).

White Museum (Pier 54), 2010/2014. 70 mm white film, projector. Installation view at Pier 54, High Line, New York, USA (2014).

White Museum (Margate), 2010/2013. 1, 70 mm white film, projector. Installation view at Turner Contemporary, Margate, England (2013).

Rosa Barbaâ&#x20AC;&#x192;341

Ruth Ewan

1980, Aberdeen, United Kingdom. Lives in Glasgow, United Kingdom

The French Revolution established a new way of measuring the passage of time. Non-religious and based on cycles of nature, the Republican Calendar renamed months and days. The new names, suggested by poet Fabre d'Églantine and André Thouin, the botanist in charge of the Paris Botanical Garden, made reference to annual seasons and crops, as well as animals, flowers, fruits, farming tools and stones. Ruth Ewan's Back to the Fields (2015/2016) takes us back to the materiality attributed to these forgotten “monuments of historical consciousness,” which are calendars.

Walter Benjamin reminds us that, on the days before the Storming of the Bastille, an incident manifested this consciousness: clock towers were shot out in several Parisian quarters after the first day of battle in July 1789. The empty and homogenous time of the clock, as opposed to the time of the calendar, marked each event indifferently. The Republican Calendar would be reinstated during the Paris Commune in 1871. It highlights the centrality of the notion of political event in Ewan's work.

Back to the Fields questions the time of the commodity, of work, of capital – modernity's meaningless and monotonous time. We must remember that the French Republic also created a new clock that split the day on a decimal basis – a theme the artist approaches in We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be (2011). This was the expression of a deep desire to break with history's continuum. Therefore, Ewan explores this live narrative able to reconfigure the future, open to a time to come, in the same way intended by each of the elements that mobilise her calendar. In this sense, these objects bring to date the circular nature of a time of reminiscences, open to uncertainties.

Political events make the contingent necessary. They impose themselves by repetition, introducing changes that are decisive for their constitution. However, some political events are farces. The repetition is not of a past that opens up to an experience of the new, such as the time of “now”. The farcical repetition is imaginary as it does not bring with it the real dimension of the process, that is, to try and create an illusory dynamic and provide the act with meaning. In this imaginary repetition, the images don't come back as a redemption of the past, but as its demise, negating the renewing character of the uncertainty.

The true political event contracts time. Ewan seems to try to unveil it through characters such as activist and composer Paul Robeson, to whom she refers in some projects, such as the exhibition Brank & Heckle (2011), curated by the artist at Dundee Contemporary Art with artworks about the social-political history of the Scottish city. The subjects of the political event bring back to stage a series of gestures coming from different past eras. They are the legacy of something that traverses us, such as “a secret agreement between past generations and the present one,” as Benjamin puts it. This is the nature of the reencounter promoted by Ewan's calendar and her objects.

——Paulo Carvalho

Back to the Fields, 2015. Installation including plants, fish, bones, agricultural tools and minerals.

Installation view at Camden Arts Centre, London, England (January, 2015).

Ruth Ewanâ&#x20AC;&#x192;343

Back to the Fields, 2015. Installation including plants, fish, bones, agricultural tools and minerals.

Installation view at Camden Arts Centre, London, England (March, 2015).

Back to the Fields, 2015. Installation including plants, fish, bones, agricultural tools and minerals.

Installation view at Camden Arts Centre, London, England (January, 2015).

Ruth Ewanâ&#x20AC;&#x192;345

Sandra Kranich

1971, Ludwigsburg, Germany. Lives in Frankfurt, Germany

Sandra Kranich is a trained pyro-technician. Since the end of the 1990s, she has used fire as the raw material for her installations, sculptures and images. Kranich is interested in the transformation, danger and risk involved in trying to control fire, which she subjects to a programmed choreography that incorporates chance as a crucial element. Gunpowder is her co-creator, taking institutional conventions to the limit.

Her work is a critical view on a society constructed from the logic of control and stability, which does the utmost to gain power and contain disorder, chance or doubt.

Paying particular attention to the space where her artworks are exhibited, Kranich creates strong images that provide different interpretational layers, such as in Bag Bang (2014), consisting of fireworks erupting from inside a handbag. The degree of provocativeness varies depending on where the piece is presented, for instance, in a bank in Frankfurt or an art fair or even in a public space, where it could be perceived as an act of terrorism.

The work Moment Monuments (2011) is linked to the philosophical interpretation of the notion of monument that evolved at the start of the 20th century, when it began to be studied from a modern perspective to include political, social and cultural impacts. The artist's ephemeral, fleeting, jocular and extroverted monuments evoke images such as rockets launched into space – to configure icons of the imperialist rationale.

Furthermore, she also reflects on the idea of spectacle, both as something to be consumed as entertainment (Bag Bang) or as represented history (Moment Monuments). In this way, Kranich's oeuvre incorporates a constant melancholy, resulting from the unusual circumstances of the fire display's aftermath, with its vestiges, remains and traces.

For the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, the artist produced two painting series. The first, R. Relief 7, 8, 9, 10 (2016) are vibrantly colourful geometrical compositions made of steel that will be exposed to the impact of gunpowder. The second series, Times Wire (2016), is a sort of knitted structure of electric cables that form a shape and lead to an explosion.

Her fireworks are spectacles that last only a few minutes but remain in the viewer's memory and linger in the charred and transformed matter. In some cases, the constructions forming the basis of the explosions are completely deformed or destroyed. The firework displays are moments of exception given their extraordinary ability to divide our temporal perception into a clear “before-during-after” (the burning).

Even though these are distinct moments, Kranich avoids any hierarchy between them. Nonetheless, she repeatedly refers to change as a potent and beautiful feature. Her pieces are exercises that celebrate the moment, blurring the frontiers between creation and destruction, construction and deconstruction.

——Bruno Mendonça

Echo Return 1, 2, 2014. Metal reliefs, fireworks and electric ignition. 188 × 144 × 6 cm. Installation view at PPC, Philipp Pflug Contemporary, Frankfurt, Germany (2014).

Sandra Kranichâ&#x20AC;&#x192;347

R. Relief 7, 8, 9, 10, 2014. Lacquered metal reliefs, fireworks and electric ignition. Installation view at Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich, Germany (2016).

Sandra Kranichâ&#x20AC;&#x192;349

Sonia Andrade

1935, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Lives in Rio de Janeiro

Renowned for her videos from the 1970s, in which her body is always present, Sonia Andrade's work also encompasses drawing, photography, mail art, sculpture and installation. Her career followed an atypical trajectory, moving outside the mainstream of Brazilian art and indifferently to the trends of the art market and system. Alongside artists such as Anna Bella Geiger and Letícia Parente, she created pioneering works in video that deal with issues of gender and criticise the medium of television by using images of a strong political content.

At the 32nd Bienal, the artist presents Hydragrammas (1978-1993), an inventory of approximately one hundred objects made of found materials. Their arrangement results in a sort of subjective lexicon, composed by a spectrum of unique pieces that resemble a text in which different meanings are entangled and become hybrid. The objects are also photographed and transformed into slides, making up an archive corresponding to a long line of words such as dream, view, vivarium, link, nocturnal, illusion, duel, mechanic, instrument, seed, fabric, initial and so on. It seems she has a need to name objects so they can exist in the world of speech or written word. By associating words and images, the artist intertwines senses in different combinations or detours that place them in a correlation of empathy or adding tension to the meaning of the created pieces.

It is as if Andrade's work stemmed from a radical desire to change reality by shaping fragments of the world into minuscule pieces of existence, at the same time revisiting gestures and forms that could be identified with Western art's visual memory. In a symbolic gesture, when piecing together discarded materials Andrade goes against a rationalising type of arrangement. The artist suppresses any trace of functionality in order to create poetry of objects, using real materials to subvert them.

The neologism Hydragramma suggests a monstrous script that puts together words and images. It contains the text, the word in the form of inscription (grámma) and the indomitable hybrid monster (the Hydra of Lerna, killed by Hercules), from whose head new serpents are always emerging and where destruction and death are nothing but rebirths or new beginnings. As opposed to a definitive image, the artist is interested in an image in constant progress. Andrade's objects show the ambiguity of her attempt to preserve, through the memory of archives or the written word, the life of resonant words and images. Her hybrids represent the eternal re-start in which creation is inscribed, starting from haunted beginnings and advancing to territories of incompleteness and uncertainty.

——Hortência Abreu

Hydragrammas, 1978-1993. Set composed of approx. 100 objects and their reproductions in slide and a word in Portuguese or French. Installation view at “Retrospectiva 1974-1993” at Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2011).

Sonia Andradeâ&#x20AC;&#x192;351

Hydragrammas, 1978-1993. Set composed of approx. 100 objects and their reproductions in slide and a word in Portuguese or French. Installation view at “Retrospectiva 1974-1993” at Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2011).

Sonia Andradeâ&#x20AC;&#x192;353

Susan Jacobs

1977, Sydney, Australia. Lives in Melbourne, Australia and London, United Kingdom

With imagery that borders on alchemy and magic, artist Susan Jacobs uses her work to present physical-chemical phenomena as protagonists and agents for transforming the materials which she uses.

Her installations reference architecture, science and sculpture, while also at times including elements of photography and video in their composition. In these installations, Jacobs unites materials of distinct origins – natural and artificial – in the same space, subjecting them to operations which question such conventions as the measurements of weight, resistance, magnetism and gravity.

In Through the Mouth of the Mantle (2016), presented at the 32nd Bienal, the artist employs chemical and physical transformations in a sort of arena comprised of compressed sand, metals, mirrors, projections and objects. In this piece, she presents a trajectory marked by a network of relationships between each of these elements. The installation's components include shovels cast in aluminum – resembling a squid's mantle –, a pool of the elemental metal Gallium corroding through the shovels, a motorized marble “Lazy Susan” disc that spins a bowl of molten Gallium to form a parabolic mirror which reflects back the viewer's eye, and videos projected onto glass panels that show the ink and mucus of a squid as it moves over a surface in a rocking boat, a squid's head that rotates on a marble disc, and a homemade chemistry experiment known as the “Black Snake”.

Jacobs is interested in the processes in which inanimate bodies seem to come to life. Exploring these unsettling reactions, the artist points to the distinct relationships between the species, similarities between nervous systems, gestures and the recognition of vitality in forms considered dead. These transformations expose our certainties to yet unknown energies, provoking a nearly instantaneous displacement in relation to that which we take for granted.

In this way, the installation shelters changing forces, inactive elements which have latent potential that can be unleashed at any moment. The course in this arena, or rather this alchemic experiment expanded in space, is conducted by compressed sand which enables elements, objects and projections to be progressively and gradually encountered, blending together and making the course a kind of gray area where everything transforms. Misconceptions and logical judgments might lead spectators to assume false readings of what they are viewing. As such, the artist evokes a series of contingent events which may or may not take place, bringing to the surface anticipation and unease in the face of doubt regarding experiences as transformative as a chemical reaction between one element and another.

——Ulisses Carrilho

Research for Through the Mouth of the Mantle, 2016.

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Research for Through the Mouth of the Mantle, 2016.

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1986, Lawrence, Kansas, USA. Lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA 1983, Sansepolcro, Italy. Lives in St-Erme, France and London, UK

Till Mycha Helen Stuhr-Rommereim and Silvia Mollicchi

Till Mycha is a duo of writers and researchers interested in recent developments in psychedelia as a method and mode of thought. Although existing as an independent agent, Till Mycha has a continued involvement with the publishing platform Fungiculture (www.fufufo.com). Created as an online journal, Fungiculture has morphed into a platform for publishing and curatorial projects, often hitching a ride on existing structures.

What the artists call a psychedelic perspective comes from a free interpretation of the anthropological concept of Perspectivism in Anthropology as originally conceived by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The text by the collective, Manifesto for a Psychedelic Method – A Set of Stories (2016) explores a statement by Viveiros de Castro in which the notion of observation is re-established: “you do not see a difference – a difference is what makes you see.” For the collective, this mechanism of perception can be attained by altering the cognitive state, which is a characteristic of psychedelia and a trigger for the libertarian emancipation of the relational and kinesthetic experience between speakers.

The condition of psychedelic researcher requires occupying an intermediate place, where all the discursive forms for interpreting the visible world interact with each other and appear with their varying particularities.

This condition arose precisely from the possibility of exchange between the two parties involved, giving rise to the manifesto. It consists of an entanglement of stories and recollections brought about through an exchange of correspondence between two parties seeking interaction. This palimpsest of information seems to want to transcend the idea of a split between knowledge, mind and body.

At the 32nd Bienal, Till Mycha aims at exploring textual and editorial production in an exhibition context attentive to the ephemeral aspect of the event. They present a text structured around specific scenes from Homer's eighth century BC epic the Odyssey, but drawing upon a much broader imaginary that defamiliarizes the original myth and uses the form of the epic to initiate a reflection on the “adventure” as an aesthetic category that pairs up with the possibility of novel epistemologies. Through a set of encounters with abstract spaces, tasks, and thinking entities, the text explores what could constitute an aesthetic of adventure, and how this might be put to work to produce a new collective imaginary. Set to work on the Odyssey as a foundational narrative of Hellenistic and European culture, Till Mycha's psychedelic method here allows for the forging of other perspectives and visions through which new relationships with myth and cosmogony can come into being.

As a result of this deconstruction, a text in the form of a poster, reproduced and available for the visitor's taking, is the device by which Till Mycha activates new references among its viewers, suggesting other paths before a dominant epistemological field. Just like the cartographic-poetic reconfigurations of Öyvind Fahlström, also on display at the Bienal, Tilly Mycha's posters make the viewer complicit in the civilization's liminal position bordering disaster and reinvention.

——Lars Bang Larsen and Diego Matos

Manifesto for a Psychedelic Method – A Set of Stories, 2015. Printed pamphlet.

Till Mycha Helen Stuhr-Rommereim and Silvia Mollicchiâ&#x20AC;&#x192;359

Tracey Rose

1974, Durban, South Africa. Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa

Tracey Rose produces installations, drawings, videos, photographs, sculptures and performances that frequently make use of mockery to create provocative images. She uses her own body as a tool for questioning socio-political constructions on her identity – as a woman, as colored, as South-African and as an artist – appropriating these discourses in order to subvert the logic of power or to shed new light on different forms of feminism. Rose questions the gender and race narratives entangled in the history of South Africa.

Her work may be understood as a response to the black body's representation in the colonial imagination, in modernist art and in the mass media, as well as in the way in which the art market deals with the “inclusion” of subjectivities considered “minority.” By approaching the objects of her critique, at times imitating them in an exaggerated and comic manner, Rose incorporates different identities, putting categories on a collision course with one another and highlighting the way they are socially construed.

Present at the 32nd Bienal, A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls) is a series of sculptures she has been producing since 2013. The title makes reference to the poem “A Dream Deferred,” by gay Black American poet Langston Hughes, who was part of the Harlem Resistance movement in 1920s New York. The artist's initial idea was to name works such as “A Raisin in the Sun,” one of the passages in the poem that, through an analogy with the permanence of the physical state of certain materials, questions what happens to a dream that is continuously postponed over time. In this title, Rose intersects Hughes' poem with narratives on the life and death of Mandela. In addition, the “Mandela Balls” make reference to the idea of power associated with testicles and how acts of oppression and violence directed against a man also include attacks on this organ. One of the punishments handed down by colonialists was to cut off or smash black men's testicles as a way of repressing the polygamy practiced in many countries on the African continent. This measure was, at the same time, an affront to the idea of masculinity and reproduction. The work, which is ongoing, involves the creation of 95 sculptures, a number that corresponds to Mandela's age at death.

The Mandela Balls reflect a critical stance on Rose's part regarding African liberation movements and the construction and “monumentalization” of Mandela's image on the international political scene. Each piece is made of ephemeral everyday materials such as newspaper, ink, tape, rocks, string, plastic bags or glue.

In opposition to the totemic logic of edifying a permanent representation with the future of a nation in mind, the balls are like anti-monuments to this public figure. The work may also be seen as a divergence with regards to the utilization and instrumentation of death for the establishment of South Africa as a nation-state, electing heroes and martyrs as historical icons. As such, Mandela Balls seems to respond to the questions asked by the poet Langston Hughes about “What happens to a dream deferred?” Both Hughes and Rose point to the finiteness that exists in deferred dreams, as well as in the material and in the historical narratives elaborated based on interests of power.

——Camila Bechelany

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 3/95: An Exercise in Colour Control, 2014. Handmade Paper Capellades 100% cotton, butchers paper, newsprint, acrylic paint, packaging tape, black garbage bag, cling wrap, air.

Tracey Roseâ&#x20AC;&#x192;361

Mandela Balls 6/95 (Strange Fruit #JeSuisPatriceLumumba), 2015. From the series Mandela Balls 6/95.

Plastic, plant (strelitzia reginae), tape, Belgian chocolate on wood board.

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 4/95 Genghis Khan Cack Handed Sperm, 2014. Butchers paper, The International Herald Tribune, blank newsprint, The Mercury Racing Tab, packaging tape, acrylic gel, plastic bags.

Tracey Roseâ&#x20AC;&#x192;363

1955, Zurich, Switzerland. Lives in Zurich 1980, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil. Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Ursula Biemann & Paulo Tavares

Forest Law – Selva Jurídica (2014) is a project by Swiss artist Ursula Biemann and Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares. Biemann's work investigates the relationship between the environment, territory and modes of representation. The results of her immersions in different socio-political contexts are presented in documents, books and videos. Since 1999, the artist has been working on projects dealing with the relationship between individual bodies and geographical, cultural and gender frontiers. Her research has taken her to the borders between Mexico and the USA, the Czech Republic and Germany, and has led to links between the Canadian and Bangladeshi ecosystems. She is also a curator, visual arts lecturer and green activist.

In her collaborative piece with Tavares, Biemann explores the friction between territories, particularly with the Amazon at centre stage. The exploitation of nature in search of raw materials for industry is investigated through the lens of its political, legal and social implications on the Earth's climate and the lives of communities who directly depend on these activities.

As the title suggests, Forest Law – Selva Jurídica is about a historically important judicial battle. In 2012, the Kichwan indigenous community of Sarayaku won a major international case against the government of Ecuador, accused of threatening life in the village by allowing oil industry exploration of their territory in the Amazon Forest. The verdict was a watershed moment in the discussion on human and environmental rights as the Court declared the Ecuadorian government guilty of threatening the physical and cultural integrity of the Sarayaku people. The case highlights a conflict between the different representations of nature – legal vs. cosmogonical– and its consequences for life on Earth.

Addressing this issue, Biemann and Tavares came up with an installation including a book, videos and documents deriving from interviews with the Sarayaku. The emphasis on their existential and political perspectives shows that the debate goes beyond the issue of land reform under the Western legal framework.

The conflict also encompasses the live relationship between inhabitants and their space which – more than just a place of residence – houses community memories and a concept of time based on the overlapping of past, present and future. Two projections show the ecological diversity of the Amazon forest from different perspectives as the Sarayaku share their daily space with botanists, scientists and researchers studying the wealth of oil that flows underground.

Forest Law – Selva Jurídica also highlights the problems that arise when nature is viewed as a legal entity and the polyphonic character of its multiple perspectives that cannot be defined by the State is ignored.

Tension is between the lines: How to claim autonomy over the territory when interventions in favor of a selective progress are concerned? How to articulate different concepts of nature when everyone's life depends on it?

——Raphael Fonseca

Forest Law – Selva Jurídica, 2014. 2 channel video projection, maps, images, books and soil samples.

Installation view at BAK Basis voor Actuele Kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands (2015).

Ursula Biemann & Paulo Tavaresâ&#x20AC;&#x192;365

Forest Law – Selva Jurídica, 2014. 2 channel video projection, maps, images, books and soil samples. 41’.

Installation view at BAK Basis voor Actuele Kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands (2015).

Ursula Biemann & Paulo Tavaresâ&#x20AC;&#x192;367

Víctor Grippo

1936, Junín, Argentina–2002, Buenos Aires, Argentina

With the upsurge of military regimes in Latin America during the second half of the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, the artists who gained notoriety were those who significantly contributed to the breakdown of prevailing modern paradigms and to establishing programmatic thinking for intellectual innovation and resistance to states of exception that were in power in the region. In Argentina, Víctor Grippo was a fundamental character in an environment of experimental artistic production, ranging from the renewal of language to the sensible practice of politics.

Grippo's complex production is still fundamental reading for the construction of new forms of conscience that put man on a par with and in relation to nature, which does not exclude the use of technology and new socioeconomic guidelines. There is nothing more symptomatic of this than the repeated use of the table as an organising object and protagonist in his work, his universal tool. On it, one symbolically elaborates, researches and standardizes; the table is a plausible place for the reconciliation between art and science.

Consistent with the fine-tuning of the word, which is at times poetic, and at others systematic and communicative, the artistic practice furthers what Guy Brett called the “dialectic of the invisible,” making the combined actions between the scientist, the alchemist and the artisan clear, conciliating their skills.

In Naturalizar al hombre, humanizar a la naturaleza, o Energia vegetal [Man Naturalization, Nature Humanization, or Vegetal Energy ] (1977) this dialectic imposes itself concomitantly to Analogía I, 2ª version [Analogy I, 2nd version] (1970/1977) – a work in which Grippo evoked the idea of an “art of systems”. In both works, he places 400 kg of potatoes, the organic element that serves as a base for the experiments, on a tablecloth-covered table. In Energia Vegetal [Vegetal Energy], on the other hand, these tubers are interspersed among a dozen of the most diverse laboratory flasks filled with paint diluted in water and capped with cotton. In this work, the alchemical transmutation gains prominence, making way for the unknown, or even suggesting a disturbance of the symmetrical energy system. However, in Analogía I, Grippo makes use of chemical and electrochemical processes, suggesting energy transfer and transformation of an entropic character, demonstrated by the very connection of the potatoes to a voltmeter using electrodes. Through time's relentlessness and life's ephemerality, the artist imposes the notion of decay upon art, allowing himself to be contaminated by his surroundings.

Making use of common knowledge, Grippo also transitions to propositions that directly interfere in social circles, granting political autonomy to the public, which, for example, was present in his own textual reflection “Alguns Ofícios” [Some Crafts] (1976). To him, the artistic action, whether ritualistic or collective, can warp the usual context of an everyday object, transposing it to another environment and, through this experience, triggering new forms of exchange and confrontation in which objects and the public implicate each other, thus contributing to the development of a new stage of self-awareness and citizenship. In short, Grippo's work lays the foundation for a conceptual and poetic structure in which knowledge, resistance and memory underlie man's survival and define another worldview.

——Diego Matos

Naturalizar al hombre, humanizar a la naturaleza, o Energía vegetal [Man Naturalization, Nature Humanization, or Vegetal Energy], 1977. Installation view at 14th Bienal de São Paulo (1977).

Víctor Grippo 369

Analogía I [Analogy I], 1970/1971. Installation. 47.4 × 156 × 10.8 cm.

Analogía I, o Energía [Analogy I, or Energy], 1977/2014. Installation. 15 × 700 × 110 cm (main base).

Installation view of the exhibition Transformation at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico (2014).

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1986, Olinda, Pernambuco, Brazil Concept, research and editing: Ana Carvalho, Tita e Vincent Carelli

Vídeo nas Aldeias

Vídeos nas Aldeias, created in 1986, is one of the longest-running and most respected projects in Brazil focusing on educational, collective mobilisation and cultural empowerment. It develops activities based on social-political relevance, cultural action, heritage and artistic experimentation. Video and related technologies are tools used by indigenous people to define a mode of image production managed and led by themselves. The initiative fosters indigenous producers that focus their gaze on their own communities and their surroundings, thus working under the premise of self-representation.

Vídeo nas Aldeias trains filmmakers and produces and disseminates audio-visual content, instantly contributing towards the fight against the deep-seated unawareness of the Brazilian people with regards to the ample, diverse and complex indigenous arena – their culture, knowledge and cosmology. Naturally, this resource encourages the emergence of new forms of indigenous mobilisation, a key step in breaking with their social invisibility, as well as in combating the lack of Western knowledge about these different worlds.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's idea that “the other from others is always the other” is exemplified when two indigenous communities who are unaware of each other are put in contact through images, as in the project Espírito da TV (1990), creating a process of reflection mediated by the camera.

More than formalising records of indigenous cultures, the radical aspect of Vídeo nas Aldeias is the subversive way in which it proposes another communication network between different indigenous peoples, in which the negotiation between them is not mediated by an external observer. The edited films and their producers are a new body of audio-visual thought, furthering the image lexicon and theory that constitute contemporary knowledge. The notion of documentary gains a new layer of value as it builds an indigenous history on its own terms, opposing the filmmaking model of imposing a distance between the observer and those being observed, according to Lilia Schwarcz in her analysis of Vídeo das Aldeias' seminal production.

The project for the 32nd Bienal is born through extensive research of the more than three thousand hours of footage involving 40 different indigenous populations and 70 full features in its 30 years of existence. Vincent Carelli, the indigenist and filmmaker behind this project, as well as the organisations' many professionals, bring to the Bienal a significant portion of their production, including excerpts that show contexts of struggle and resistance against renewed colonization efforts, attempted genocides and cultural cleansing. Extracted from their raw material, the short films represent around twenty different peoples, including the Xavante, Enawenê Nawê, Guarani Kaiowá, Fulni-ô, Gavião, Krahô, Huni Kuin, Mbya Guarani, Maxacali, Tupinambá, Yanomami and Kayapó. The comprehensive archive is organised in a fluid way promoting sound intercessions. In some cases, the purposeful lack of captions makes the public feel out of balance and not playing the leading part. Here, visibility belongs to the other, to whom it has always been denied.

——Diego Matos

Images of project in production: Captain Stages War with Rival Groups (Gavião),1989. Part of the project: O Brasil dos Índios: um arquivo aberto [The Brazil of the Indians: An Open Archive], 2016.

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Tiramantu; povo Kanoê [Tiramantu; Kanoê people], 1995. Frames from the Video. Part of the project O Brasil dos Índios: um arquivo aberto [Brazil of the indians: An open archive], 2016.

Ritual Kateoku; povo Enawenê-nawê [Kateoku ritual; Enawenê-nawê people], 1995/1996. Frames from the video. Part of the project O Brasil dos Índios: um arquivo aberto [Brazil of the indians: An open archive], 2016.

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Vivian caccuri

1986, São Paulo, Brazil. Lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with DJKEYZZZ, Ghalileo, Kuvie, MensaHighlife, Mutombo Da Poet, Panji Anoff, Sankofa, Steloo, Wanlov, Yaw P.

Vivian Caccuri uses sound as the starting point for exploring questions of perception, as well as issues of a historical and social nature. Through objects, installations and performances, her work promotes the distortion of the everyday sensorial experience, making room for undoing certain meanings, narratives and conventions that are apparently as fixed as our very cognitive structure. Just as it disorients sensory signals, Caccuri's work also displaces a given arrangement of the imagination and, as such, activates our capacity to construct other images and what she calls the “vibrational state,” while being in ordinary places.

In the context of the 32nd Bienal, the work Tabom Bass (2016), presents on installation made of stacked speakers – like those used for street parties –, built by Brazilian craftsmen from the wood to the electronics, composed solely of subwoofers (loudspeakers used to reproduce low-pitched frequencies). In front of the speakers are lit candles whose flames move with the shifting air, in effect dancing to the rhythm of the frequencies emitted. The public at the Bienal is also invited to move to these sounds, as long as the assembly and the shape of the installation result in a clear, central space for music performances and dance.

As part of the research developed in the Study Days for this Bienal, Caccuri reclaims the symbolic heritage of Accra, Ghana, using this historical backdrop and suggesting a bridge to expand the connections and meanings for thinking of the Africa-America trajectory. The artist has invited established musicians and producers from Accra to compose the bass lines to be regularly played on the sound system as if on a radio station. In sessions throughout the course of the Bienal, guest Brazilian DJs and MCs will perform live at the installation, improvising beats, instruments, words and other sounds added to the low-pitched lines composed by the Ghanaians. The first performance is to be broadcast via live stream to Brazil House in Jamestown, Accra. In addition to the installation and performances, these local artists are invited to produce tracks based on their remixes of the African bass lines – the hybrid sounds resulting from this interaction serving as the ingredients for an album release.

The title of the work combines the word “bass” with “Tabom,” the name given to the Brazilian slaves and their descendants who returned to Accra after the Malê Revolt, a slave rebellion that took place in Salvador in 1835. At the same time that Tabom Bass creates a setting for festive interaction, it also mobilizes fantasies and utopias involving the African continent and unleashes phantasmagorical imagery, in which the flames dance like bodies in a mysterious ritual.

——Marilia Loureiro

Model for TabomBass, 2016.

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Wilma Martins

1934, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Drawing, painting and etching are essential practices in Wilma Martins' production. Using drawing as a point of departure for painting is a tradition that recognises it as a preparatory technique. The unique aspect of Martins' work is that she goes from drawing to painting and then back to drawing, such as in the series Cotidiano (1974-1984). Each piece was initially made using India ink and watercolour, and later recreated with acrylic on canvas. From 1979, the artist introduced another stage in her process by redrawing in a notebook the compositions created in previous years, including a record of the original date and the medium used. The notebook seems to refer to the tradition that assigned the technique of etching with the task of disseminating the pictorial works of great masters. However, by adding new scenes, Martins' gesture goes beyond the idea of cataloguing.

Amongst dressing table objects, crockery and clothing items that constitute household intimacy, we see forests, bushes and wild animals that are unusual in the context. Nevertheless, given how they are placed in the scene these characters seem at ease, as if in their own habitat, and belonging comfortably in this human routine, far from the idealised nature of the pictorial tradition. Nature and animals are the only elements with colour in the series. The house, objects and furniture are illustrated with the artist' sharp black outline and work as a dividing line between the paleness of banal items of daily experience (represented on a large scale) and colourful fragments scattered on the paper and canvas with minuscule creatures.

Despite functioning within the antagonism between inside and outside, domestic and wild, known and unknown, big and small, artificial and natural, the artist's compositions create a peculiar interweaving of the represented dimensions. On the blank canvas or paper, the emergence of a natural world disorganises the construction of an everyday experience created by the drawn lines. In the scenes, we can see the irruption of a world characterised by the impermanence of nature or a symbolic disruption, evoking the ungovernable things of childhood, as if in an oneiric dimension that only lightly touches reality. Going through this topology is like touring the images of the unconscious, where the real and the imaginary (fantasy) are not easily distinguishable. Through the prism of surrealism, the oneiric and unconscious dimensions are, above all, political as they are able to convert symbols made numb by the immobility of our bourgeois existence into sparks of reverie and fascination.

In Martins' compositions, household objects, drawers, wardrobes and half-opened doors expose the human presence whilst acting as a metaphor for the idea of overcoming or crossing thresholds. Perhaps the threshold of reason is one of them, when unexpected crossings create gaps in everyday spaces or in the gates that contain the absurd, the fables and the myths.

——Hortência Abreu

From the series Cotidiano [Everyday], 1981. Paper, watercolor and pen and ink. 18 × 15,6 cm.

Wilma Martinsâ&#x20AC;&#x192;379

From the series Cotidiano [Everyday], 1983. Paper, watercolor and pen and ink. 18 × 16,6 cm.

From the series Cotidiano [Everyday], 1982. Paper, watercolor and pen and ink. 18 × 16,6 cm.

Wilma Martinsâ&#x20AC;&#x192;381

1927, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Lives in Rio de Janeiro

Wlademir Dias-Pino

Wlademir Dias-Pino grew up in Cuiabá, the geodesic center of South America, where his father, a communist editor, moved the family in political exile. It was in Cuiabá that, at age 12, Dias-Pino became familiar with engraving and editorial projects. In 1948, along with Silva Freire, Dias-Pino launched the literary movement known as intensivismo, which later begot the artistic movement poema / processo (1967-1972).

Based in Rio de Janeiro and Natal, poema/processo used poetry as a tactic of popular “cultural guerrilla warfare,” in opposition to the hermetic and dogmatic concrete art of São Paulo. In 1952, he completed one of the first artist's books in Brazil, A ave [The bird] (1948-1956). Published with a print run of 300 copies, with layers of colorful, overlapping pages with pierced holes revealing floating lines of poetry, the volume allowed readers to create their own versions of poems.

Poet, graphic designer, window dresser, visual programmer, long-time partner of collage and offset printing and scholar of the slanted line, Wlademir Dias-Pino, at age 89, defines himself as “avant-garde” and situated in a field of formal and ideological experimentation. If, for example, a biennial exhibition is a project of cultural capital, he chooses to act against this backdrop based on his socialist/constructivist ideology.

His work is informed by the selection of industrial standards of materials and measurements, in a rational economic practice which uses applied mathematics. At the core of each work, he seeks to economize on the space used in paper, page, wood, wall and facades.

Wlademir Dias-Pino works in three shifts and in series, as he likes to say. It is no coincidence that he has an archive/arsenal of thousands of abstract shapes ready for any occasion. The printed image from distinct eras and cultures is his key to reading the world, materialized in juxtapositions, approximations and symmetries. Geometric patterns guide the vision and circulation (on the page or in space), act as play architecture, and, principally, mold the poet's ambitious didactic plane.

For the 32nd Bienal, Dias-Pino presents two interrelated works: Outdoors (2015-2016), a series of 20 plates distributed throughout Ibirapuera Park, derived from the visual essays A rigor [Rigorously], Matemática cuiabana [Cuiabá Mathematics] and Aventura gráfica [Graphic Adventure] (all undated); and the Enciclopédia visual brasileira [Brazilian Visual Encyclopedia] (1970-2016), which is installed in the Bienal building in a brand new way. In the former, colorful plywood boards with geometric reliefs lend three-dimensional form to studies originally conceived for publications. The latter, in turn, is composed by the accumulation and indexing of printed images, a project carried out on a semi-daily basis by the artist throughout his life and which intentionally escapes any kind of definition regarding chronology and source.

Dias-Pino questions the forms of power that seek to control the images we all produce and distribute today.

It is in relation to this uncertainty of the imagetic regime that he constructs endless versions of a Brazilian visual encyclopedia in a twofold manner: in an attempt to create another rational-ideological system of visual reading of human history in the world with the geodesic center of South America as its neuralgic point (or line); and also as material evidence or even as an explosive celebration of the collapse of any order of images connected to power, including the encyclopedia itself.

——Leandro Nerefuh and Tobi Maier

Image from Enciclopédia Visual Brasileira [Brazilian Visual Encyclopedia], 1970-2016. Digital collages and collages on paper. 42 × 29.7 cm.

Wlademir Dias-Pinoâ&#x20AC;&#x192;383

Image from Enciclopédia Visual Brasileira [Brazilian Visual Encyclopedia], 1970-2016. Digital collages and collages on paper. 42 × 29.7 cm Projeto para Outdoors, 2015-2016. Mixed media.

Wlademir Dias-Pinoâ&#x20AC;&#x192;385

Xabier Salaberria

1969, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain. Lives in Donostia-San Sebastián and Barcelona, Spain

Xabier Salaberria works across various artistic media – including installation, photography, graphic design and exhibition architecture. He explores processes of formalization, as well as the potentials of those media to become something else, given their shifting material, ideological, and institutional contexts. Vacillating between being sign and material, art and something other than art, his works open up to contemplation as displaced or even intransigent objects and situations. A kind of vanishing point for what they normally are and the norms they uphold, they question their time and place in history. Salaberria talks about a process of “denaturalizing sculpture”.

At the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, where the Bienal de São Paulo has taken place since 1957, the artist explores the relationships between the Pavilion's architecture and the reality of its surroundings, and also mobilizes local elements from the city of São Paulo and from the history of the Bienal. In his installation, which Salaberria defines as “the abstract materiality” of objects, conditions and alters people's movement within the space, causing unexpected connections between visitors, objects and location. Concepts like ephemeral structures, obstacles, alliances and affections shared in the field of conflict can be operative in a critical approach to the artist's work.

In the installation Restos materiales, obstáculos y herramientas [Material, remains, obstacles and tools] (2016), commissioned for the 32nd Bienal, bricks from Vila Itororó, a construction from the 1920s, that witnessed the urban development and real estate speculation of the Bela Vista neighborhood in São Paulo, join a number of elements such as wooden modules, in a display similar to those from the first Bienal de São Paulos. Large bottles of mineral water and metal frames emulating the frames of the building also integrate the work, as well as the photographic reproduction of the stone wall, in direct vicinity to the installation itself. Images and objects of differing natures seek to broaden the context in which they operate, extending the limits of the exhibition space out towards the city. The installation intervenes in the space, permitting new experiences with the temporalities evoked by these objects without falling into nostalgic interpretations.

The elements in Salaberria's work pile up and are redistributed as obstacles to the flow of visitors. They demand a certain critical positioning through an interrupting gesture, a momentary suspension of temporal references, maybe creating in this pile of elements a space for shuffling memories, the construction of a different relationship between the overlapping objects. This barricade set up by the artist affirms the impossibility of a historical narrative that is neutral, linear, regarded as a mere accumulation of information about the past. The visitor is then in an opportune moment for rearranging these narratives, a moment of recollection which is in fact political, collective and “dangerous”. The objects that the artist mobilizes come up displaced, intended to cause surprise and indicate not only new directions to the visitors – new experiences before the conflict of which they are an index – but to claim new narratives and also a new place in the past.

——Paulo Carvalho

4th Bienal de São Paulo, in 1957, flooding of the Pavilion Ciccillo Matarazzo. Reproduction.

Xabier Salaberriaâ&#x20AC;&#x192;387

Sin Titulo (Oblique 2), 2016. Untitled (Oblique 2). Markina marble, newspapers and wood.

265 × 140 × 110 cm.

Xabier Salaberriaâ&#x20AC;&#x192;389

About the authors (1988, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a curator. He is currently a member of the team in charge of Solar dos Abacaxis (Rio de Janeiro). He has curated the exhibitions O que vem com a aurora [What comes with the dawn](2016), Encruzilhada [Crossroad] (2015), Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (2015) and Anna Bella Geiger: circa mmxiv – A imaginação é um ato de liberdade [Anna Bella Geiger: circa mmxiv – The imagination is an act of freedom] (2014), amongst others. He lives in Rio de Janeiro. bernardo mosqueira

boaventura de sousa santos (1940, Coimbra, Portugal) holds a PhD in Sociology of Law from Yale University (1973). He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Economics of Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal, and a Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the Director of the Social Studies Centre of Universidade de Coimbra. He lives in Coimbra. bruno mendonça (1987, São Paulo, Brazil) is an artist, researcher, curator and cultural producer. He received a BA in Design from Universidade Mackenzie and an MA in Communication and Semiotics from Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). Since 2005 he has developed trans-disciplinary and collaborative projects in institutions, independent venues and galleries. He is currently part of a team of critics and curators of Centro Cultural São Paulo. He lives in São Paulo.

(1979, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is a curator and researcher. She is currently studying for a PhD at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), in Paris, and is assistant curator at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). She holds an MA in Art and Politics from New York University (NYU). She co-founded La Maudite, an art space in Paris, curating exhibitions and hosting public events. She lives in São Paulo, Brazil. camila bechelany

(1983, Fortaleza, Brazil) is a curator and researcher. She received an MA in Communication and Semiotics with focus on art, critique and curatorship from PUC-SP and a BA in Visual Arts from Faculdade Integrada Grande Fortaleza (FGF/CE). She has worked in the cecília bedê

fields of art and education, collection management, production and curating. She is currently Curator of Special Collections at Fundação Edson Queiroz, in Fortaleza. She lives in Fortaleza.

(1963, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a Professor and the Director of the Social Justice Institute at The University of British Columbia, Canada. Her academic writing and artistic practice address the ethical challenges posed by Global Capital, in particular those related to the juridic and economic architectures of colonial and racial violence. She lives at the Musqueam First Nation Reservation, in Vancouver, Canada. denise ferreira da silva

(1979, Fortaleza, Brazil) is a researcher and lecturer. He holds a MA and an PhD from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of Universidade de São Paulo (FAU-USP). He was curatorial assistant of the 29th Bienal de São Paulo; member of the Team of Researchers and Curators of Instituto Tomie Ohtake; Assistant Curator of the 18th Festival Sesc_Videobrasil; curator of the exhibitions Da próxima vez eu fazia tudo diferente [The next time I would do it all differently] (Pivô, 2012) and Quem nasce pra aventura não toma outro rumo [Who is born for adventure don’t stray from the path] (Paço das Artes, 19th Festival Sesc_ Videobrasil, 2015). He was also Collection and Research Coordinator of Associação Cultural Videobrasil. He lives in São Paulo, Brazil. diego matos

elizabeth a. povinelli (1962, Buffalo, USA) is a professor and filmmaker. She currently holds the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies chair at Columbia University in New York City. She is the author of five books, the most recent, Geontologies, A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke, 2016) and the director of three films including the Melbourne International Film Festival 2015 Cinema Nova Award for When the Dogs Talked. She splits her time between New York City and Belyuen, Australia.

(1989, São Paulo, Brazil) is an anthropologist, essayist and curator. He is currently associate curator of the project Vila Itororó Canteiro Aberto, in São Paulo. He worked at the public program for Casa do Povo, in São Paulo; co-curated the project for Frente à Euforia fábio zuker

391

[Facing Euphoria] (2015) and organized the audio-visual exhibition Cinemasoquismo [Cinemasochism] and the seminar The Frontier of Modernity (2014, Mexico). He lives in São Paulo.

(1974, Durban, South Africa) is an artist, independent curator and member of faculty at the Wits University School of Arts, Johannesburg. In 2010 she co-founded the Center for Historical Reenactments (2010- 2014), an independent project that operated from Johannesburg, where she curated PASSS-AGES: references & footnotes and Xenoglossia, the Exhibition, amongst others. She co-founded and co-directs NGO-Nothing Gets Organized, a project space based in Johannesburg. Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. gabi ngcobo

(1988, São Paulo, Brazil) is an anthropologist, curator and documentary filmmaker. He holds an MA in Social Anthropology from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He was curatorial assistant of the 10th São Paulo Architecture Biennial (2013) and directed the documentary O Castelo [The Castle] (2015). He is currently curator of museu do louvre pau-brazyl. He lives in São Paulo. guilherme giufrida

hortência abreu (1989, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is an artist and researcher with a BA in Visual Arts and an MA in Arts from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). She focuses on memory strategies found in contemporary art practices and the history of art. She lives in Belo Horizonte.

(1971, Braunschweig, Germany) is a curator and art critic.

He served as Head of Programmes at the Serpentine Galleries in London; Artistic Director at Instituto Inhotim; and curator at Portikus in Frankfurt.

He was co-curator of the international exhibition of the 53rd Bienal de Veneza (2009) and the 1st Aichi Triennial in Nagoya (2010) and guest curator of the 27th Bienal de São Paulo (2006). Lives in São Paulo, Brazil. jochen volz

(1977, Bogota, Colombia) is an art critic and historian specialised in Latin American art. She holds a PhD in Architecture and Urbanism from FAU-SP. She regularly writes for ArtNexus magazine and

julia buenaventura

the site Fórum Permanente. Her book Polvo eres. El correr del tiempo en María Elvira Escallón [You were dust. The passage of time in María Elvira Escallón] was published by Colombia’s Ministry of Culture. She lives in Bogota.

(1984, Aracaju, Brazil) is a curator, researcher and art critic. She was curator at Instituto Inhotim from 2007 to 2015 and a member of the Curatorial Team of the 18th and 19th Festival Internacional Sesc_Videobrasil (2012-2015). In 2013 she was associate curator of the 9th Mercosul-Porto Alegre. She holds an MA and is currently undertaking a PhD from Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) Visual Arts PostGraduation Programme. She lives between São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

júlia rebouças

leandro nerefuh (1975) is a research-based artist. His work investigates formal translations of historical narratives, with a special interest in Latin America. Nerefuh is the founder of PPUB, a political party active in Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. He is a collaborator of Escola Capacete, Rio de Janeiro, and SOLO SHOWS, São Paulo. Lives in São Paulo. lars bang larsen (1972, Silkeborg, Denmark) is a writer, curator, and art historian. He has (co-)curated exhibitions such as Reflections from Damaged Life (Raven Row, London 2013) and Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings (Courtauld Gallery, London 2016). His books include The Model. A Model for a Qualitative Society 1968 (2010), Networks (2014) and Arte y norma (2016). Lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. marilia loureiro (1988, São Paulo, Brazil) is a curator, researcher and artist. She was curatorial assistant of Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP) and has worked in independent spaces such as Ateliê397 and Casa Tomada, both in São Paulo. She curated Renata Har’s exhibition Behold (2014) in Berlin and was curator in residence at lugar a dudas (2015-2016), in Cali, Colombia. She is curator-in-residency at Capacete, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

393

(1983, Recife, Brazil) is a journalist and researcher. In 2015 he published Limiares – Fotografia em Pernambuco [Thresholds – Photography in Recife] (www.limiares.com.br). He lives in Recife. paulo carvalho

(1988, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a curator, art historian and researcher. In 2015 he received the Curatorship Award Marcantonio Vilaça. He curated the exhibitions Quando o tempo aperta [When the time is short] (2016), Água mole, pedra dura [Soft water, hard stone] (2014), Deslize <surfe skate> [Slide <surf skate>] (2014), City as a Process (2012) and the film festival Derek Jarman – Cinema é liberdade [Derek Jarman – Cinema is freedom]. He lives in Rio de Janeiro. raphael fonseca

renan araujo (1987, Santa Rita do Passa Quatro, Brazil) is a curator and writer. He is currently part of the team of critics and curators of Centro Cultural São Paulo and editor of the platform bendego.com. He curated the exhibitions Dois pra lá, dois pra cá [Two steps to the right, two steps to the left] (2014), Técnicas de desaparecimento [Tecniques of disappearance] (2012) and 748.600 (2011). He lives in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. sharon avery-fahlström

is the president of the Öyvind Fahlström

Foundation.

(1980, Mexico City, Mexico) works in the intersections of art and education. She served as the academic curator at MUAC (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo – UNAM) in Mexico City, where she coordinated the academic program Campus Expandido [Expanded campus]. Olascoaga was prior Head of Education and Public Programs at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City and collaborates with international laboratories for public programs across the globe. Lives in Mexico City and São Paulo. sofía olascoaga

(1976, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is a curator and writer based in São Paulo. He was associate curator for the 30th Bienal de São Paulo (2011-2012); curator at Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt am Main (2006–2008) and at Ludlow 38 in New York (2008-2011). He holds a MA Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London

tobi maier

and is currently undertaking PhD research in the department of Poéticas Visuais at the Escola de Comunicações e Artes, Universidade de São Paulo.

In early 2015 he co-founded the exhibition space SOLO SHOWs in São Paulo. ulisses carrilho (1990, Porto Alegre, Brazil) is a curator and writer. He is director's assistant of Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, in Rio de Janeiro. He curated the exhibitions Aqui mis crímenes no serían de amor [Here my crimes wouldn’t be of love] (2016), in Cali, Colombia, and Morro [Mount] (2015), in Rio de Janeiro. He co-edited the publications of the 9th Mercosul Biennial. He lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

395

images credits Alia Farid pp.87 – 89

pp.100 – 101 Sim Não, 2015. Artist’s

Image: Carlos Motta.

p.114

Ma’arad Trablous, 2016.

collection. Courtesy: the artist.

Towards a Homoerotic

Courtesy: Galerie Imane Fares,

Image: Antonio Malta Campos.

Historiography, 2013. Courtesy: the artist and P.P.O.W., New

Paris. Image: Alia Farid.

Bárbara Wagner Alicia Barney

p.103

York. Image: Hendrick Zeitler.

p.115

Tô nem aí, 2016. Image: Bárbara

Untitled, 1998. Courtesy: the

Valle de Alicia, 2016. Yamile

Wagner.

artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

Velosa / Maria Belén Saes de

Ana e Yasmin, 2016. Image:

Image: Carlos Motta.

Ibarra / Departamento Cultural

Bárbara Wagner.

p.91

Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Image: Alicia Barney.

pp.104 – 105 Estás vendo coisas, 2016.

Carolina Caycedo p.117

Courtesy: Solo Shows, São

Yaqui, Yuma, Elwha, 2016.

Ana Mazzei

Paulo. Image: Bárbara Wagner

Courtesy: Instituto de Visión,

p.93

and Benjamin de Burca.

Bogota. Image: Carolina Caycedo.

Avistador de pássaros, 2014.

Artist’s collection. Courtesy:

Bené Fonteles

Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São

p.107

Paulo. Image: Eduardo Ortega.

pp.94 – 95 Êxtase, ascensão e morte, 2016.

p.118 Cosmotarraya Yaqui, 2016.

Antes arte do que tarde, 1977.

Courtesy: Instituto de Visión,

Image: Milton Mendes.

Bogota. Image: Carolina

p.108

Caycedo.

p.119

Courtesy: Galeria Jaqueline

Ex-cultura, 1983. Courtesy: the

Martins, São Paulo. Image:

Nature. Image: Luiz Fernando

Be Dammed, 2016. Image:

Everton Ballardin.

Borges da Fonseca.

Carolina Caycedo.

pp.108 – 109 Anawana Haloba

Antes arte do que tarde, 1977.

Cecilia Bengolea &

p.97

Image: Milton Mendes.

Jeremy Deller pp.121 – 123

This and Many More, 2013.

Courtesy: the artist and Sharjah

Carla Filipe

Bombom’s Dream, 2016. Image:

Art Foundation, Al Mareija.

p.111

Cecilia Bengolea & Jeremy

Image: Anawana Haloba.

Saloio, 2011. Artist’s collection.

Deller.

Courtesy: the artist and Galeria

Antonio Malta Campos

Murias Centeno, Lisbon. Image:

Charlotte Johannesson

p.99

Pedro Magalhães and Susana

p.125

Mapa-múndi, 2015. Artist’s

Pomba.

Achtung – Actions Speak Louder Than Words, 1976. Courtesy:

collection. Courtesy: the artist.

Image: Antonio Malta Campos.

Carlos Motta

Dimensão, 2016. Artist’s

p.113

the artist. Image: Charlotte Johannesson.

p.126

collection. Courtesy: the artist.

Towards a Homoerotic

Image: Antonio Malta Campos.

Historiography, 2013. Courtesy:

No Choice Amongst Stinking

the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

Fish, 1976. Courtesy: the artist.

Image: Charlotte Johannesson.

p.127

things and finding ways to

Francis Alÿs

understand... (...when they grow

p.163

No Future, 1977. Courtesy:

up...), 2016. Courtesy: the artist

Untitled, 2016. Artist’s

the artist. Image: Charlotte

and Monique Meloche Gallery,

collection. Courtesy: the artist

Johannesson.

Chicago. Image: Ebony G.

and Galerie Peter Kilehmann,

Patterson.

Cristiano Lenhardt p.129 Trair a espécie, 2014-2016.

Eduardo Navarro

In a Given Situation, 2016.

pp.149 – 151

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

Sound Mirror, 2016. Courtesy:

Cristiano Lenhardt.

the artist. Image: Eduardo

pp.130 – 131

Zürich. Image: Francis Alÿs.

pp.164 – 165

Navarro.

Uma coluna, 2016. Courtesy:

Francis Alÿs.

Frans Krajcberg p.167

the artist. Photo: © Cristiano

Em’kal Eyongakpa

Sem título (Gordinhos), n.d.

Lenhardt.

p.153

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

Breathe II, 2013. Courtesy:

Dalton Paula

the artist. Image: Em’kal

p.133

Eyongakpa.

Implantar Anamú, 2016. Image: Gabriela Sacchetto.

p.134 – 135

Frans Krajcberg.

pp.168 – 169 Sem título (Bailarinas), n.d.

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

Erika Verzutti

Frans Krajcberg.

p.155

Series Rota do tabaco, 2016.

Ouro branco, 2015. Courtesy:

Gabriel Abrantes

Courtesy: Sé Galeria, São Paulo.

Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

p.171

Image: Paulo Rezende.

Image: Ding Musa.

Os humores artificiais, 2016.

Dark Matter, 2016. Courtesy:

Fundação de Serralves, Porto

Dineo Seshee Bopape

Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

and Colección Intelcom de

pp.137 – 139

Image: Ding Musa.

Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid.

We Need the Memories of All

pp.156 – 157

Our Members, 2015. Courtesy:

Courtesy: Galeria Fortes Vilaça,

the artist. Image: Hordalend

São Paulo. Image: Ding Musa.

Felipe Mujica pp.141 – 143

Gabriel Arantes.

Gilvan Samico

Kunstsenter.

Donna Kukama

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

p.159

p.173 O Outro Lado do Rio, 1980.

Untitled (para Cuenca), 2014.

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio

What We Caught We Threw

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

Magalhães, Recife. Courtesy:

Away, What We Didn’t Catch

Felipe Mujica.

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio

We Kept, 2015. Courtesy: the artist. Image: Christine Clinckx.

pp.160 – 161 Untitled (El Quisco), 2013.

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

Ebony G. Patterson pp.145 – 147 ...they were discovering

Felipe Mujica.

Magalhães, Recife. Image: Gilvan Samico.

p.174 Fruto Flor, 1998. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães, Recife. Courtesy: Museu de Arte

397

Moderna Aloisio Magalhães,

Cologne/New York. Image:

Jordan Belson

Recife. Image: Gilvan Samico.

Galerie Buchholz.

p.205

p.175

p.190

Samadhi, 1967. Courtesy:

Rumores de Guerra em Tempos

4, 2016. Courtesy: the artist

Center for Visual Music,

de Paz, 2001. Museu de Arte

and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/

Los Angeles. Image: Jordan

Moderna Aloisio Magalhães,

Cologne/New York. Image:

Recife. Courtesy: Museu de Arte

Galerie Buchholz.

Moderna Aloisio Magalhães, Recife. Image: Gilvan Samico.

p.189

Brain Drawings EW.0120, 1952.

Some Illustrations to the Life of

Catherine Heinrich. Courtesy:

Alan Turing, 2009. Courtesy:

Catherine Heinrich. Image:

Grada Kilomba

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/

p.177

Cologne/New York. Image:

The Desire Project, 2015-2016.

Henrik Olesen.

Image: Grada Kilomba.

p.178 – 179 Illusions, 2016. Image: Grada

Belson.

p.206

Jordan Belson.

p.207 Brain Drawings EW.0117, 1952.

Catherine Heinrich. Courtesy:

Hito Steyerl

Catherine Heinrich. Image:

p.193

Jordan Belson.

Factory of the Sun, 2015.

Kilomba.

Courtesy: the artist and Andrew

Jorge Menna Barreto

Güneş Terkol

Kreps Gallery, New York.

pp.209 – 211

pp.181 – 183

Image: Manuel Reinartz.

The Girl Was Not There, 2016.

Courtesy: the artist. Image: Ozan Eras.

pp.194 – 195

Restauro, 2016. Image: Joélson Bugila.

How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .mov File,

José Antonio Suárez Londoño

2013. Courtesy: the artist and

pp.213 – 215

Heather Phillipson

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New

Planas: del 1 de enero al 31 de

pp.185 – 187

York. Image: Hito Steyerl.

diciembre del año 2005, 2005.

true to size,

2016. Arts Council

Courtesy: the artist and Galería

Collection, London. Courtesy:

Iza Tarasewicz

Casa Riegner, Bogotá. Image:

the artist and Arts Council

pp.197 – 199

Miguel Suárez.

Collection, London. Image:

turba, turbo,

2015. Zachęta

Heather Phillipson / Arts Council

Narodowa Galeria Sztuki,

José Bento

Collection, London.

Warsaw. Courtesy: the artist

p.217

and Zachęta Narodowa Galeria

Chão, 2004/2016. Image:

Henrik Olesen

Sztuki, Warsaw. Image: Maciej

Eduardo Eckenfes and Eduardo

p.189

Landsberg.

2, 2016. Courtesy: the artist

Ortega.

pp.218 – 219

and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/

Jonathas de Andrade

Do pó ao pó, 2015-2016.

Cologne/New York. Image:

pp.201 – 203

Image: Daniel Mansur.

Galerie Buchholz.

pp.190 – 191 5, 2016. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/

O peixe, 2016. Courtesy: the artist. Image: Jonathas Andrade.

Kathy Barry pp.221 – 223 Series 12 Energy Diagrams,

2015–2016. Courtesy: the artist.

Lourdes Castro

occurs: Ektachrome Archive:

Image: Kathy Barry.

p.241

Nan, Berlin, 1992, 2015-2016.

Katia Sepúlveda pp.225 – 227

Salsa, 1980. Image: Lourdes

Courtesy: the artist; David

Castro.

Castillo Gallery, Miami; JMM

pp.242 – 243

Gallery, Brussels. Image: Lyle

Dispositivo doméstico, 2007-

Un Autre livre rouge, 1973-74.

2012. Courtesy: the artist.

Lourdes Castro’s Collection.

Image: Katia Sepúlveda.

Courtesy: Lourdes Castro.

Today I shall judge nothing that

Image: Carlos Azevedo.

occurs: Ektachrome Archive:

Koo Jeong A

Truce between Crips and Blood,

p.229 arrogation,

2016. Courtesy: the

artist. Image: Koo Jeong A.

pp.230 – 231 evertro,

Ashton Harris Studio.

p.254

Luiz Roque

Los Angeles, 1992, 2015-2016.

pp.245 – 247

Courtesy: the artist; David

heaven,

2016. Courtesy: the

artist. Image: Joana Luz.

2015. Courtesy: the

artist. Image: Koo Jeong A.

Castillo Gallery, Miami; JMM Gallery, Brussels. Image: Lyle Ashton Harris Studio.

Luke Willis Thompson p.249

p.255 Today I shall judge nothing that

Lais Myrrha

Sucu Mate / Born Dead

occurs: Ektachrome Archive:

p.233

(pesquisa), 2016. Courtesy: the

Malcolm X Tshirt, Rome, 1992,

Geometria do acidente, 2014.

artist; Hopkinson Mossman,

2015-2016. Courtesy: the artist;

Artist’s collection. Courtesy:

Auckland; Nagel Draxler,

David Castillo Gallery, Miami;

the artist and Pivô, São Paulo.

Cologne. Image: Luke Willis

JMM Gallery, Brussels. Image:

Image: Everton Balardin.

Thompson.

Lyle Ashton Harris Studio.

pp.234 – 235

pp.250 – 251

Estados intermediários,

Sucu Mate / Born Dead, 2016.

Maria Thereza Alves

2014-ongoing. Courtesy: the

Courtesy: the artist; Hopkinson

p.257

artist. Image: Lais Myrrha.

Mossman, Auckland; Nagel

Uma possível reversão de

Draxler, Cologne. Image: Luke

oportunidades perdidas, 2016.

Willis Thompson.

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

Leon Hirszman p.237

Kai-Morten Vollmer.

Cantos de trabalho – Mutirão,

Lyle Ashton Harris

1974. Courtesy: Leon Hirszman

p.253

Family. Image: Leon Hirszman.

p.238

Today I shall judge nothing that

Mariana Castillo Deball p.259

occurs: Ektachrome Archive:

Unconfortable Objects

Cantos de trabalho – Cana-de-

Self Portrait, Los Angeles,

(detail), 2012. Courtesy: the

açucar, 1976. Courtesy: Leon

circa Early 1990s, 2015-2016.

artist; Barbara Wien, Berlin;

Hirszman Family. Image: Leon

Courtesy: the artist; David

Kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

Hirszman.

Castillo Gallery, Miami; JMM

p.239 Cantos de trabalho – Cacau, 1976. Courtesy: Leon Hirszman Family. Image: Leon Hirszman.

Gallery, Brussels. Image: Lyle Ashton Harris Studio.

p.254 Today I shall judge nothing that

Image: Rosa Maria Rühling.

p.260 – 261 You Have Time to Show Yourself Before Other Eyes, 2014. Courtesy: the

399

artist; Barbara Wien, Berlin;

p.280 – 281

OPAVIVARÁ!

Kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

Tears of Africa, 1987-1988.

Image: Anders Sune Berg.

Artist’s collection. Courtesy: the

Transnomaden, 2016.

artist. Image: Mmakgabo Helen

Courtesy: the artists. Image:

p.261 Estas ruinas que ves, 2006.

Sebidi.

Courtesy: the artist. Image: Ramiro Chávez.

pp.293 – 294

OPAVIVARÁ!.

p.295 Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa p.283

Maryam Jafri

Corazón del Espantapájaros,

pp.263 – 265

(sketch for costume), 2016.

Transnômades, 2016.

Courtesy: the artists. Image: OPAVIVARÁ!.

Product Recall: An Index

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

Öyvind Fahlström

of Innovation, 2014-2015.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa.

p.297

Courtesy: Galleria LaVeronica, Modica. Image: Phillip Hänger.

pp.284 – 285

Garden – A World Model,

Corazón del Espantapájaros,

1973. Sharon Avery-Fahlström

2015. Courtesy: the

Collection. Courtesy: The

Michael Linares

artist. Image: Naufus

Öyvind Fahlström Foundation.

pp.267 – 269

Ramírez-Figueroa.

Image: Tony Coll © 2016

Museu do Pau, 2015. Courtesy:

Sharon Avery-Fahlström.

the artist and Galería Agustina

Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas

Ferreyra, San Juan. Image: José

pp. 287, 289

López Serra.

pp.298 – 299 Section of World Map – A

Psychotropic House: Zooetics

Puzzle, 1973. Courtesy: The

Pavillion of Ballardian

Öyvind Fahlström Foundation.

Michal Helfman

Technologies, 2015-2016.

Image: The Öyvind Fahlström

pp.271 – 273

Courtesy: the artists. Image:

Foundation © 2016 Sharon

Running Out of History, 2015-

Nomeda Urbonas / Urbonas

Avery-Fahlström.

2016. Courtesy: the artist and

Studio.

Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. Image: Asi Oren.

p.288 Psychotropic House: Zooetics

Park McArthur p.301

Pavillion of Ballardian

Contact A, 2015. Eleanor

Misheck Masamvu

Technologies, 2015-2016.

and Bobby Cayre Collection.

pp.276 – 277

Courtesy: the artists. Image:

Courtesy: the artist; ESSEX

Heavy Weight Champion, 2016.

Giedrius Ilgunas.

STREET, New York; Lars

Image: Misheck Masamvu.

p.288

Friedrich, Berlin. Image: Mark

Zooetics Pavilion: Mycomorph

Blower.

mmakgabo Helen Sebidi

Lab, 2015-2016. Courtesy: the

pp.302 – 303

p.279

artists. Image: CAC Vilnus.

Contact S and Contact C, 2016.

Mangwano Olshara Thipa

Courtesy: the artist; ESSEX

Kabhaleng, 1988-1989. Iziko

Oficina de imaginação

STREET, New York; Lars

South African National Gallery,

política

Friedrich, Berlin. Image: Mark

Cape Town. Courtesy: the artist.

p.291

Blower.

Image: Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi.

Image: Oficina de Imaginação Política.

Pia Lindman

Priscila Fernandes

Galería Livia Benavides, Lima.

p.305

p.321

Image: Rafael Nolte.

A Kalevala Duo, Playing Bones,

Gozolândia, 2016. Courtesy:

2015. Courtesy: the artist.

the artist. Image: Priscila

Rosa Barba

Image: Kate Lovering.

Fernandes.

pp.339 – 341

pp.306 –307

p.322

Project for Nose Ears Eyes,

Ahahah, 2016. Courtesy: the

2016. Courtesy: the artist.

artist. Image: Priscila Fernandes.

Image: Pia Lindman.

p.323

White Museum (Vassivière), 2010. Courtesy: the artist.

Image: Rosa Barba.

p.340

Uma vista em fuga, 2016.

White Museum (Pier 54),

Pierre Huyghe

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

2010/2014. Courtesy: the artist.

p.309

Priscila Fernandes.

Image: Rosa Barba.

p.341

A Forest of Lines, 2008.

Courtesy: the artist. Image: Paul

Rachel Rose

White Museum (Margate),

Green.

p.325

2010/2013. Courtesy: the artist.

p.310

A Minute Ago, 2014. Courtesy:

Image: Rosa Barba.

Research material for

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New

De-Extinction, 2016. Courtesy:

York; Pilar Corrias Gallery,

Ruth Ewan

the artist. Courtesy: the artist.

London. Image: Rachel Rose.

pp.343 – 345

Image: Katja Schulz.

pp.326 – 327

Back to the Fields, 2015.

Everything and More, 2015.

Courtesy: Camden Arts Centre,

De-Extinction, 2016. Courtesy:

Courtesy: Gavin Brown’s

London, England. Image:

the artist and Hauser & Wirth,

Enterprise, New York; Pilar

Marcus J Leigh.

London. Image: Pierre Huyghe.

Corrias Gallery, London. Image:

p.311

Rachel Rose.

p.347

Pilar Quinteros pp.313 – 314 Estudo para Smoke Signals,

Sandra Kranich

Rayyane Tabet

Echo Return 1, 2, 2014.

p.329

Courtesy: the artist and

2016. Courtesy: the artist.

Sósia, 2016-on going. Image:

PPC, Philipp Pflug

Image: Pilar Quinteros.

Pedro Ivo Trasferetti / Fundação

Contemporary, Frankfurt.

p.315

Bienal de São Paulo.

Image: Wolfgang Günzel.

pp.348 – 349

Storyboard para Smoke Signals, 2016. Courtesy: the artist.

Rikke Luther

R. Relief 7, 8, 9, 10, 2016.

Image: Pilar Quinteros.

pp.331 – 333

Courtesy: the artist and PPC,

Overspill: Universal Map, 2016.

Philipp Pflug Contemporary,

Pope.L

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

Frankfurt. Image: Siegfried

pp.317 – 319

Rikke Luther.

Wameser.

Pull!, 2013. Courtesy: the artist.

Image: Pope.L.

Rita Ponce de León pp.335 – 337 Intercambios, 2015-2016.

Courtesy: the artist and 80M2

401

Sonia Andrade

Ursula Biemann &

pp.351 – 353

Paulo Tavares

Hydragrammas, 1978-1993.

pp.365 – 367

Aldeias, Olinda. Image: Vincent Carelli / Vídeo nas Aldeias.

p.375

Courtesy: the artist. Image:

Forest Law – Selva Jurídica,

Ritual Kateoku; povo

Vicente de Mello.

2014. Courtesy: the artists.

Enawenê-nawê, 1995/1996.

Image: Ursula Biemann e Paulo

Vídeo nas Aldeias Archive,

Tavares.

Olinda. Courtesy: Vídeo nas

Susan Jacobs

Aldeias, Olinda. Image: Vincent

pp.355 – 357 Through the Mouth of the

Víctor Grippo

Mantle, 2016. Courtesy: the

p.369

artist. Image: Susan Jacobs.

Till Mycha (Helen Stuhr-Rommereim & Silvia Mollicchi) p.359 Manifesto for a Psychedelic Method – A Set of Stories, 2015.

Courtesy: the artist. Image: Till Mycha.

Carelli / Vídeo nas Aldeias.

Naturalizar al hombre,

Vivian Caccuri

humanizar a la naturaleza, o

p.377

Energía vegetal, 1977. Image:

TabomBass, 2016. Image: Vivian

Rômulo Fialdini.

Caccuri.

p.370 Analogía I, 1970/1971. Museo

Wilma Martins

de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires.

pp.379 – 381

Image: Oscar Balducci.

p.371 Analogía I, o Energía,

Series Cotidiano, 1974 – 1984.

Courtesy: the artist. Image: Wilma Martins.

1977/2014. Courtesy: Alexander

Tracey Rose

and Bonin, New York. Image:

Wlademir Dias-Pino

p.361

Oliver Santana / Museo

pp.383 – 384

A Dream Deferred (Mandela

Universitario de Arte

Enciclopédia Visual Brasileira,

Balls), 3/95: An Exercise in

Contemporaneo (MUAC),

1970-2016. Courtesy: the artist.

Colour Control, 2014. Courtesy:

Mexico City.

Image: Tracey Rose.

p.362

Image: Wlademir Dias-Pino.

p.385

the artist and Dan Gunn, Berlin.

Vídeo nas Aldeias

Outdoors, 2015-2016. Courtesy:

p.373

the artist. Image: Wlademir Dias-Pino.

Mandela Balls 6/95 (Strange

Captain Stages War with Rival

Fruit #JeSuisPatriceLumumba),

Groups (gavião), 1989. Vídeo

2015. Courtesy: the artist and

nas Aldeias Archive, Olinda.

Xabier Salaberria

Dan Gunn, Berlin. Image: Tracey

Courtesy: Vídeo nas Aldeias,

p.387

Rose.

Olinda. Image: Raimundo

4a Bienal de São Paulo em

Parkatejê / Vídeo nas Aldeias;

1957, inundação no Pavilhão

A Dream Deferred (Mandela

editing: Vincent Carelli, Ana

Ciccillo Matarazzo, 1957.

Balls), 4/95 Genghis Khan Cack

Carvalho, Tita / Vídeo nas

Image: Extracted from the book

Aldeias.

“As Bienais de São Paulo, de

p.363

Handed Sperm, 2014. Courtesy: the artist and Dan Gunn, Berlin.

Image: Tracey Rose.

p.374

1951 a 1987” written by Leonor

Tiramantu; povo Kanoê, 1995.

Amarante. São Paulo: Editora

Vídeo nas Aldeias Archive,

Projeto, 1989 p.70.

Olinda. Courtesy: Vídeo nas

pp.388 – 389 Sin Titulo (Oblique 2), 2016.

Courtesy: the artist and Galeria Carreras Mugica. Image: Xabier Salaberria / Galeria Carreras Mugica.

403

LIST OF WORKS The present list was completed after the exhibition had opened, which meant we could match it work-for-work against the original list compiled during production, thus trying to avoid errors, omissions and undue additions. We were able to have some of the information and translations revised by the artists and owners, which made the final list as complete and precise as possible.

This is the third version of the list of works (April 2017).

ALIA FARID Ma’arad Trablous, 2016. [The Exhibition of Tripoli]. Video

Support: The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (O C A),

2K. 14’26’’. Support: Shrook Al Ghanim; Rana Sadik &

Nordic Culture Fund, Nordic Culture Point.

Samer Younis; Galerie Imane Farès; marra.tein; Amer Huneidi; Mohammed Hafiz; Ziad Mikati. Director: Alia

ANTONIO MALTA CAMPOS

Farid; Director of Photography: Mark Khalife; Editing:

Capacete, 2015. [Helmet]. Oil on canvas. 230 × 360 cm

Malek Hosni, Vartan Avakian; Sound Consultant: Amin

(diptych). Assistance by Antonia Baudouin. Artist’s

Fari; Music and Sound Design: Nadim Mishlawi; Producer:

collection.

Jowe Harfouche; Cast: Nowar Yusuf; Sound Engineer:

Dimensão, 2016. [Dimension]. Oil on canvas. 230 × 360 cm

Karine Basha; Colouring: Belal Hibri; Production Manager:

(diptych). Assistance by Antonia Baudouin. Artist’s

Jennifer Haddad; Production Assistant: Rosette Stephan;

collection.

1st Camera Assistant: Ziad Choucha; 2nd Camera Assistant:

Mapa-múndi, 2015. [World Map]. Oil on canvas.

Joseph Rai; Key Grip: Hatem Chayna; Grip Assistant:

230 × 360 cm (diptych). Assistance by Antonia Baudouin.

Boudi Said; Technical Equipment and Crew Supplied

Artist’s collection.

by: Platform Studios; Distribution: Galerie Imane Farès.

Sim Não, 2015. [Yes No]. Oil on canvas. 230 × 360 cm

Acknowledgements: Iman Farés; George Awde; Jared

(diptych). Assistance by Antonia Baudouin. Artist’s

McCormick; Kristine Khoury; George Arbid; Amal Khalaf;

collection.

Sarah Chalabi; Wassim Naghi; Farida Sultan; Ginger Beirut

Series Misturinhas, 2000-2016. [Little Mixtures]. Mixed

Productions; Ziad Mikati. Commissioned by the Fundação

media on cardboard. 20 × 25 cm (249 pieces). Artist’s

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

collection.

ALICIA BARNEY

BÁRBARA WAGNER & BENJAMIN DE BURCA

Valle de Alicia, 2016. [Valley of Alicia]. Installation

Estás vendo coisas, 2016. [You Are Seeing Things]. Video

composed of metal, wood, paper, PVC, acrylic emulsion.

installation, 4K HD video (color, sound). 16’. Support: The

Dimensions variable. Yamile Velosa / Maria Belén Saes de

Arts Council of Ireland; Fundo de Incentivo à Cultura

Ibarra / Departamento Cultural Universidad Nacional de

do Estado de Pernambuco, FUNC ULTUR A. Casting: MC

Colombia Collection. Commissioned by the Fundação

Porck, Dayana Paixão and Alan Ka (Banda Mais Amor),

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Leydson Dedesso, Singleds Cass, MC Meta Safadão, Dany Bala, Allany Carvalho, Jurema Fox, Joás Junior

ANA MAZZEI

(JJ Óculos), Lucas Santos, Neguin do Charme, DJ Jadson,

Espetáculo, 2016. [Spectacle]. Installation composed of

Fernando Pato, Victor Ronã, Italo Monteiro (ProRec

wood, painted wood, felt, iron, industrial rubber. 4.30 × 14

Filmes); Cinematographer: Pedro Sotero; Assistant Director:

m (approx. 70 pieces). Commissioned by the Fundação

Jerônimo Lemos; Camera Assistant: Raphael Malta

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Clasen; Sound Recordist: Phelipe Joannes, Sálua Oliveira; Electricians: Alexandre Aranha, Fernando Marinho;

ANAWANA HALOBA

Executive Production: Carol Vergolino, Daiana Dultra

Close-Up, 2016. Installation composed of rock salts, dishes,

(Alumia); Production Assistant: Lara Mafra; Editing:

contact microphones and sound. Dimensions variable.

Rodrigo Carneiro; Finishing: Frederico Benevides; Original

Soundtrack: Dany Bala, Tiquinho Lira (Studio Grife); Sound

Kelly e Kaio da Coréia, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton

Mixing and Mastering: Daniel Turini, Fernando Henna;

paper, 80 × 120 cm.

Sound Effects: Henrique Chiurciu, Sérgio Abdalla, João

Tamires, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper,

Victor Coura; Dialogue Editing: Cauê Shimoda, Mariana

80 × 120 cm.

Vieira; Sound Studio: Confraria de Sons & Charutos;

Bele, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper,

Transcription, translation and subtitles: Daniel Chediek

80 × 120 cm.

(4Estações). Acknowledgments: Thiago Leal (Planeta Show),

Jessica, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper,

Vanclécio Vasconcelos, Júlio Propaganda, MC Leozinho,

80 × 120 cm.

MC Kaio da Corea, MC Joaozinho da Patrão, MC Tróia, Lipinho Dantas, Elvis and PP, Kelly Alves, Scarllet Lima,

BENÉ FONTELES

Sara Ferreira, Rita Azevedo, Marcelo Caetano, Gisela

Ágora: OcaTaperaTerreiro, 2016. Installation with straw

Domschke, Edouard Fraipont, Marcio Harum. Shot in

roof and clay walls, collection of objects and artworks;

Planeta Show, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, June 2015.

performative activations. 5.2 × 18 × 8 m.

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP. CARLA FILIPE BÁRBARA WAGNER

Migração, exclusão e resistência, 2016. [Migration,

Series Mestres de Cerimônias, 2016. [Masters of

Exclusion and Resistance]. Installation composed of

Ceremony]. Mineral pigment on cotton paper. 16 pieces,

plastic canisters, metal barrels, concrete rings with two

80 × 120 cm each. Project carried out with incentive of the

different measures, tires, unconventional food plants and

ZUM / IMS Photography Grant, 2015.

popular plants. Overall dimensions variable. Support:

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; Trelleborg Wheel Systems;

Veríssimo da Prata, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton

República Portuguesa – Cultura | Direção-Geral das Artes.

paper, 80 × 120 cm.

Acknowledgments: Peter Webb, Vera Pezzini, Pedro Coelho,

Cego Abusado, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper,

Mafê Vieira, Rafael Flaborea, Pedro Allioto. Commissioned

80 × 120 cm.

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

Patrão é patrão, 2016. [A Boss is a Boss]. Mineral

(2016).

pigment on cotton paper, 80 × 120 cm.

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

Gleice, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper, 80 × 120 cm.

CARLOS MOTTA

Ana e Yasmin, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper,

Nefandus, 2013-2016. Archival inkjet print in Hahnemühle

80 × 120 cm.

Photo Rag Satin paper. 76.2 × 50.8 cm. Courtesy: the artist

Léo da Lagoa, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper,

and P.P.O.W., New York.

80 × 120 cm.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1 #1, 2013. Gold

Scarllet, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper,

washed silver figure. 0.5 × 1.5 × 1 cm. Based on graphic

80 × 120 cm.

illustration of the Maya culture. Courtesy: the artist and

Tô nem aí, 2016. [I Don’t Care]. Mineral pigment on

P.P.O.W., New York.

cotton paper, 80 × 120 cm.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1 #2, 2013. Gold

Afala e Case, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper,

washed silver figure. 0.7 × 2 × 1.5 cm. Based on sculpture of

80 × 120 cm.

an unidentified ethnic Mexican group. Courtesy: the artist

Mical, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper,

and P.P.O.W., New York.

80 × 120 cm.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1 #3, 2013. Gold

Neguin do Charme, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton

washed silver figure. 0.8 × 1.7 × 1.5 cm. Based on sculpture

paper, 80 × 120vcm.

attributed to the Moche culture from Peru. Courtesy: the

Elloco, 2016. Mineral pigment on cotton paper,

artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

80 × 120 cm.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1 #4, 2013. Gold

405

washed silver figure. 0.5 × 1.7 × 2 cm. Based on sculpture

the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

attributed to the Moche culture from Peru. Courtesy: the

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #2 #6, 2014. Gold

artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

washed silver figure (tumbaga). 1.58 × 0.95 × 0.37 cm. Based

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1 #5, 2013. Gold

on sculpture atrtributed to the Moche culture from Peru.

washed silver figure. 0.5 × 0.5 × 1 cm. Based on sculpture

Courtesy: the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

attributed to the Moche culture from Peru. Courtesy: the

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #2 #7, 2014. Gold

artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

washed silver figure (tumbaga). 1.58 × 0.95 × 0.95 cm. Based

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1 #6, 2013. Gold

on a sculpture of Xochipilli, the Aztec god of art, dance,

washed silver figure. 1.3 × 1.5 × 1 cm. Based on sculpture

flowers and song. Courtesy: the artist and P.P.O.W., New

attributed to the Moche culture from Peru. Courtesy: the

York.

artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #2 #8, 2014. Gold

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1 #7, 2013. Gold

washed silver figure (tumbaga). 1.85 × 1.9 cm. Based on an

washed silver figure. 0.7 × 1.5 × 1.5 cm. Based on sculpture

ancient drawing of an unidentified ethnic Mexican group.

attributed to the Moche culture from Peru. Courtesy: the

Courtesy: the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #2 #9, 2014. Gold

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1 #8, 2013. Gold

washed silver figure (tumbaga). 1.58 × 0.35 × 0.35 cm. Based

washed silver figure. 0.7 × 1.5 × 1.5 cm. Based on sculpture

on sculpture atrtributed to the Moche culture from Peru.

of an unidentified ethnic Mexican group. Courtesy: the

Courtesy: the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #2 #10, 2014. Gold

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1 #9, 2013. Gold

washed silver figure (tumbaga). 1.27 × 0.64 × 0.32 cm. Based

washed silver figure. 2 × 1 cm. Fictional depiction. Courtesy:

on an ancient sculpture of an undentified ethnic Mexican

the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

group. Courtesy: the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #1 #10, 2013. Gold

Series Untitled Self-Portraits, 1998 / 2016. Courtesy: the

washed silver figure. 0.7 × 1.5 × 2.5 cm. Based on sculpture

artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

attributed to the Quimbaya culture from Colombia.

Untitled, 1998. Silver gelatin print. 27.94 × 21.59 cm.

Courtesy: the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 76.2 × 114.3 cm.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #2 #1, 2014. Gold

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 76.2 × 114.3 cm.

washed silver figure (tumbaga). 1.27 × 0.64 × 0.32 cm. Based

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 76.2 × 114.3 cm.

on an ancient sculpture of the Tolita culture. Courtesy: the

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 76.2 × 114.3 cm.

artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 76.2 × 114.3 cm.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #2 #2, 2014. Gold

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 88.9 × 101.6 cm.

washed silver figure (tumbaga). 2.22 × 1.58 × 0.64 cm. Based

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 76.2 × 114.3 cm.

on an ancient sculpture of an undentified ethnic Mexican

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 50.8 × 60.96 cm.

group. Courtesy: the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

Untitled, 1998. Archival inkjet print. 50.8 × 60.96 cm.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #2 #3, 2014. Gold washed silver figure (tumbaga). 1.27 × 0.95 × 0.64 cm. Based

CAROLINA CAYCEDO

on sculpture attributed to a culture from Central Mexico.

A Gente Rio, 2016. [The People River]. From the series

Courtesy: the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

A Gente Rio – Be Dammed. [The People River – Be

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #2 #4, 2014. Gold

Dammed]. HD video (color, sound). 30’. Support: MAB

washed silver figure (tumbaga). 1.58 × 0.93 × 0.93 cm. Based

Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens – Coordenação

on sculpture attributed to a culture from Ecuador. Courtesy:

Nacional (São Paulo), MAB Amazônia (Altamira),

the artist and P.P.O.W., New York.

MAB Minas Gerais (Mariana, Barra Longa, Rio Doce),

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #2 #5, 2014. Gold

Movimento Xingu Vivo Para Sempre (Altamira, Belém),

washed silver figure (tumbaga). 1.27 × 0.95 × 0.31 cm. Based

Comissão dos Atingidos pelo Rompimento da Barragem

on sculpture attributed to a culture from Ecuador. Courtesy:

de Fundão (Mariana), Jornal A Sirene (Mariana), MOAB

Movimento dos Ameaçados por Barragens (Vale do

Watu, 2016. From the series A Gente Rio – Be Dammed

Ribeira), EAACONE Equipe de Articulação e Assessoria às

[The People River – Be Dammed]. Marker over Canson

Comunidades Negras (Vale do Ribeira), Rodrigues Family

paper. 173.5 × 66.4 cm each. Support: Ana Laide Soares,

– Quilombo de Ivaporunduva (Vale do Ribeira), Neves

Ailton Krenak, Yuli Diana, British Council, Embaixada da

Family (Ilha do Cardoso / Vale do Ribeira), Restaurante

Colômbia no Brasil. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal

Comunitário Recanto dos Golfinhos (Ilha do Cardoso),

de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Dona Esperança Quilombo do Sapatu (Vale do Ribeira),

Yuma, 2016. From the series Be Dammed. Marker over

Rios Vivos Colombia, Temporal Films, Veronica Villa,

Canson paper. 173.8 × 47 cm each. Support: Instituto de

Estúdio-9Voltios, Estúdio CVS, Cinedelia, Creative Capital,

Visión (Bogotá), Cesar Reyes Collection (Puerto Rico),

FAAP Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, British Council,

British Council, Embaixada da Colômbia no Brasil.

Embaixada da Colômbia no Brasil. Commissioned by the

Yaqui, 2016. From the series Be Dammed. Marker over

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Canson paper. 174.5 × 47.1 cm each. Support: Instituto de

A Gente Xingú, A Gente Doce, A Gente Paraná, 2016. [The

Visión (Bogotá), Cesar Reyes Collection (Puerto Rico),

People Xingú, The People Doce, The People Paraná]. From

British Council, Embaixada da Colômbia no Brasil.

the series A Gente Rio – Be Dammed. [The People River –

Elwha, 2016. From the series Be Dammed. Marker over

Be Dammed]. Satellite photographs, UV print on aluminum

Canson paper. 173.5 × 47.2 cm each. Support: Instituto de

dibond. 900 × 300 cm. Support: FAAP Fundação Armando

Visión (Bogotá), Cesar Reyes Collection (Puerto Rico),

Alvares Penteado, British Council, Embaixada da Colômbia

British Council, Embaixada da Colômbia no Brasil.

no Brasil. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São

Jornadas de Debate Modelo Energético – Geocoreografias,

Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

2016. [Journeys of Debate Energy – Geochoreography

Cosmotarrafas con Cosmotarrayas, 2016. [Cosmotarrafas

Model]. Public space intervention. Event held within the

with Cosmofishing Nets]. From the series A Gente

32nd Bienal de São Paulo. Support: MAB Movimento dos

Rio – Be Dammed. [The People River – Be Dammed].

Atingidos por Barragens – Coordenação Nacional (São

Installation composed of fishing nets, dyeing, ceramics,

Paulo), Um Minuto de Sirene (Mariana), MOAB Movimento

seeds, bats, candles, oil, fishing rods, alpargatas, wool,

dos Ameacados por Barragens (Vale do Ribeira),

cotton, embroidery, oars, arpilleras. Dimensions variable.

Restaurante Comunitário Recanto dos Golfinhos (Ilha do

Support: MAB Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens

Cardoso), British Council, Embaixada da Colômbia no

– Coordenação Nacional (São Paulo), MAB Amazônia

Brasil. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

(Altamira), MAB Minas Gerais (Mariana, Barra Longa, Rio

for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Doce), Atingidas Bordando a Resistência, Movimento Xingú

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

Vivo Para Sempre (Altamira / Belém), Neves Family − Ilha do Cardoso (Vale do Ribeira), Restaurante Comunitário

CECILIA BENGOLEA & JEREMY DELLER

Recanto dos Golfinhos (Ilha do Cardoso), Centro do

Bombom’s Dream, 2016. HD video. 12’48’’. Support: British

Artesanato Quilombo do Sapatu (Vale do Ribeira), ISA

Council. Camera: Justin Meekel; Additional Cameras:

Instituto Socioambiental (Altamira / Pará), Rios Vivos

Cecilia Bengolea, Jeremy Deller; Editing: Justin Meekel;

Colombia, Creative Capital, Instituto de Visión (Bogotá),

Effects: Arnaud Dezoteux, Maru Cantos; Dancers: BOMBOM

British Council, Embaixada da Colômbia no Brasil.

DHQ JAPAN, Shelly Belly. Commissioned by the Fundação

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016) and the

32nd Bienal (2016).

Hayward Gallery, London.

Iguaçu, 2016. From the series A Gente Rio – Be Dammed [The People River – Be Dammed]. Marker over Canson

CHARLOTTE JOHANNESSON

paper. 173.3 × 66.2 cm each. Support: Ana Laide Soares,

Achtung – Actions Speak Louder Than Words, 1976.

Ailton Krenak, Yuli Diana, British Council, Embaixada da

[Attention – Actions Speak Louder Than Words].

Colômbia no Brasil. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal

Tapestry. 100 × 150 cm. Artist’s collection. Support:

de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Swedish Arts Grants Committee; Moderna Museet,

407

Stockholm; Nordic Culture Fund.

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Attack Attitude, 1977. Tapestry. 200 × 100 cm. Malmö

Communication. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Konstmuseum / Malmö Art Museum Collection. Support:

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Swedish Arts Grants Committee; Moderna Museet,

David Bowie. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Stockholm; Nordic Culture Fund.

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Chile eko i skallen, 1973 / 2016. [Chile Echoes in My Skull].

Design. Apple II and computer (Digital

Tapestry, branches, cinnamon branch. 55 × 100 cm. Support:

Theatre Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Swedish Arts Grants Committee; Moderna Museet,

Dragon. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

Stockholm; Nordic Culture Fund.

29.7 × 42 cm.

Drop Dead, 1977. Tapestry. 190 × 100 cm. Malmö

Guardian? Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Konstmuseum /

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Malmö Art Museum Collection. Support: Swedish Arts

Guardian? Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Grants Committee; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Nordic

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Culture Fund.

I Went. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

Frei Die RAF, 1976. [Free the RAF]. Tapestry. 100 × 150 cm.

29.7 × 42 cm.

Artist’s collection. Support: Swedish Arts Grants

Identity. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

Committee; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Nordic Culture

29.7 × 42 cm.

Fund.

Joseph Beuys. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Longing, 1972. Tapestry. 200 × 100 cm. Private collection.

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Support: Swedish Arts Grants Committee; Moderna

Me and My Computer. Apple II and computer (Digital

Museet, Stockholm; Nordic Culture Fund.

Theatre Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

New Wave, 1977. Tapestry. 107 × 156 cm. Private collection.

nr.77. Gösta. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Support: Swedish Arts Grants Committee; Moderna

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Museet, Stockholm; Nordic Culture Fund.

Our World. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

No Choice Amongst Stinking Fish, 1976. Tapestry.

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

60 × 90 cm. Support: Swedish Arts Grants Committee;

Parliament. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Nordic Culture Fund.

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

No Future, 1977. Tapestry. 105 × 94 cm. Courtesy: Det

Programs. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Nya Museet, Sundbyberg. Support: Swedish Arts Grants

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Committee; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Nordic Culture

Programs. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Fund.

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Series Original Computer Graphics Art, 1981-1986. Artist’s

Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Apple II and computer

Collection. Support: Swedish Arts Grants Committee;

(Digital Theatre Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Nordic Culture Fund.

Revelation. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Ahmad Shah Massoud. Apple II and computer (Digital

Studio). 29.7 × 42cm.

Theatre Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Richard Wagner. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Ahmad Shah Massoud. Apple II and computer (Digital

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Theatre Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Rocket. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Arab. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

29.7 × 42 cm.

Safe. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

Björn Borg. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

29.7 × 42cm.

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Save Us. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

Black Hole. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

29.7 × 42 cm.

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Self-Portrait 1. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Boy George. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Self-Portrait 2. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Support: Swedish Arts Grants Committee; Moderna

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Museet, Stockholm; Nordic Culture Fund.

Self-Portrait 3. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Trampa entre på gräset, 1971 / 2016. [Don’t Step on the

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Grass]. Tapestry, branches. 100 × 100 cm. Artist’s collection.

Texture 1. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Support: Swedish Arts Grants Committee; Moderna

Studio). 29.7 × 42cm.

Museet, Stockholm; Nordic Culture Fund.

Texture 2. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Utmätt Gods (Make a Distress), 1975. [Distressed Goods

Studio). 29.7 × 42cm.

(Make a Distress)]. Tapestry. 100 × 150 cm. Private

Texture 3. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

collection. Support: Swedish Arts Grants Committee;

Studio). 29.7 × 42cm.

Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Nordic Culture Fund.

Texture 4. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

CRISTIANO LENHARDT

Texture 5. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Trair a espécie, 2014-2016. [To Betray the Species].

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Sculpture made from cará with internal metal rods.

Texture 6. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Dimensions variable.

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Uma Coluna, 2016. [A Column]. Performance / site specific,

Texture 7. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

various materials weaved by people. Dimensions variable.

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Assistance: Luiz Henrique Chipan; Vocal Preparation:

Texture 8. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Luciana Freire; Performers: Cupuaçu Group. Commissioned

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

There. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

(2016).

29.7 × 42 cm.

To Space. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

DALTON PAULA

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Series Rota do tabaco, 2016. [Tobacco Route]. Oil

Transformation. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

painting and leaves of gold and silver on alguidar. 15 cm,

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

30 cm and 50 cm ⌀ (51 pieces). Courtesy: Sé Galeria, São

Victoria Benedictsson. Apple II and computer (Digital

Paulo. Support: Sé Galeria, UFR B, Dannemann, Instituto

Theatre Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Identidade Brasil, Associação Quilombola de Piracanjuba

Vote for Me. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre

Ana Laura, Fortaleza de San Carlos de La Cabaña, I S A –

Studio). 29.7 × 42 cm.

Universidad de las Artes. Commissioned by the Fundação

Vote? Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

29.7 × 42 cm.

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

Walk 2. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

29.7 × 42 cm.

DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE

Walk 3. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

:indeed it may very well be the _______ itself, 2016.

29.7 × 42 cm.

Installation composed of compressed soil, ceramics, ash,

Walk 4. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

charcoal, fertility and restorative herbs, brass, crystals,

29.7 × 42 cm.

rope, seeds, flowers, sheepskin, leather, glass. Dimensions

Where. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

variable. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São

29.7 × 42 cm.

Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

World. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

29.7 × 42 cm.

DONNA KUKAMA

World. Apple II and computer (Digital Theatre Studio).

A: The Anatomy of History, 2016. Performance at the

29.7 × 42 cm.

Museu Afro Brasil (9 September, 2016). 15’ approx.

Terror, c.1972 / 2016. Tapestry, barbed wire. 55 × 110 cm.

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

409

32nd Bienal (2016).

EDUARDO NAVARRO

B: I, Too, 2016. Performance (10 September, 2016). 3h

Sound Mirror, 2016. Mixed media. Dimensions variable.

approx. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São

Acoustic tool that connects the sound from a palm tree

Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

located outside the building with the inside of the Bienal

C: The Genealogy of Pain, 2016. Performance in the

Pavilion. Support: Consulado Geral da República Argentina

Cemetery of Consolação (7 September, 2016). 20’ approx.

em São Paulo. Acknowledgments: M.A.T.A; Daina Leyton,

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

Leonardo Catilho (MA M Educational Team); Elaine

32nd Bienal (2016).

Fontana. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

EBONY G. PATTERSON ...doing what they always do... (…when they grow up…),

EM’KAL EYONGAKPA

2016. Hand cut Jacquard woven tapestry with beads,

Breathe II, 2013. Mixed media installation.

appliques, embellishments, broaches, plastic, glitter, fabric,

Dimensions variable. Artist’s collection, Intermedia

toys, embellished knapsack, book and handmade shoes.

Studios / KHaL!SHRINE. Support: Em’kal Eyongakpa

314.96 × 1092.20 × 30.48 cm. Courtesy: the artist and

Intermedia Studios; KHaL!SHRINE; Mondriaan Fund.

Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Commissioned by the

Rustle 2.0, 2016. From the series Rustle. Installation

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

composed of plant fibre, surroundsound, metal, kinetic

...he was only 12... (...when they grow up...), 2016. Mixed

sculpture, text, cables, plastic, light, electronic interfaces,

media print on hand cut, watercolor paper with beads,

magnetism. Dimensions variable. Support: Em’kal

appliques, embellishments, broaches, plastic, glitter, fabric

Eyongakpa Intermedia Studios; KHaL!SHRINE; Mondriaan

and toys. 193.04 × 337.82 cm. Courtesy: the artist and

Fund. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Commissioned by the

for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Untitled XXIV, 2016. From the series Memory Maps for

...love… (…when they grow up…), 2016. Hand cut

an Overload. Installation composed of camera obscura,

Jacquard woven tapestry with beads, appliques,

ambient sound, kinetic sculptures, text, episcope, electronic

embellishments, broaches, plastic, glitter, fabric, and stuffed

interface. Dimensions variable. Support: KHaL!SHRINE;

toys. 284.48 × 308.61 × 30.48 cm. Courtesy: the artist and

Mondriaan Fund. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de

Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Commissioned by the

São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016). ...they were discovering things and finding ways to

ERIKA VERZUTTI

understand... (...when they grow up...), 2016. Hand

Branco, 2016. [White]. Oil on papier-mache and expanded

cut Jacquard woven tapestry with beads, appliques,

polystyrene. 335 × 900 × 20 cm. Commissioned by the

embellishments, broaches, plastic, glitter, fabric, toys,

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

embellished knapsack, book and handmade shoes.

Halo, 2016. Oil on papier-mache and expanded

208.28 × 287.02 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Monique

polystyrene. 300 × 300 × 20 cm. Commissioned by the

Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Commissioned by the Fundação

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Nova, 2016. Oil on papier-mache and expanded

...they were filled with hope, desire, and beauty... (...

polystyrene. 335 × 800 × 20 cm. Commissioned by the

when they grow up...), 2016. Mixed media print on

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

hand cut, watercolor paper with beads, appliques,

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

embellishments, broaches, plastic, glitter, fabric and toys.

232.41 × 378.46 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Monique

FELIPE MUJICA

Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Commissioned by the Fundação

Las universidades desconocidas, 2016. [The Unknown

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Universities]. From the series Cortinas, 2016. [Curtains].

Cotton fabric and thread. 30 pieces, 295 × 160 cm each.

Support: Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes; Alex

S16mm transferred to HD. 30’. Courtesy: of the artist

Cassimiro & Valentina Soares (Platô); Galeria Metrópole;

and Galeria Francisco Fino, Lisbon. Support: Fundação

Grupo Bordadeiras do Jardim Conceição. Commissioned

Calouste Gulbenkian; República Portuguesa – Cultura |

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

Direção-Geral das Artes. Commissioned by the Fundação de

(2016).

Serralves, Colección Inelcom, and the Fundação Bienal de

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

FRANCIS ALŸS Series In a Given Situation, 2010-2016. Oil, pencil and

GILVAN SAMICO

collage on tracing paper; mirrors. 14 pieces, 43 × 32.3 cm

No Reino da Ave dos Três Punhais, 1975. [In the Kingdom

(framed). Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann,

of the Three Daggers Bird]. Woodcut. 74.7 × 41 cm. Museu

Zurich.

de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MA MA M Collection.

Untitled, 2016. Oil on canvas. 25.3 × 32.3 cm. Courtesy: the

Recordação de um Malabarista, 1976. [Recollection of a

artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich. Commissioned

Juggler]. Woodcut. 90 × 35.5 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

Aloisio Magalhães – MA MA M Collection.

(2016).

A Luta dos Homens, 1977. [The Struggle of Men].

Untitled, 2016. Oil on canvas. 25.3 × 32.3 cm. Courtesy: the

Woodcut. 84.5 × 46 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio

artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich. Commissioned

Magalhães – MA MA M Collection.

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

O Encontro, 1978. [The Encounter]. Woodcut. 73.5 × 50 cm.

(2016).

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MA MA M

Untitled, 2016. Oil on canvas. 25.3 × 32.3 cm. Courtesy: the

Collection.

artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich. Commissioned

O Guardião, 1979. [The Guardian]. Woodcut. 91 × 40.2 cm.

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MA MA M

(2016).

Collection.

Untitled, 2016. Drawings and animated paintings;

O Outro Lado do Rio, 1980. [The Other Side of the River].

16mm projection. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Peter

Woodcut. 90 × 47 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio

Kilchmann, Zurich. Collaborators: Emilio Rivera, Federico

Magalhães – MA MA M Collection.

Navarrete, Felix de Smedt and Elena Pardo. Commissioned

A Mãe dos Homens, 1981. [The Mother of Men]. Woodcut.

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

52.4 × 69.5 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães

(2016).

– MA MA M Collection.

O Fazedor da Manhã, 1982. [The Morning Maker].

FRANS KRAJCBERG

Woodcut. 57.5 × 70.5 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio

Sem título (Bailarinas), n.d. [Untitled (Bailarinas)].

Magalhães – MA MA M Collection.

Sculptures of wood from burnings and natural pigments. 10

O Segredo do Lago, 1983. [The Secret of the Lake].

pieces, dimensions variable.

Woodcut. 56.2 × 92 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio

Sem título (Coqueiros), n.d. [Untitled (Coqueiros)].

Magalhães – MA MA M Collection.

Sculptures of wood from burnings and natural pigments. 62

O Rapto do Sol, 1984. [The Abduction of the Sun].

pieces, dimensions variable.

Woodcut. 57.1 × 90.8 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio

Sem título (Gordinhos), n.d. [Untitled (Gordinhos)].

Magalhães – MA MA M Collection.

Sculptures of wood from burnings and natural pigments. 8

A Primeira Homenagem ao Cometa, 1985. [The First

pieces, dimensions variable.

Tribute to the Comet]. Woodcut. 55 × 90 cm. Museu de Arte

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MA MA M Collection.

O Senhor do Dia, 1986. [The Lord of the Day]. Woodcut.

GABRIEL ABRANTES

55.7 × 90.3 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães

Os humores artificiais, 2016. [The Artificial Humours].

– MA MA M Collection.

411

O Sonho de Matheus, 1987. [Matheus's Dream]. Woodcut.

of the Sirens – Baroque Allegory]. Woodcut. 55.5 × 91 cm.

90.5 × 50.2 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MA MA M

– M AMAM Collection.

Collection.

O Diálogo, 1988. [The Dialogue]. Woodcut. 90.3 × 55.3 cm.

A Caça, 2003. [The Hunt]. Woodcut. 92.7 × 47 cm. Museu

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MAMAM

de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MA MA M Collection.

Collection.

A Ascensão, 2004. [The Ascension]. Woodcut. 93 × 53 cm.

O Enigma, 1989. [The Enigma]. Woodcut. 89.8 × 50.3 cm.

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MA MA M

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MAMAM

Collection.

Collection.

Júlia e a Chuva de Prata, 2005. [Júlia and the Silver Rain].

A Fonte, 1990. [The Fountain]. Woodcut. 89.5 × 53.5 cm.

Woodcut. 93 × 50 cm. Samico Family Collection.

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MAMAM

A Árvore da Vida e o Infinito Azul, 2006. [The Tree of

Collection.

Life and the Infinite Blue]. Woodcut. 93 × 49.5 cm. Samico

Virgem dos Cometas, 1991. [Virgin of the Comets].

Family Collection.

Woodcut. 90.7 × 53.5 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio

A Pesca, 2007. [The Fishery]. Woodcut. 93 × 52 cm. Samico

Magalhães – MAMAM Collection.

Family Collection.

A Queda, 1992. [The Fall]. Woodcut. 35.7 × 20.2 cm. Museu

Via Láctea – Constelação da Serpente II, 2008. [Milky Way

de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MAMAM Collection.

– Constellation Snake II]. Woodcut. 116 × 80 cm. Samico

A Criação – Homem e Mulher, 1993. [The Creation – Man

Family Collection.

and Woman]. Woodcut. 90.7 × 49.7 cm. Museu de Arte

Criação das Estrelas, 2009. [Creation of the Stars].

Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MAMAM Collection.

Woodcut. 93 × 50 cm. Samico Family Collection.

A Dama da Noite, 1994. [The Lady of the Night]. Woodcut.

A Conquista do Fogo e do Grão, 2010. [The Conquest of

90.5 × 49.5 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães

Fire and Grain]. Woodcut. 94.8 × 51.3 cm. Samico Family

– M AMAM Collection.

Collection.

O Retorno, 1995. [The Return]. Woodcut. 55.5 × 90.3 cm.

Criação – O Sol, a Lua e as Estrelas, 2011. [Creation – the

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MAMAM

Sun, the Moon and the Stars]. Woodcut. 92.5 × 53 cm.

Collection.

Samico Family Collection.

A Bela e a Fera, 1996. [The Beauty and the Beast].

O Delírio ou as Sete Luas de Ícaro, 2012. [The Delirium or

Woodcut. 91.5 × 47 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio

the Seven Moons of Icarus]. Woodcut. 92.5 × 53 cm. Samico

Magalhães – MAMAM Collection.

Family Collection.

O Sagrado, 1997. [The Sacred]. Woodcut. 56 × 81 cm.

Estudo colorido para xilogravura, 2013. [Colorful Study

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MAMAM

for Woodcut]. Acrylic on cardboard. 116 × 80 cm. Samico

Collection.

Family Collection.

Fruto Flor, 1998. [Flower Fruit]. Woodcut. 90 × 50.2 cm.

Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MAMAM

GRADA KILOMBA

Collection.

The Desire Project, 2015-2016. Video installation

O Devorador de Estrelas, 1999. [The Star Eater]. Woodcut.

composed of 3 video channels with sound, 3 “print

93.2 × 55 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães –

form” prints with image and text. 3 monitors with

M AMAM Collection.

total dimensions 204 cm × 115 cm. 2’37” loop. Support:

A Espada e o Dragão, 2000. [The Sword and the Dragon].

Goethe-Institut São Paulo; República Portuguesa – Cultura |

Woodcut. 91.5 × 48.7 cm. Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio

Direção-Geral das Artes. Music: Moses Leo; Text Revision:

Magalhães – MAMAM Collection.

Júlia Soares Correia; Assistance: Anne Wiegmann; Special

Rumores de Guerra em Tempos de Paz, 2001. [War Rumors

thanks: Lann Hornscheidt, Babalaô Fábio Felipe Maia.

in Times of Peace]. Woodcut. 91.5 × 50.5 cm. Museu de Arte

Illusions, 2016. Performance with screen video projection

Moderna Aloisio Magalhães – MAMAM Collection.

(1 channel, sound), table, texts, microphone. Screen stage

Criação das Sereias – Alegorias Barrocas, 2002. [Creation

size of 4 meters. Approx. 45’. Support: Goethe-Institut São

Paulo; República Portuguesa – Cultura | Direção-Geral das

HENRIK OLESEN

Artes. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

1, 2016. Acrylic paint, edding marker, paper, high-density

for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

fiberboard. 210 × 193 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York. Support: Danish Arts

GUGUOU (GÜNEŞ TERKOL, GÜÇLÜ ÖZTEKIN & OĞUZ ERDIN)

Foundation; Nordic Culture Fund; Nordic Culture Point;

Along Song, 2016. Sound performance. Support: SAHA –

ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen).

Supporting Contemporary Art from Turkey. Commissioned

2, 2016. Inkjet print on photo paper, self-adhesive film,

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

edding marker, acrylic paint, oil paint, high-density

(2016).

fiberboard. 243 × 210 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York. Support: Danish Arts

GÜNEŞ TERKOL

Foundation; Nordic Culture Fund; Nordic Culture Point;

Series Couldn’t Believe What She Heard, 2015.

ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen).

Embroidery and drawing on fabric. 14 pieces, dimensions

3, 2016. Acrylic paint, edding marker, paper, high-density

variable. Artist’s collection. Support: SAHA – Supporting

fiberboard. 220 × 210 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie

Contemporary Art from Turkey.

Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York. Support: Danish Arts

Series The Girl Was Not There, 2016. Embroidery and

Foundation; Nordic Culture Fund; Nordic Culture Point;

drawing on fabric. 16 pieces, dimensions variable. Artist’s

ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen).

collection. Support: SAHA– Supporting Contemporary Art

4, 2016. Inkjet print on photo paper, self-adhesive film,

from Turkey. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São

edding marker, acrylic paint, oil paint, high-density

Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

fiberboard. 210 × 193 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York. Support: Danish Arts

HEATHER PHILLIPSON

Foundation; Nordic Culture Fund; Nordic Culture Point;

TRUE TO SIZE – Wind, 2015-2016. Monitors, speakers,

ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen).

giant soft toy bears, prom dress, umbrella, digital prints on

5, 2016. Inkjet print on photo paper, self-adhesive film,

cardboard, digital prints on vinyl, cardboard, timber, bungee,

edding marker, acrylic paint, oil paint, high-density

pillows, fishing wire and gaffer tape. Dimensions variable.

fiberboard. 210 × 830 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie

Support: British Council; The Henry Moore Foundation.

Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York. Support: Danish Arts

TRUE TO SIZE, 2016 by Heather Phillipson is a 70th

Foundation; Nordic Culture Fund; Nordic Culture Point;

anniversary commission for the Arts Council Collection.

ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen).

Founded in 1946, the Arts Council Collection is the largest national loan collection of modern and contemporary British

HITO STEYERL

art and includes important examples by all of the UK’s

Robots Today, 2016. HD video, environment. 8’. Support:

prominent artists.

Bariş Şehitvan; Zelal Özmen; Sümer Kültür Merkezi

TRUE TO SIZE – Fire, 2015-2016. Monitors, speakers,

Diyarbakır; Goethe-Institut São Paulo; ifa (Institut für

giant soft toy bears, prom dress, umbrella, digital prints

Auslandsbeziehungen). Camera: Savaş Boyraz; Translation:

on cardboard, digital prints on vinyl, cardboard, timber,

Rojda Tugrul, Övül Durmosoğlu; Production: Misal

bungee, pillows, fishing wire and gaffer tape. Dimensions

Adnan Yıldız, Şener Özmen; Protagonists: Nevin Soyukaya

variable. Support: British Council; The Henry Moore

(archaeologist, researcher, writer head of the Department

Foundation. TRUE TO SIZE, 2016 by Heather Phillipson

Cultural Heritage and Tourism, Diyarbakır); Researcher,

is a 70th anniversary commission for the Arts Council

Writer: Abdullah Yaşin, Cizre; Dancers: Ibrahim Halil

Collection. Founded in 1946, the Arts Council Collection

Saka, Vedat Bilir, Sezer Kılıç. Music: Kassem Mosse;

is the largest national loan collection of modern and

Postproduction: Christoph Manz, Maximilian Schmoetzer;

contemporary British art and includes important examples

Assistant: Milos Trakilović. Acknowledgements: Alice

by all of the UK’s prominent artists.

Conconi, Andrew Kreps, Sümer Kültür Merkezi, Diyarbakir, Sanat Merkezi, Gunnar Wendel, Esme Buden.

413

Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2016. 3 channel video installation,

JONATHAS DE ANDRADE

environment, HD video. 4’. Support: Goethe-Institut São

O peixe, 2016. [The Fish]. 16mm film transferred to

Paulo; ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). Original

digital HD. 38’. Support: Funcultura; Governo do Estado

Soundtrack: Kassem Mosse; based on research by David

de Pernambuco. Fishermen: Carlos dos Santos (Menezes),

Taylor identifying the 5 most popular words in English

Cícero dos Santos (Ciço), Cipriano Batista Alves (Cipriano),

song titles since 2010. Robot push recovery, AI falling

Genivaldo Santos de Lima (Irmão), Gileno Cândido Bezerra

simulation and bipedal gait footage with many thanks by:

(Leno), José Ailton Almeida de Liza (Xau), José Dalmo dos

Thomas Geijtenbeek (www.goatstream.com), Michiel van

Santos (Curió), José Elenildo Oliveira dos Santos (Keno),

de Panne, Frank van der Stappen, Natural Motion, MIT

Romerig Francisco dos Santos (Rom), Ronaldo Vieira

Darpa Robotics Team (http://drc.mit.edu), Siyuan Feng (The

Santos (Ronaldo); fishes: Pirarucu, Tambuacu, Tilápia.

Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Team), WPI-

Assistant Director: Jeronimo Lemos; Production: Rachel

CMU, Benjamin Stephens Ph.D work (Carnegie Mellon

Daisy Ellis; Co-production: Jennifer Lange; Production

University), Zhibin (Alex) LI, PhD (Assistant Professor,

Director: Vanessa Barbosa; Cinematographer: Pedro

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh), Mr. Noel

Urano; Cinematographer Assistant: Leandro Gomes,

Maalouf and Dr. Imad Elhajj (members of the Vision and

Camila Freitas; Editing: Tita, Ricardo Pretti; Sound

Robotics Laboratory at the American University of Beirut),

Design: Mauricio d’Orey; Sound Mixing: Paul Hill; Color

Seedwell Media. Dancers: Ibrahim Halil Saka, Vedat Bilir,

Correction: Mike Olenick; Finishing: Film / Video Studio

Sezer Kılıç; Postproduction: Christoph Manz, Maximilian

Program, Wexner Center for the Arts; Fish providers:

Schmoetzer; Line Producer: Lawren Joyce; Producer and

Fernando (Coruripe), Galindo (Piaçabuçu), Wellinton

Director Photography California Robotic Challenge: Kevan

(Coruripe); Camera Boat Pilots: Carlos Roberto Bento e

Jenson. Assistant: Milos Trakilovic. Acknowledgements:

Silva, Chico Pescador, Ronaldo Vieira Dos Santos; Driver:

Alice Conconi, Andrew Kreps, Gunnar Wendel, Esme

Marcinho; Set helpers: Gileno Cândido Bezerra (Leno), José

Buden. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Américo dos Santos (Zé), José Caetano Santos (Juquinha),

for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

José Neoson dos Santos (Neo), Manuel Jacinto de Oliveira (Mãozinha); Special Acknowledgements: Redfish.

IZA TARASEWICZ

Acknowledgements: Agnês, Ana Maria Maia, Antônio

TURBA, TURBO, 2015. Installation composed of a

Amorim, Antônio José Pereira (Baixinho), Arto Lindsay,

modular system and the elements: white titanium, yellow

Bruno Corrêa Meurer, Barbara Wagner, Camile Reis,

iron, red iron, brown iron, black iron, green chrome, cobalt

Camila Salgado, Colônia dos Pescadores de Piaçabuçu Z19,

iron, ash, metal, cement, hemp fibre, resin, asphalt, rubber

Cristina Gouvêa, Cristiano Lenhardt, Eduardo Serrano,

mass, water glass, glue; 25 metal hoops connected to 75

Esdras Bezerra de Andrade, Gabriel Mascaro, Gilberto

shelves / frames. 1000 cm x 1000 cm x 150 cm. Courtesy:

Falbo, Hernani Heffner, Jairo Dornelas, Lelo (Olinda),

of the artist. Support: Deutsche Bank; Zachęta National

Marie Carangi, Miguel Alencar, Naná Vasconcelos, Pelado,

Gallery; Adam Mickiewicz Institute; Culture.pl; Goethe-

Pousada Santiago, Pousada Rosa dos Ventos, Priscila de

Institut São Paulo.

Souza Gonzaga, Rodrigo Tavares; Produced by: Desvia

Mbamba Mazurek, 2016. Music and dance performance.

Wexner Center for the Arts.

50’. Support: Adam Mickiewicz Institute; Deutsche Bank;

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

Zachęta National Gallery; Adam Mickiewicz Institute; Culture.pl; Goethe-Institut São Paulo. Participants:

JORDAN BELSON

Cachuera Group, string-player Filpo Ribeiro, accordionist

Abraxas, c.1950. Paper, pigment, cut board, tape.

Gabriel Levy and Iza Tarasewicz. Acknowledgments:

18.41 × 15.24 cm. Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Willian Fernandes, Barbara Alge, Prof. Alberto Tsuyoshi

Elephant Parts, n.d. Paper, pigment, glass, mashing tape,

Ikeda, Acácio Piedade, Pula Leme, Piotr Zgorzelski, “All the

cardboard. 20.95 × 17.14 cm (framed). Courtesy: Catherine

World’s Mazurkas” – Festival in Poland. Commissioned by

Heinrich.

the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016)

Gordian Knot, n.d. Paper, pigment, glass, black tape,

cardboard. 24.13 × 18.42 cm (framed). Courtesy: Catherine

pigment, artboard. 22.22 × 22.22 cm. Courtesy: Catherine

Heinrich.

Heinrich.

Horns of Unplenty, n.d. Masonite, pigment, wood, stain.

Untitled, 1952. From the series Brain Drawings. Paper,

30.48 × 40.64 cm. Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

pigment, artboard. 22.22 × 22.22 cm. Courtesy: Catherine

Phoenix, n.d. Paper, pigment, matboard, tape.

Heinrich.

18.41 × 15.24 cm. Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Untitled, 1952. From the series Brain Drawings. Paper,

Red Cosmic Egg, n.d. Mixed media drawing.

pigment, artboard. 22.22 × 22.22 cm. Courtesy: Catherine

20.32 × 15.24 cm (framed). Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Heinrich.

Samadhi, 1967. 16 mm film transferred to digital HD. 5’.

Untitled, n.d. Paper, pigment, plastic, tape, cardboard.

Courtesy: Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles.

20.32 × 15.24 cm (framed). Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Snake, n.d. Paper, pigment, matboard. 18.41 × 15.24 cm.

Untitled, n.d. Paper, pigment, glass, mashing tape,

Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

cardboard. 20.32 × 15.24 cm (framed). Courtesy: Catherine

Spools, n.d. Masonite, pigment, wood, stain.

Heinrich.

30.48 × 40.64 cm. Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Turbine Wheel, n.d. Masonite, pigment, wood, stain.

JORGE MENNA BARRETO

30.48 × 40.64 cm. Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Restauro, 2016. [Restoration]. Restaurant designed for

Untitled, n.d. Mixed media drawing. 22.86 × 30.48 cm.

the 32nd Bienal, in which the menu prioritizes the diversity

Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

of the plant kingdom of agroforestry origin. Eaters

Untitled, n.d. Mixed media, drawing. 22.86 × 30.48 cm.

become participants of an environmental sculpture in the

Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

process, to the extent that the act of feeding regenerates

Untitled, n.d. Mixed media, drawing. 22.86 × 30.48 cm.

and shapes the landscape in which we live. Support:

Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Lab.SONAR – Laboratório de Sonoridades, Organicidades,

Untitled, n.d. Mixed media drawing. 22.86 × 30.48 cm.

Nomadismos, Artes e Radiofonias (UERJ); Extension

Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Project “Arte Colaborativa, Sonoridades e Biopolítica”

Untitled, n.d. Mixed media drawing. 22.86 × 30.48 cm.

(UERJ); Extension Project “Consciência Contextual: entre

Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

o artístico e o ambiental” (Secretaria do Meio Ambiente

Untitled, n.d. Mixed media drawing. 22.86 × 30.48 cm.

do Estado de São Paulo). Collaborators: Neka Menna

Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Barreto, Marcelo Wasem, O Grupo Inteiro, Escola Como

Untitled (Scroll), n.d. Mixed media drawing.

Como de Ecogastronomia, Vitor Braz. Commissioned by the

190.5 × 30.48 cm. Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Untitled (Scroll), n.d. Mixed media drawing.

190.5 × 30.48 cm. Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

JOSÉ ANTONIO SUÁREZ LONDOÑO

Untitled (Scroll), n.d. Mixed media drawing.

Series Planas: del 1 de enero al 31 de diciembre del año

190.5 × 30.48 cm. Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

2005, 2005. [Exercises: from January 1 to December 31

Untitled, 1952. From the series Brain Drawings. Paper, ink.

of the year 2005]. Mixed media on paper. 365 pieces,

19.68 × 19.68 cm. Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

dimensions variable. Series performed daily by the artist in

Untitled, 1952. From the series Brain Drawings. Paper, ink.

exercise pages for one year (2005). Support: Embassy of

19.68 × 19.68 cm. Courtesy: Catherine Heinrich.

Colombia in Brazil. Acknowledgments: Emiliano Valdés –

Untitled, 1952. From the series Brain Drawings. Paper,

MA MM, Medellín; Miguel Suárez Londoño; Ana Mercedes

pigment, artboard. 22.22 × 22.22 cm. Courtesy: Catherine

Suárez Londoño; Casas Riegner.

Heinrich.

Untitled, 1952. From the series Brain Drawings. Paper,

JOSÉ BENTO

pigment, artboard. 22.22 × 22.22 cm. Courtesy: Catherine

Chão, 2004 / 2016. [Floor]. Slats of various woods, iron,

Heinrich.

steel cables and springs. Dimensions variable.

Untitled, c.1952. From the series Brain Drawings. Paper,

Do pó ao pó, 2016. [From Dust to Dust]. 25 wood types

415

from Brazilian biomas that were and are marketed:

LEON HIRSZMAN

Angelim, Angico, Santos Mahogany, Bicuíba, Baraúna,

Cantos de trabalho – Cacau, 1976. [Work Songs – Cocoa].

Caixeta, Canela, Oak, Spanish cedar, Eucalyptus, Garapa,

16 mm film transferred to video. 11’. Production: Leon

Jatobá, Brazilian rosewood, Jequitibá Rosa, Itapicuru,

Hirszman Produções; Brazilian Product Certificate:

Oiticica, Brazilwood, Pau-pereira, White Peroba, Peroba-

233 / 10.1979; Directed by: Leon Hirszman; Photography:

rosa, Roxinho, Tumujú, Vinhático, Sapucaia, Sucupira. 25

José Antônio Ventura; Video-editing: Sérgio Sanz; Sound:

parts of 57 × 42 × 91 cm.

Francisco Balbino; Narration: Ferreira Gullar; Final coordination: Marcos Farias; Image lab: Líder (RJ); Sound

KATHY BARRY

studio: Tecnisom (RJ). Courtesy: Leon Hirszman Family.

Series 12 Energy Diagrams, 2015-2016. Watercolor and

Cantos de trabalho – Cana-de-açúcar, 1976. [Work

pencil on paper. 12 pieces of 70 × 72 cm. Support: Creative

Songs – Sugar Cane]. 16 mm film transferred to video. 10’.

New Zealand.

Production: Leon Hirszman Produções, Marcos Farias;

12 Minute Movement, 2016. HD video. 12’12’’. Support:

Brazilian Product Certificate: 234 / 10.1979; Written and

Creative New Zealand.

directed by: Leon Hirszman; Photography: José Antônio Ventura; Video-editing: Sérgio Sanz. Courtesy: Leon

KATIA SEPÚLVEDA

Hirszman Family.

Dispositivo doméstico, 2007-2012/2016. [Domestic

Cantos de trabalho – Mutirão, 1975. [Work Songs – Joint

Device]. Installation composed of: 2 channels video (The

Effort]. 35 mm film transferred to video. 12’. Production:

Horizontal Man, 2016), model (White House Lego) and

Departamento de Assuntos Culturais (Plano de Ação

collages (made in 2007-2012) and cut-out vinyl on the floor.

Cultural – MEC ); Executive Producer: Leon Hirszman;

Collages: 140 × 70 cm; video: 3’23’’; model: 11 × 2 × 8 cm.

Directed by: Leon Hirszman; Adivisory text: Vicente Salles;

Acknowledgements: Felipe González. Commissioned by the

Photography, Camera: José Antônio Ventura; Camera

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Assistant: Francisco Balbino; Video-editing: Raul Soares;

Feminismo Mapuche, 2016. [Mapuche Feminism].

Sound: Francisco Balbino; Location: Chã Preta, Alagoas;

Performance. Action with the participation of the artist,

Image Lab: Revela (SP); Sound Studio: Tecnisom (RJ); Photo

Margarita Calfio and Maria Angelica Valderrama.

Compositing: Movedoll (SP). Courtesy: Leon Hirszman

Acknowledgements: Marta Ormazabal. Commissioned

Family.

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

LOURDES CASTRO Series Sombras à volta de um centro, 1980-1987. [Shadows

KOO JEONG A

Around a Center]. Artist's collection deposited in the

ARROGATION, 2016. Skatepark. Concrete, metal, paint

Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea,

and luminescent dust. 1700 cm ⌀. . Support: Arts Council

Porto. Support: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; República

Korea (ARKO); ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). In

Portuguesa – Cultura | Direção-Geral das Artes.

collaboration with Aleksandrina Rizova. Commissioned

Aucuba japónica, 1985. Colored pencil on paper.

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

50 × 70 cm.

(2016).

Beladonas, 1987. [Amaryllis]. Marker pen on tracing paper. 76 × 76 cm.

LAIS MYRRHA

Camélia, 1985. [Camellia]. Crayon on paper.

Dois pesos, duas medidas, 2016. [Double Standard].

55 × 37.5 cm.

Concrete, brick, mortar, roof tile, glass, PVC tubes, conduits,

Cearas / Lentilhas, 1985. [Cearas / Lentils]. Crayon,

wires, metal, wood, palm fiber, bamboo and compacted soil.

colored pencil and collage on paper. 48 × 76.7 cm.

800 × 300 × 300 cm each. Commissioned by the Fundação

Cearas / Lentilhas, 1985. [Ceara / Lentils]. Marker pen

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

and crayon on paper. 39 × 61.5 cm.

Cesto rosas, 1986. [Basket Roses]. Crayon on paper.

56.5 × 76 cm.

Primaveras II, 1980. [Bougainvillea II]. Colored pencil on

Cesto rosas, 1986. [Basket Roses]. Crayon on paper.

paper. 66 × 50 cm.

50.3 × 70.3 cm.

Ranúnculos, 1980. [Ranunculus]. China Ink on paper.

Cyclamen, 1980. China Ink on paper. 50 × 66 cm.

50 × 66 cm.

Cyclamen de perse, 1980. Crayon and colored pencil on

Rosa, 1985. [Rose]. Colored pencil on paper.

paper. 66 × 46 cm.

56 × 38.5 cm.

Folha de palmeira, 1986. [Palm Leaf]. Colored pencil on

Salsa, 1980. China Ink and cutout on paper. 61 × 39 cm.

paper. 90 × 68.3 cm.

Sem título, 1980. [Untitled]. China Ink and cutout on

Folha de palmeira, 1986. [Palm Leaf]. Pencil and colored

paper. 50 × 66 cm.

pencil on paper. 90 × 68.3 cm.

Sem título, 1984. [Untitled]. China Ink on paper.

Folhas, 1980. [Leaves]. Crayon on paper. 66 × 50 cm.

50.5 × 70.5 cm.

Folhas, 1985. [Leaves]. Colored pencil on paper.

Sem título, 1984. [Untitled]. Colored pencil on paper.

37.5 × 55 cm.

37.2 × 55 cm.

Geranium Robert, 1984. China Ink and colored pencil on

Strelitzia, 1985. Crayon on paper. 50 × 70.5 cm.

paper. 38.5 × 57 cm.

Strelitzia, 1985. Crayon on paper. 37.5 × 55 cm.

Goivos, 1980. [Brassicaceae]. Colored pencil on paper.

Strelitzia, 1985. Colored pencil on paper. 55 × 37.8 cm.

57 × 76 cm.

Tulipas II, 1980. [Tulips II]. Crayon on paper. 66 × 50 cm.

Íris, 1980. [Iris]. Crayon on paper. 66 × 50 cm.

Tulipas III, 1980. [Tulips III]. Crayon on paper.

Íris, 1980. [Iris]. Colored pencil on paper. 50 × 66 cm.

66 × 50 cm.

Íris Azul, 1980. [Blue Iris]. Crayon and colored pencil on paper. 50 × 66 cm.

LOURDES CASTRO & MANUEL ZIMBRO

Liláses I, 1980. [Lilacs I]. Pencil and colored pencil on

Un Autre livre rouge I, 1973. [Another Red Book I]. Artist

paper. 50 × 66 cm.

book. 164 p.; 47 × 35 cm. 82 sheets of white cardboard and

Liláses II, 1980. [Lilacs II]. Crayon on paper. 50 × 66 cm.

various shades of red, with various thicknesses; all sheets

Liláses III, 1980. [Lilacs III]. Colored pencil on paper.

with collages whose common theme is the “red” (clippings

50 × 66 cm.

from newspapers and magazines, postcards, packaging

Malmequeres, 1980. [Marigolds]. China Ink on paper.

paper, photocopies with text excerpts); 2 serigraphs: sheet

45.5 × 66 cm.

56 ex. 39 / 50, 1968, and sheet 58 ex. 14 / 35, n.d. Packed

Malmequeres, 1980. [Marigolds]. Litograph, natural

in a carton cover, red, tied by two ribbons. Signed. Artist’s

elements. 65 × 50 cm.

collection; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian – Biblioteca de

Malmequeres, 1980. [Marigolds]. Pencil of 4 colors on

Arte. Support: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; República

paper. 50 × 66 cm.

Portuguesa – Cultura | Direção-Geral das Artes.

Malmequeres, 1980. [Marigolds]. Pencil of 4 colors on

Un Autre livre rouge II, 1974. [Another Red Book II].

paper. 50 × 66 cm.

Artist book. 188 p. ; 40 × 30.5 cm 94 sheets of white

Malmequeres, 1980. [Marigolds]. Silver pencil on paper.

cardboard with various thicknesses, except: 10 sheets

57 × 76 cm.

black; 15 sheets red and 1 sheet green; cutout of the

Miosótis, 1984. [Myosotis]. Pencil on paper. 37.5 × 55 cm.

sheets painted red. All sheets with collages: clippings from

Muguet, 1980. [Lily of the Valley]. China Ink on paper.

newspapers and magazines, postcards, packaging paper,

50 × 66 cm.

photocopies with excerpts from texts in which the common

Narcisos, 1980. [Narcissus]. Crayon and colored pencil

theme is the “red”. Packed in a red carton cover, tied

on paper. 48.2 × 64 cm.

with six ribbons. Artist’s collection; Fundação Calouste

Narcisos secos, 1980. [Dry Narcissus]. Colored pencil on

Gulbenkian – Biblioteca de Arte. Support: Fundação

paper. 50.3 × 66 cm.

Calouste Gulbenkian; República Portuguesa – Cultura |

Primaveras I, 1980. [Bougainvillea I]. China Ink and

Direção-Geral das Artes.

cutout on paper. 66 × 50 cm.

417

LUIZ ROQUE

team, Ruy Ohtake, Sabrina Wilkins, Tereza Zózimo, Tiago

HEAVEN, 2016. HD video (5.1 sound, color). 9’. Cast:

Guiness. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São

Mavi Veloso, Glamour Garcia, Danilo Grangheia, Danna

Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Lisboa, Gretta Starr, Maitê Schneider, Latoya Prado,

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

Dani Pinheiro, Bruno Mendonça; Executive Production: Camila Groch; Written by: Josefina Trotta & Luiz

LUKE WILLIS THOMPSON

Roque; Cinematography: Joana Luz; Casting preparation

Sucu Mate – Born Dead, 2016. Installation composed

for “Debate”: Tomás Rezende; Production Direction:

of concrete headstones. 9 pieces, 800 × 400 × 60 cm each

Mary Garske; Direction Assistant: Thiago Villas Boas;

(approx.). Courtesy: the artist and Hopkison Mossman,

Art Production: Adriana Michalski & Tyaga Sá Britto;

Auckland. Support: Creative New Zealand.

Costume: Alex Cassimiro & Tina Soares; Make-up: Carlinhos Rosa; Electrician: Bruno Homem de Mello;

LYLE ASHTON HARRIS

Machinist: Weber Cunha “Cabelo”; Platô: Bruno Possati &

Uma vez, uma vez, 2016. [Once, Once]. Installation.

Erik Vítor; Direct Sound: Tiago Bittencourt; Editing: Manga

Ektachrome Archives (Brazil Mix), 2016. 3-channel

Campion; Original Soundtrack: Márcio Biriato; Artist’s

video installation with sound component, continuous

Assistant: Pedro Gallego; Artists Collaborators: Bruno 9li,

loop. 221 × 124 cm, 148 × 263 cm, 124 × 221 cm.

Erika Verzutti, Rodolpho Parigi; Executive Assistant: João

Journal #1, 1997 (An Educated Heart), 2016. Archival

Metzner; Set Assistant: Raphael Matos; Contra Regra:

inkjet print on Epson lustre paper. 127 × 183 cm.

Marcão Araújo; 1st Camera Assistant: André Keller; 2nd

Journal #1, 1997 (Forever), 2016. Archival inkjet print

Camera Assistant: Lucas Lourenço; 3rd Camera Assistant:

on Epson lustre paper. 127 × 183 cm.

Gabriel Silveira; Logger: Guilherme Castelli; Electrical

Journal #1, 1997 (Haile Selassie), 2016. Archival inkjet

Assistants: Joel Santos, Nigéria; Machinery Assistants:

print on Epson lustre paper. 127 × 183 cm.

Ferpa, Nick, Vinicius Ribeiro da Cunha; Camera: A.

Orange Journal, 1997, 2016. 90 archival inkjet prints on

Ermel, Base 1 Locadora; Light and Motion: Electrica

Epson lustre paper. 29 × 42 cm each.

Cinema & Vídeo; Drone: Disk Films; Set’s Infrastructure:

Untitled (Beachwood Canyon, circa mid 1990’s), 2016.

Estrutura Cine; Image Finishing: Lilit Laboratório

Video installation, MiniDV video (color), video projection

Digital; Coordination of Post Production: Laura Futuro;

onto four silk panels. 304.8 × 114.3 cm each.

Editing Assistant: Joana Reis; Colouring: Julia Bisilliat;

Untitled (Blue Snow), 2016. MiniDV video on broadcast

Composition and VFX: Uriel Arakilian; Sound Editing and

monitor (color and sound). 4’.

Foley Recording: Effects Filmes; Sound Design and Mixing:

Untitled (Silver Lake, 1994), 2016. Hi8 video (color). 25’.

Ricardo Reis, ABC; Sound Editing: Débora Morbi, Vitor

Untitled (Obsessão), 2016. [Untitled (Obsession)].

Moraes, Camila Mariga; Secretary of Production: Andreia

Mixed-media collage. Dimensions variable.

da Silva; Sound Editing Coordination: Miriam Biderman,

Untitled (Prelude to The Watering Hole), 1991-1996.

ABC. Acknowledgments: Alberto Youssef & Bruna Macedo,

Gold leaf on magazine covers. 27 × 20 cm each.

Aldeia / Julia Bock & Simone Elias, Alexandre Ermel,

Untitled (for Tommy), 2016. Two-channel video

Auditório Ibirapuera / Alexandre Sacchi di Pietro & team,

installation, Hi8 video (color and sound). 38’.

Bar Fama, Big Bonsai, Breno Trindade, Caio César, Casa

Acknowledgements: Tommy Gear, Producer; Parissah Lin,

Juisi, Clarice Cunha, Dudu Quintanlha / MEXA , FAAP

Studio Manager; Gregory Carideo, Joseph Imhauser, John

– Sergio Moussali & team, Fernanda Gassen, Fernando

Edmonds, Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip and Dorothy Chi Hung

Cozendey, Filmland, Gabriel Base 1, Guaraná Turismo

Lam, Assistants; Bonnie Lane and Mayid Guerrero, Video

(Andréa Grynszpan), Jacob Solitrenik, José Roberto

Editors; Billy Gerard, Video Consultant; Aniyah McNeal,

Eliezer, Márcia Rocha, Maxwell Jackson, Michel Zózimo,

Intern. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Nadezhda Rocha, Núcleo de Pesquisa & Curadoria / ITO,

for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Ovo Design, Pedro Farkas & team, Psycho’ n’ Look, Ricardo Tapajós, Rita Faustini, Rogerio Francisco & Laika

MARIA THEREZA ALVES

Marxuach, Galería Agustina Ferreyra, Museu Afro Brasil,

Uma possível reversão de oportunidades perdidas, 2016.

Clube de Atletismo BM&F BOVESPA.

[A Possible Reversal of Missed Opportunities]. 6 posters, 3 different models, 3 formats, versions in Portuguese and

MICHAL HELFMAN

English (Rio Branco, Aquidauana, Dourados). Digital print

Running Out of History, 2015-2016. Video. 21’. Private

on paper, 2 × 1.47 m each. Versions for distribution: 55

collection, Israel. Courtesy: the artist and Sommer

posters, 4 × 0 colors, 60 × 90 cm, offset high brightness 120g

Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. Support: Artis Grant Program;

paper; 150 posters, 4 × 0 colors, A3 (42 × 29.7 cm), offset

Consulado Geral de Israel em São Paulo; Mifal Hapais

high brightness 120 g paper; 5100 posters, 4 × 0 colors, A3

for art and culture; Nathalie and Jean-Daniel Cohen-

(42 × 29.7 cm), matte couche 115 g paper. Commissioned

Luxembourg; Myriam and Jacques Salomon collection,

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

Paris; Ayelet and Yair Landau; Art Partners; Diane Henin.

(2016).

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

MISHECK MASAMVU Spiritual Host, 2016. Oil on canvas. 175 × 450 cm.

MARIANA CASTILLO DEBALL

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

Hipótese de uma árvore, 2016. [Hypothesis of a Tree].

32nd Bienal (2016).

Installation composed of bamboo structure based on a

Midnight, 2016. Oil on canvas. 175 × 450 cm.

phylogenetic tree; paper rubbings from fossil sediments in

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

the Crato Formation (Araripe Basin), Museu and Instituto

32nd Bienal (2016).

de Paleontologia (Universidade Regional do Cariri), Museu, Instituto and Oficina de Réplicas (Universidade de São

MMAKGABO HELEN SEBIDI

Paulo); linocut stamps. 9.2 m ⌀. Support: ifa (Institut für

Tears of Africa, 1987-1988. Collage, charcoal and pastel

Auslandsbeziehungen). Assistants: Alberto Abascal, Anna

on paper. 195 × 390 cm (diptych). Support: Everard Read

Szaflarski. Special thanks to: Gabriela Aguileta. Antonio

Gallery.

Alamo Feitosa, Luiz Eduardo Anelli. Renan Machado

Untitled, 2016. 230 × 298 cm. Support: Goethe-Institut

Bantim, Juliana Manso Sayao, Flaviana Jorge de Lima.

Salvador-Bahia. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

32nd Bienal (2016).

NAUFUS RAMÍREZ-FIGUEROA MARYAM JAFRI

Series Corazón del Espantapájaros, 2015-2016. [Heart of

Product Recall: An Index of Innovation, 2014-2015.

the Scarecrow]. Acquatint. 9 pieces, 37 × 29 each. Courtesy:

Installation composed of framed photos, framed texts,

the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala. Support:

plinths and objects. Dimensions variable. Courtesy: the

Goethe-Institut São Paulo.

artist and Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, Modica.

Corazón del Espantapájaros, 2016. [Heart of the Scarecrow].

Support: Danish Arts Foundation.

Performance and installation (props and costume). Support: Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala; Goethe-Institut

MICHAEL LINARES

São Paulo. Collaborators: Wingston González (poem);

Museu do Pau, 2013-2016. [Museum of the Stick].

Co-directed by: Martha Kiss Perrone; Interpreters: Felipe

Installation composed of various materials collected by the

Riquelme, Jaya Batista, Lowri Evans, Natália Mendonça,

artist. Dimensions variable.

Ricardo Januário; Costume: Valentina Soares, Alex

Una historia aleatoria del palo, 2014. [An Aleatory History

Cassimiro. Acknowledgements: Byron Figueroa, Wingston

of the Stick]. Video (sound). 53’25’’. The duration of this

González, José Luis Blondet, Rita González, Pilar Tompkins,

video refers to Brian Panky’s world record obtained by

Stefan Benchoam, Dominique Ratton. Commissioned by the

holding a stick in balance for 53’25”. Acknowledgments:

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016) and

Beta-Local, Olga Casellas, Fabián Wilkins, Michelle

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

419

NOMEDA & GEDIMINAS URBONAS

Journey (for mixed voice choir)]. Mixed voice choir.

Psychotropic House: Zooetics Pavilion of Ballardian

Performance recorded live by Swedish National Radio,

Technologies, 2016. From the series Mycomorph

April, 1972 at Fylkingen, Stockholm. Installation with wall

Laboratory. Climate chambers, series of workshops,

text suggested by Antonio Sergio Bessa in 2001. 5’25’’.

mycelium, agricultural waste, metal and PVC. Dimensions

Collection Sharon Avery-Fahlström. Support: Moderna

variable. Support: Lithuanian Council for Culture;

Museet.

Contemporary Art Centre (CAC); School of Architecture

Elements from “Masses”, 1976. Baked enamel on metal

and Planning, MIT; Creative Arts Council, MIT; HASS Fund

with magnets. 69.9 × 69.9 × 1.4 cm. Collection Sharon Avery-

Award, MIT. Acknowledgements: Assistant Architects:

Fahlström. Support: Moderna Museet.

Paulius Vaitiekūnas, Jautra Bernotaitė; Design: Goma

Mao-Hope March, 1966. 16mm film. 4’5’’. Collection

Oficina; Platô (Valentina Soares, Alex Cassimiro); Research

Sharon Avery-Fahlström. Support: Moderna Museet.

Assistance, São Paulo: Luiza Schulz; Scientific Research

Packing the Hard Potatoes (Chile 1: Last Months of

Assistance, São Paulo: Edison de Souza / Brasmicel.

Allende Regime. Words by Plath and Lorca), 1974.

Variable structure. Painted forms attached to spring wires

OFICINA DE IMAGINAÇÃO POLÍTICA

and magnets. Acrylic and India ink on vinyl. Painted

Oficina de Imaginação Política, 2016. [Workshop on

metal panel. 112 × 211 × 10 cm. Museo Nacional Centro

Political Imagination]. Installation and intervention in the

de Arte Reina Sofia Collection, Madrid. Long-term of

form of a public program (workshops, presentations and

Sharon Avery-Fahlström. Support: Moderna Museet.

debates). Proposer: Amilcar Packer; Collaborators: Diego

Sketch for World Map, 1973. Silkscreen print.

Ribeiro, Jota Mombaça (Monstra Errátika), Rita Natálio,

55.9 × 106 cm. Collection Helena Tatay. Support: Moderna

Thiago de Paula,Valentina Desideri. Commissioned by the

Museet.

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Sketch for World Map Part 1 (Americas. Pacific), 1972. Offset lithograph on newsprint. 85.4 × 101.6 cm.

OPAVIVARÁ!

Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Falckenberg Collection. Support:

TRANSNÔMADES, 2016. [Transnomads]. Ambulant

Moderna Museet.

relational devices. 7 devices, dimensions variable. Support:

Sitting...Blocks, 1965-1966. Tempera on vinyl mounted on

Cooperativa de Catadores da Baixada do Glicério, São

wood. 10 blocks, 38 × 38 × 38 cm (each). Collection Sharon

Paulo. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Avery-Fahlström. Courtesy: Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin.

for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Support: Moderna Museet.

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

Sitting...Directory, 1962-1963. Tempera, ink and pencil on paper. 30 × 38.3 × 1 cm (closed), 66 pages (front and back).

ÖYVIND FAHLSTRÖM

Collection Sharon Avery-Fahlström. Support: Moderna

Column no. 1 (Wonder Bread), 1972. Offset lithograph.

Museet.

71 × 59 cm. Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Falckenberg

Sitting...Dominoes, 1966. Silkscreen in colors on

Collection. Support: Moderna Museet.

vinyl, plexiglass, magnets, enamel on metal. Framed:

Column no. 2 (Picasso 90), 1973. Silkscreen (26 colors).

115 × 83.5 × 10.5 cm, no frame: 71.8 × 102.6 × 1.8 cm.

76 × 55.9 cm. Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Falckenberg

Collection Sharon Avery-Fahlström. Courtesy: Galerie Aurel

Collection. Support: Moderna Museet.

Scheibler, Berlin. Support: Moderna Museet.

Column no. 3 (Chile F), 1974. Silkscreen in colors.

Study for “Sitting...The Stamp”, 1963. Tempera and

99.5 × 69.5 cm. Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Falckenberg

India ink on canvas mounted on wood panel. Framed:

Collection. Support: Moderna Museet.

52.8 × 58 cm. Collection Sharon Avery-Fahlström. Courtesy:

Column no. 4 (IB-Affair), 1974. Silkscreen (26 colors).

Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin. Support: Moderna Museet.

75.9 × 56.4 cm. Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Falckenberg

Study for World Model (Garden), 1974. Silkscreen in colors.

Collection. Support: Moderna Museet.

69.2 × 99.4 cm. Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Falckenberg

Den svåra resan (för blandad talkör), 1954. [The Difficult

Collection. Support: Moderna Museet.

PARK McARTHUR

hours per day. Support: U.S. Consulate General in São

Sometimes You’re Both, 2016. Stainless steel,

Paulo; Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery. Commissioned

various products made of latex rubber. 25 plinths,

by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal

86.4 × 48.3 × 83.8 cm each. Acknowledgments: ESSEX STREET,

(2016).

New York; Lars Friedrich, Berlin. Commissioned by the

Baile: Document, 2016. [Ball: Document]. “Landscape

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

that Michel Temer may have drawn with framed Festa de Debutante photograph”, latex skull, plaster dust, pen, and

PIA LINDMAN

cut paper in conjunction with 72-hour performance of

Nose Ears Eyes, 2016. Structure of Bamboo and mud;

resistance. Dimensions variable. Support: U.S. Consulate

treatment bench, ink, oil crayon, paper, plants, air,

General in São Paulo; Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery.

mycorrhiza, tree, soil; and performative activations.

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

Dimensions variable. Support: Arts Promotion Centre;

32nd Bienal (2016).

KONE Foundation; Aalto University; Nordic Culture Fund; Frame Visual Art Finland; Nordic Culture Point.

PRISCILA FERNANDES GOZOLÂNDIA E OUTROS FUTUROS, 2016. [Cuckoo-

PIERRE HUYGHE

land and Other futures]. Installation with video projection,

Cerro Indio Muerto, 2016. [Dead Indian Hill]. Photograph.

Inkjet Fine Art prints, beach chairs and printed fabric.

80 × 120 cm. Support: Consulado Geral da França em São

Support: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; Mondriaan Fund;

Paulo; Institut Français. Commissioned by the Fundação

República Portuguesa – Cultura | Direção-Geral das Artes.

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

De-Extinction, 2016. Film (color, 5.1 sound). 12’38’’.

32nd Bienal (2016).

Support: Consulado Geral da França em São Paulo; Institut

Ahahah, 2016. Inkjet Fine Art Print. 200 × 150 cm,

Français.

framed.

De-Extinction (S.P. Evolution), 2016. Insects. Dimensions

Ergonomia do abstracionismo, 2016. [Ergonomics

variable. Support: Consulado Geral da França em São

of Abstractionism]. Teka wood and print on fabric.

Paulo; Institut Français. Commissioned by the Fundação

120 × 100 × 70 cm.

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Gozolândia, 2016. [Cuckoo-land]. Full HD video projection (color and sound). 17’35’’.

PILAR QUINTEROS

O salto, splash, 2016. [The Jump, Splash]. Inkjet Fine Art

Smoke Signals, 2016. Video. Approx. 45’. Support:

Print. 200 × 150 cm, framed.

Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes de Chile

Uma vista em fuga, 2016. [A Vanishing View]. Inkjet Fine

(CN CA), Dirección de Asuntos Culturales del Ministerio de

Art Print. 200 × 150 cm, framed.

Relaciones Exteriores de Chile (DIRAC), Mário Eduardo de Cico. Director: Pilar Quinteros; Camera: Alexis Llerena;

RACHEL ROSE

Video Editor: Pilar Quinteros; Video Editing Assistant:

A Minute Ago, 2014. HD video. 8’43’’. Courtesy: Gavin

Alexis Llerena; Assistants: Ignacio Helmke, Héctor Vergara;

Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Pilar Corrias Gallery,

Tour Guide and Host: Maurinhio Ferreira da Silva; Boat

London. Support: U.S. Consulate General in São Paulo.

Driver: Fabio Delcio Tonin Tanhadera; Locations: Serra do

Everything and More, 2015. HD video. 10’31’’. Courtesy:

Roncador (Mato Grosso, Brazil); Rio das Mortes (Mato

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Pilar Corrias Gallery,

Grosso, Brazil); Original Soundtrack: Diego Lorenzini.

London. Support: U.S. Consulate General in São Paulo.

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

RAYYANE TABET Sósia, 2016–ongoing. Publication and narration in Arabic

POPE.L

of the book Um copo de cólera [A Cup of Rage] by Raduan

Baile, 2016. [Ball]. Endurance performance. 4 days, 24

Nassar, translated from Portuguese by Mamede Jarouche.

421

The novel was written in 1970 and first published in 1978.

projector. Dimensions variable. 30’. Support: ifa (Institut für

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

Auslandsbeziehungen).

32nd Bienal (2016).

RUTH EWAN RIKKE LUTHER

Back to the Fields, 2015 / 2016. Installation composed of

Overspill: Universal Map, 2016. Drawings printed on

plants, bones, agricultural tools and minerals. Dimensions

tiles, original tiles for the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion,

variable. Support: British Council; The Henry Moore

toxic mud from Mariana, slime molds with biotopes,

Foundation; Arts Council England. Acknowledgments:

and found and modelled objects. Overall dimensions:

Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo / Governo

3.88 × 30.6 m (approx.). Support: Danish Arts Foundation;

do Estado de São Paulo; Museu do Vinho Wine

Nordic Culture Fund; Nordic Culture Point; ifa (Institut

Weekend – Vinho Magazine – Vinícola Goes; Museu

für Auslandsbeziehungen). Acknowledgements: Instituto

Afro Brasil; Manuel Silveira Corrêa; Helena Isola; Museu

de Geociências – USP; Museu Valdemar Lefèfre (MUGEO).

de Geociências IGc / USP; Fabio Pugliese; Família Geld;

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

Museu de Anatomia Veterinária da Faculdade de Medicina

32nd Bienal (2016).

Veterinária e Zootecnia da Universidade de São Paulo;

Outer Space, 2016. Panel of tiles. 210 × 375 cm.

Museu do Instituto Biológico do Estado de São Paulo.

Antarctica, 2016. Panel of tiles. 210 × 375 cm.

High Sea, 2016. Panel of tiles. 210 × 375 cm.

SANDRA KRANICH

Atmosphere, 2016. Panel of tiles. 210 × 375 cm.

Times Wire, 2010. Knitted electric cable, firework and electric ignition. Dimensions variable. Support: ifa (Institut

RITA PONCE DE LEÓN

für Auslandsbeziehungen); Goethe-Institut São Paulo.

En forma de nosotros, 2016. [In the Shape of Us].

R. Releif 7, 2016. Lacquered metal reliefs, fireworks and

Installation composed of sculptures made of plywood

electric ignition. 188 × 144 × 6 cm. Support: ifa (Institut

sheets, reinforced mortar of cement and sand, wire mesh,

für Auslandsbeziehungen); Goethe-Institut São Paulo.

wood, kraft paper, structured plaster with burlap and

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

jute canvas, cement finish, clay, glue, audio recordings

32nd Bienal (2016).

and 8 drawings (China ink and pencil on paper). Overall

R. Relief 8, 2016. Lacquered metal reliefs, fireworks and

dimensions: 1650 × 800 cm (approx.). Aknowledgements:

electric ignition. 188 × 144 × 6 cm. Support: ifa (Institut für

Educational Program (Bienal de São Paulo); Emilie Sugai;

Auslandsbeziehungen); Goethe-Institut São Paulo.

Peter Webb; Dorothy Lenner; Michiko Okano; Tilsa Otta;

R. Relief 9, 2016. Lacquered metal reliefs, fireworks and

Yaxkin Melchy; Mauricio de la Puente; participants of

electric ignition. 188 × 144 × 6 cm. Support: ifa (Institut für

the Dias de Estudo (Lamas, Peru); team of Waman Wasi,

Auslandsbeziehungen); Goethe-Institut São Paulo.

Pratec; communities of Alto Pucalpillo, El Naranjal, Anaq

R. Relief 10, 2016. Lacquered metal reliefs, fireworks and

Churuyacu; Elaine Fontana; Joelle Gruenberg; Arnulfo

electric ignition. 188 × 144 × 6 cm. Support: ifa (Institut für

Rendón; Víctor Florido; Livia Benavides; Associação

Auslandsbeziehungen); Goethe-Institut São Paulo.

Tochigi; Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP ).

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

SONIA ANDRADE

32nd Bienal (2016).

Hydragrammas, 1978-1993. Set composed of approx. 110 objects and their reproductions in slide with a word in

ROSA BARBA

Portuguese or French. Dimensions variable.

Disseminate and Hold, 2016. 16 mm film transferred to

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

digital, archival material, sound. 20’ approx. Courtesy: the artist. Commissioned by Fondation Prince Pierre de

SUSAN JACOBS

Monaco, XLVIème Prix International d’Art Contemporain.

Through the Mouth of the Mantle, 2016. Installation

White Museum (São Paulo), 2010 / 2016. 35 mm white film,

composed of compressed sand, HD video (sound), glass,

motor, lazy susan, aluminium, gallium. Dimensions variable.

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 9 / 95 For the Olive

This project was supported by the Victorian Government

People: How long is a peace of string?, 2013 – ongoing.

through Creative Victoria and the Victorian College of the

Medium: Floss, string, cord, ribbon, thread, rope, line,

Arts, Australia. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de

drawstring. Dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and

São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Dan Gunn. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

TILL MYCHA (HELEN STUHR-ROMMEREIM & SILVIA

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 10 / 95 Viral virus:

MOLLICCHI)

The Mandela Effect, 2016. Acrylic paint, glue, beach ball,

The First Decade of June, 2016. Text, print. Poster graphic

newspaper, drawings and prints on Hahnemühle paper,

design by Eliza Koch. 59 × 84 cm. Support: Consulado-

plastic domes. Dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and

Geral dos Estados Unidos da América em São Paulo.

Dan Gunn. Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São

Commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the

Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

32nd Bienal (2016).

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 11 / 95 Mud on [the] Dan’s floor, 2016. Charcoal, chalk, mosaic tiles and

TRACEY ROSE

mirrors, rubber ball, chains, tape, soil. Dimensions variable.

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 1 / 95 Health Vitality

Courtesy: the artist and Dan Gunn. Commissioned by the

Skin & Care, 2013-2014. Papier collé, plastic and tape.

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Dimensions variable. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina

FALSE FLAG: A deed in 2 acts (Mandela Balls) 8 / 95,

Sofía Collection, Madrid.Courtesy: the artist.

2016. From the series Mandela Balls. Rubber, glass, tape,

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 2 / 95 A Rock and Hard

glue, pen, air, plastic. Dimensions variable. Courtesy: the

Place:, A TRIBUTE #16061976, 2013-2014. Papier collé,

artist and Dan Gunn, Berlin.

plastic and tape. Dimensions variable. Museo Nacional

Mandela Balls 6 / 95 (Strange Fruit

Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Collection, Madrid. Courtesy:

#JeSuisPatriceLumumba), 2015. Plastic, plant (strelitzia

the artist.

reginae), tape, Belgian chocolate on wood board.

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 3 / 95 An Exercise in

30 × 60 × 42 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Dan Gunn.

Colour Control, 2014. Handmade Paper Capellades 100%

Portrait for a Young Black Man, 2013. Mixed media on

cotton, butchers paper, newsprint, acrylic paint, packaging

paper. 240 × 210 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Dan Gunn.

tape, black garbage bag, cling wrap, air. 40 × 50 × 53 cm.

Courtesy: the artist and Dan Gunn.

URSULA BIEMANN & PAULO TAVARES

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 4 / 95 Genghis

Forest Law – Selva jurídica, 2014 / 2016. 2 channel video

Khan Cack Handed Sperm, 2014. Butchers paper, The

projection, assemblage of documents, soil samples and

International Herald Tribune, blank newsprint, The

publication. 41’. Support: Pro-Helvetia. Commissioned

Mercury Racing Tab, packaging tape, acrylic gel, plastic

by Ely and Edythe Broad Art Museum, State University of

bags. 43 × 75 × 52 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Dan Gunn.

Michigan.

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 5 / 95 Placebo Domino, 2014. Powered stones, wire, plastic bags, blank newsprint,

VÍCTOR GRIPPO

The Sunday Times, The International Herald Tribune,

Analogía I, (2da. versión), 1970 / 1977. [Analogy I, (2nd

paper towel, acrylic paint, packaging tape, acrylic gel and

Version)]. Installation composed of 400kg of potato,

conservation glue. 42 × 66 × 55 cm. Courtesy: the artist and

zinc electrodes and copper electrodes, electrical cables,

Dan Gunn.

electric meter DC voltage, electric push, chair, white linen

A Dream Deferred (Mandela Balls), 7 / 95 Eye & I

tablecloth, text, wood, wooden easels, synthetic enamel and

(maquette), 2016. Cardboard box cameras, monster ball,

white paint. Dimensions variable. Jointly acquired by The

acrylic paint, elastic band. Dimensions variable. Courtesy:

Art Institute of Chicago, prior gift of Adeline Yates; and the

the artist and Dan Gunn. Commissioned by the Fundação

Philadelphia Museum of Art, with funds contributed by the

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Committee on Modern and Contemporary Art. Support:

423

Consulado Geral da República Argentina em São Paulo.

Cotidiano, 1979. [Everyday]. Acrylic on canvas. 75 × 50 cm.

Naturalizar al hombre, humanizar a la naturaleza, o Energía

Private collection.

vegetal, 1977. [Man Naturalization, Nature Humanization,

Cotidiano, 1979. [Everyday]. Acrylic on canvas. 75 × 50 cm.

or Vegetal Energy]. Installation composed of 400kg of

Artist’s collection.

potato, 8 or 10 kinds of lab flasks, rubber stoppers, cotton

Cotidiano, 1981. [Everyday]. Acrylic on canvas.

swabs, drawing ink of different colors diluted with water,

100 × 73 cm. Collection Frederico Morais.

white linen tablecloth, bronze plaque with text, wood,

Sem título, 1982. [Untitled]. Vinyl paint on canvas.

sawhorses and white paint. Dimensions variable. Courtesy:

100.3 × 73.3 cm. Collection Gilberto Chateaubriand Museu

the Estate of the Artist and Alexander and Bonin, New

de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.

York. Support: Consulado Geral da República Argentina

Sem título, 1983. [Untitled]. Oil on canvas. 65.3 × 54.3 cm.

em São Paulo.

Collection João Leão Sattamini Netto (Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói).

VÍDEO NAS ALDEIAS

Cotidiano, 1984. [Everyday]. Acrylic on canvas. 70 × 50 cm.

O Brasil dos Índios: um arquivo aberto, 2016. [The

Artist’s collection.

Brazil of the Indians: An Open Archive]. Installation

Cotidiano, 1984. [Everyday]. Acrylic on canvas. 70 × 50 cm.

with 81 video fragments from the archive material of

Artist’s collection.

Vídeo nas Aldeias, produced in its 30 years of experience

Santa Teresa 1 – com elefantes, 1984. [Santa Teresa

with the indigenous peoples in Brazil, and sequences of

1 – with Elephants]. Acrylic on canvas. 100 × 73 cm. Artist’s

films of filmmakers, activists, indigenous leaders, partner

collection.

institutions and collaborators, between the years 1911 and

Santa Teresa 2, 1984. Acrylic on canvas. 100 × 73 cm.

2016. Concept, research and video-editing: Ana Carvalho,

Artist’s collection.

Tita and Vincent Carelli. Commissioned by the Fundação

Santa Teresa 3 – com cristais, 1984. [Santa Teresa 3 – with

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

Crystals]. Acrylic on canvas. 100 × 73 cm. Artist’s collection.

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

Rio de Janeiro com cristais, 1986. [Rio de Janeiro with Crystals]. Acrylic on canvas. 160 × 190 cm. Artist’s

VIVIAN CACCURI & KEYZUZ, GHALILEO, KUVIE,

collection.

MENSAHIGHLIFE, MUTOMBO DA POET, PANJI ANOFF,

Cotidiano, 1993. [Everyday]. Ink and ecoline on paper.

SANKOFA, STELOO, WANLOV, YAW P

100 × 72 cm. Artist’s collection.

TabomBass, 2016. Subwoofers, amplifiers, software, wood,

Cotidiano, 1993. [Everyday]. Ink and ecoline on paper.

candles and stereo audio. Dimensions variable. Support:

100 × 72 cm. Artist’s collection.

Dubversão Sistema de Som. Commissioned by the Fundação

Morro Dona Marta 24 horas, 2016. [Dona Marta Hill

Bienal de São Paulo for the 32nd Bienal (2016).

24 hours]. Colored pencils on paper Fabriano. 25 pieces,

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

25 × 23 cm each. Artist’s collection.

WILMA MARTINS

WLADEMIR DIAS-PINO

Cotidiano, 1975-1984. [Everyday]. Artist’s notebook, 144

Enciclopédia Visual Brasileira, 1970-2016. [Brazilian Visual

p. / 18 × 15.6 × 2 cm; 62 fac-simile prints. Artist’s collection.

Encyclopedia]. Digital collages and collages on paper

Interior, 1974. [Inside]. Acrylic on canvas. 100 × 73 cm.

installed on 6 painted walls. 14 reproductions and 397

Artist’s collection.

original collages, A3 format approx.

Cotidiano, 1974. [Everyday]. Acrylic on canvas.

Outdoors, 2015-2016. Acrylic on wood. 20 images,

100 × 73 cm. Collection Frederico Morais.

220 × 160 cm.

Cotidiano, 1976. [Everyday]. Acrylic on canvas.

Invited Curators: Tobi Maier, Leandro Nerefuh; Assistance:

100 × 73 cm. Artist’s collection.

Caetano Carvalho, Octávio Ferran; Collaborator: Regina

Cotidiano, 1978. [Everyday]. Acrylic on canvas.

Pouchain.

100 × 73 cm. Collection Frederico Morais.

Presentation produced in partnership with Sesc-SP.

XABIER SALABERRIA Restos materiales, obstáculos y herramientas, 2016.

[Material Remains, Obstacles and Tools]. Wood, iron, concrete, mineral water, photography; artwork from the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Collection (Animal, 1963, by Liuba Wolf. Bronze sculpture, 96 × 61 × 49 cm). Dimensions variable. Support: Acción Cultural Española, AC / E ; Etxepare.

425

32nd Bienal de São Paulo Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Permanent Team Superintendency Luciana Guimarães General Projects Coordination Dora Silveira Corrêa · Coordinator

Administrative and Financial Coordination Paulo Rodrigues · Coordinator

Communications Felipe Taboada · Manager Adriano Campos Ana Elisa de Carvalho Price Diana Dobránszky Eduardo Lirani Gabriela Longman Julia Bolliger Murari Pedro Ivo Trasferetti von Ah Victor Bergmann

Bienal Archive Ana Luiza de Oliveira Mattos · Manager Ana Paula Andrade Marques Fernanda Curi Giselle Rocha Melânie Vargas de Araujo

Legal Counsel Ana Carolina Marossi Batista

Editorial Cristina Fino

Special Projects Eduardo Sena

Research and Content Thiago Gil

Institutional Relations and Fundraising Emilia Ramos · Manager Flávia Abbud Gláucia Ribeiro Marina Dias Teixeira Raquel Silva

Production Felipe Isola · Manager of planning and logistics Joaquim Millan · Manager of artwork production and exhibition design Adelaide D’Esposito Gabriela Lopes Graziela Carbonari Sylvia Monasterios Veridiana Simons Vivian Bernfeld Viviane Teixeira Waleria Dias

Building Management and Maintenance Valdomiro Rodrigues da Silva · Manager Angélica de Oliveira Divino Larissa Di Ciero Ferradas Vinícius Robson da Silva Araújo Wagner Pereira de Andrade

General Secretary Maria Rita Marinho Carlos Roberto Rodrigues Rosa Josefa Gomes

Educational Program Laura Barboza · Manager Bianca Casemiro Claudia Vendramini Helenira Paulino Mariana Serri Regiane Ishii

Finance Amarildo Firmino Gomes · Manager Fábio Kato

Financially Supported Projects Eva Laurenti Danilo Alexandre Machado de Souza Rone Amabile Human Resources Albert Cabral dos Santos Information Technology Leandro Takegami · Manager Jefferson Pedro Outsourced Services Fire Brigade Empresa Atual Serviços Especializados Maintenance and Hygiene Empresa Tejofran Saneamento e Serviços Reception Desk Empresa Plansevig Tercerização de Serviços Eireli

427

32nd Bienal de São Paulo Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Project Team Curatorial team Curator Jochen Volz Co-curators Gabi Ngcobo Júlia Rebouças Lars Bang Larsen Sofía Olascoaga Assistants Catarina Duncan Isabella Rjeille Sofia Ralston Achitecture Alvaro Razuk Team Daniel Winnik Isa Gebara Juliana Prado Godoy Paula Franchi Ricardo Amado Silvana Silva

Photographic Documentation Leo Eloy, Ilana Bar, Tiago Baccarin General Projects Coordination Editorial Rafael Falasco Production Dorinha Santos Tarsila Riso Clarissa Ximenes Felipe Melo Franco Audio-visual MAXI Áudio, Luz, Imagem Scenography Metro Cenografia

Communications

Conservation Ana Carolina Laraya Glueck Bernadette Baptista Ferreira Cristina Lara Corrêa Tatiana Santori

National Press Office Pool de Comunicação

Lighting Samuel Betts

Internacional Press Office Rhiannon Pickles PR

Assembly Gala Elastica

Soundfield (Audio Guide) Matheus Leston Design Roman Iar Atamanczuk Marketing CP+B Documentation and Audiovisual Content Carolina Barres, Fernanda Bernardino, F For Felix

Insurance Axa-Art Educational Program Mediation Maria Eugênia Salcedo · Consultant Supervisors Anita Limulja Juliana da Silva Sardinha Pinto Paula Nogueira Ramos Silvio Ariente

Valéria Peixoto de Alencar Mediators Affonso Prado Valladares Abrahão Alexandre Queiroz Alonzo Fernandez Zarzosa Ana Carolina Porto da Silva Ana Lívia Rodrigues de Castro Ananda Andrade do Nascimento Santos André Luiz de Jesus Leitão Ariel Ferreira Costa Barbara Martins Sampaio da Conceição Bianca Leite Ferreira Bruno Coltro Ferrari Bruno Elias Gomes de Oliveira Bruno Vital Alcantara dos Santos Carina Nascimento Bessa Carlos Eduardo Gonçalves da Silva Carmen Cardoso Garcia Carolina Rocha Pradella Cláudia Ferreira Daiana Ferreira de Lima Danielle Sallatti Danielle Sleiman Danilo Pêra Pereira Diane Ferreira Diran Carlos de Castro Santos Divina Prado Eduardo Palhano de Barros Eloisa Torrão Modestino Erica da Costa Santos Felipe Rocha Bittencourt Flávia de Paiva Coelho Flávio Aquistapace Martins Ian da Rocha Cichetto Janaina Maria Machado Jorge Henrique Brazílio dos Santos José Adilson Rodriguês dos Santos Jr Julia Cavazzini Cunha Juliana Biscalquin Karina da Silva Costa

Karina Gonçalves de Adorno Leonardo Masaro Letícia Ribeiro de Escobar Ferraz Lia Cazumi Yokoyama Emi Ligia Marthos Lívia Costa Monteiro Luara Alves de Carvalho Lucas Francisco Delfino Garcia

Promotion Elaine Fontana · Consultant Valquíria Prates · Educational Material Consultant Articulators Ana Luísa Nossar Célia Barros Celina Gusmão

da Silva Lucas Itacarambi Lucia Abreu Machado Luciana Moreira Buitron Lucimara Amorim Santos Ludmila Costa Cayres Luiz Augusto Citrangulo Assis Manoela Meyer S de Freitas Manuela Henrique Nogueira Marcia Falsetti Viviani Silveira Marco Antonio Alonso Ferreira Jr María del Rocío Lobo Machín Maria Fernanda B Rosalem Maria Filippa C. Jorge Marília Souza Dessordi Marina Baffini Marina Colhado Cabral Mateus Souza Lobo Guzzo Nei Franclin Pereira Pacheco Nina Clarice Montoto Paula Vaz Guimarães de Araújo Pedro Félix Ermel Pedro Wakamatsu Ogata Renato Ferreira Lopes Roberta Maringelli Campi Rogério Luiz Pereira Rômulo dos Santos Paulino Thiago da Silva Pinheiro Thiago Franco Tiago Rodrigo Marin Tiago Souza Martins Vinícius Fernandes Silva Booking Diverte Logística Cultural

Gabriela Leirias Maurício Perussi Guest Curators (Wlademir Dias-Pino) Leandro Nerefuh & Tobi Maier Co-curator (Öyvind Fahlström) Sharon Avery-Fahlström Administrative and Financial Coordination Ambulance Premium Serviços Médicos Administration Lays de Souza Santos Silvia Andrade Simões Branco Fire Brigade Local Serviços Especializados Supplies Daniel Pereira Nazareth Leandro Cândido de Oliveira Legal Olivieri Sociedade de Advogados Maintenance MF Serviços de Limpeza e Conservação Security Atual Serviços Especializados

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Créditos da publicação Edited by Jochen Volz Júlia Rebouças Isabella Rjeille · assistant Editorial Coordination Cristina Fino Graphic Design and Layout Adriano Campos Ana Elisa de Carvalho Price Roman Iar Atamanczuk Editorial Assistant Rafael Falasco Translation Adriana Francisco Alexandre Barbosa de Souza Anthony Doyle Cid Knipel Jeffery Hessney Mariana Mendes Matthew Rinaldi Copyediting and Proofreading Anthony Doyle Bruno Tenan Gareth Peard Jeffery Hessney John Ellis-Guardiola Lívia Azevedo Lima Mariana Mendes Matthew Rinaldi Sandra Brazil Images Management Pedro Ivo Trasferetti von Ah Graphic Production Signorini Produção Gráfica Eduardo Lirani

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Acknowledgements Individual Acácio Piedade, Adriano Pedrosa, Agustín Pérez Rubio, Ailton Krenak, Alberto Tsuyoshi Ikeda, Alejandro Cevallos, Alexandre Sacchi Di Pietro, Alexandre Sampaio, Alexandre Viana, Alexia Tala, Alexie Glass-Kantor, Allan Alves, Cel. Alvaro Camilo, Alvaro Puntoni, Alvaro Tukano, Amer Huneidi, Ana Garzón Sabogal, Ana Laíde Barbosa, Ana Maria Maia, Andre Bergamin, André Mesquita, Andrea Pacheco, Annick Kleizen, Annika Leimann, Antonio Paucar, Arnaldo Antunes, Áurea Carolina, Barbara Saavedra, Ben Vickers, Benjamin Seroussi, Burkhard Riemschneider, Caio Bourg de Mello, Camila Marambio, Camila Rocha, Carlos Moura-Carvalho, Carolina Dal Ben Padua, Carolyn Alexander, Catalina Casas, Catherine Münger, Célida Peregrino, Cesar Gyrão, Charles Green, Chen Tamir, Christopher Cozier, Cildo Meireles, Claudinéia Baroni, Craig Higginson, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Daniel Birnbaum, Daniela Berger, Daniela Castro, Deborah Anzinger, Diego Matos, Dimitrina Sevova, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Dorota Kwinta, Dulcídio Caldeira, Edison de Souza, Eduardo de Jesus, Eliana Otta, Elke aus dem Moore, Emiliano Valdés, Enock Pessoa, Eungie Joo, Fábio Bolota, Fabio de Alencar Iorio, Fabio Pugliese, Fábio Zuker, Família Geld, Fátima Faria Gomes, Felipe Chaimovich, Felipe Villada, Felippe Crescenti, Fernanda Brenner, Fernanda Nogueira, Filipa Oliveira, Flávio Motta, Florencia Loewenthal, Frederico Morais, Fredrik Liew, Fulvio Giannella Junior, Gabriel Lemos, George Awde, George Rotatori, Gladys Faiffer, Glaucia Barros Xavier, Grimaldo Rengifo, Guilherme Boulos, Guiliana Furci, Gustavo Esteva, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Heraldo Guiaro, Heron Werner Jr., Hilton Haw, Ibis Hernandez, Inês Grosso, Iracema Schoenlein Crusius, Isabel Diegues, Ivo Mesquita, Jacinta Arthur, Jair Batista da Silva, James Rondeau, Jared McCormick, Jimena Lara, Joana Fins Faria, João Campos, João Ribas, Joca Reiners Teron, Joe Osae-Addo, Jorge Baradit, Jorge Fernandez, José Roberto Sadek, Juan Pablo Vergara Undurraga, Juan Varela, Julia Peyton-Jones, Juliana Manso Sayão, Julie Lomax, Jürgen Bock, Karen Cunha, Katharina von Ruckteschell-Katte, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Kwasi Ohene Ayeh, Laise de Holanda Cavalcanti Andrade, Larissa Silva Freire, Lena Malm, Libia Posada, Ligia Nobre, Lisette Lagnado, Ludmila Brandão, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Luiz Eduardo Anelli, Luiz Marchetti, Macarena Areco Morales, Mamede Jarouche, Mantse Aryeequaye, Manuel Silveira Corrêa, Marcello Nietsche, Marcio Harum, Marcos Moraes, Margarita González, Maria Angelica Melendi, Maria Cristina Donadelli Pinto, Maria del Carmen, Maria do Carmo Pontes, Maria Lafayette Aureliano Hirszman, Mario Friedlander, Martin Bach, Mauricio de la Puente, Mavis Tetteh-Ocloo, Melissa Rocha, Merve Caglar, Michelle Marxuach, Miguel Lopez, Moacir dos Anjos, Mohammed Hafiz, Morgana Rissinger, Nadia Somekh, Naine Terena, Nana OforiattaAyim, Nancy La Rosa Saba, Nat Amartefeio, Nathalie Morhange, Óscar Gonzalez, Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, Pablo Lafuente, Paula Zasnicoff, Paulina del Valle Vera, Paulo Bogorni, Paulo Pires do Vale, Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino, Pedro Montes, Raduan Nassar, Rafael Ortega, Ralph Rugoff, Rana Sadik, Raúl Matta, Rebecca Coates, Regina Pouchain, Renato Corch, Ricardo Ohtake, Richard Fletcher, Rivane Neuenschwander, Rodolfo Walder Viana, Rodrigo Bueno, Rodrigo Moura, Rodrigo Nunes, Rodrigo Pimentel Pinto Ravena, Rodrigo Tavares, Samer Younis, Senam Okudzeto, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Sergio Ide, Sergio Parra, Shrook Al Ghanim, Silvan Kaelin, Silvia Ambrogi, Sinethemba Twalo, Smiljan Radic, Solange Farkas, Stefan Benchoam, Suely Rolnik, Suzanne Cotter, Tali Cherizli, Tatiana Oliveira, Tatiane Kaiowa, Testinha, Tete Espíndola, Thiago de Paula Souza, Thyago Nogueira, Tim Neuger, Tiyoko Tomikawa, Tonico Benites Guarani, Valeria Galarza, Valéria Rossi Domingos, Veerle Poupeye, Virginija Januskeviciute, Vivian Ziherl, Wilson Díaz, Yale Reinhard, Yann Chateigne, Yavuz Parlar, Yessica Hernandez, Ziad Mikati, Zohra Opoku, Zoraida Maria Lobato Viotti.

Institutions Acción Cultural Española, AC/E, Administração do Parque Ibirapuera, Al-Kamel Verlag, Alta Excelência Diagnóstica, ANO, Arquivo Multimeios – Centro Cultural São Paulo, Artis Grant Program, Arts Council Korea (ARKO), Artspace - Auckland, Associação Quilombola de Piracanjuba, Auditório Ibirapuera, Australia Council, Australia Council for the Arts, Bisagra, Blank Projects, Bug Agentes Biológicos, Bull Produtora Digital, Câmara Municipal do Porto, CECI Jaraguá, Cemitério da Consolação, Centro Cultural Dannemann, Centro de Ciências Biológicas – UFPE, Cinemateca Brasileira, Clube de Atletismo BM&F BOVESPA, Coleção Moraes-Barbosa, Companhia das Letras, Companhia de Engenharia de Tráfego de São Paulo (CET), Conpresp, Conselho Gestor do Parque Ibirapuera, Conselho Municipal de Preservação do Patrimônio Histórico, Cultural e Ambiental da Cidade de São Paulo (Conpresp), Consulado Geral do México em São Paulo, Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Cooperativa de Catadores da Baixada do Glicério, CP+B, Creative New Zealand , Dan Gunn Gallery, Departamento do Patrimônio Histórico (DPH), Educativo do MAM-SP, Escola Municipal de Astronomia e Astrofísica – UMAPAZ, Etxepare, Everard Read Gallery – JHB, Faculdade de Artes Plásticas – FAAP, Faculdade de Comunicação – FAAP, Fazenda da Toca, Fortaleza de San Carlos de La Cabaña, Frame Visual Art Finland, Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Fundación Funghi, Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Galeria Pilar, Galeria Sé, Galerie Imane Farès, Gallery 1957, GCM – Parque Ibirapuera, Goethe-Institut SalvadorBahia, Grupo Ecolyzer, iASPIS, Institute of Modern Art - Brisbane, Instituto Biológico de São Paulo, Instituto de Botânica de São Paulo, Instituto de Geociências da Universidade de São Paulo, Instituto de Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (Iphan), Instituto Identidade Brasil, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes de México, Instituto Tomie Othake, Itaú Cultural, Kempinski Hotel, KONE, Lugar a Dudas, Más Arte Más Acción, Melbourne University, Ministério da Cultura, Ministério da Cultura da República Argentina, Museo de la Memoria Santiago de Chile, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo MUAC-UNAM, Museu Afro Brasil, Museu da Cidade de São Paulo, Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo / Governo do Estado de São Paulo, Museu de Anatomia Veterinária da Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária e Zootecnia – USP, Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães (MAMAM), Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Museu Valdemar Lefèvre (MUGEO), Nubuke Foundation, Obrera Centro, ONG Social Skate, Peter Kilchmann Galerie, Polícia Militar do Estado de São Paulo, Pratec, Prefeitura de Lisboa, Pro-Helvetia, Procolombia, Programa de Aventura Ambiental – UMAPAZ, Rhiannon Pickles PR, SAHA, Scape Public Art, Secretaria Estadual da Cultura – São Paulo, Secretaria Estadual da Educação – São Paulo, Secretaria Estadual de Logística e Transportes – São Paulo, Secretaria Municipal de Cultura – São Paulo, Secretaria Municipal de Educação – São Paulo, Secretaria Municipal de Transportes – São Paulo, São Paulo Transporte S.A. – SPTrans, Secretaria Municipal do Verde e do Meio Ambiente– São Paulo, Serviço Funerário do Município de São Paulo, Sesc São Paulo, Sesc - Serviço Social do Comércio – Administração Regional no Estado de São Paulo, Sol Henaro, SP-Trans, Subprefeitura Sé, The Henry Moore Foundation, The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Trelleborg Wheel Systems, Universidad de las Artes – ISA, Cuba, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Universidade Federal da Grande Dourados, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Universidade Federal do Acre , Universidade Federal do Reconcavo Bahiano, Waman Wasi, Wits School of Arts – JHB.

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Co-realization

Master Sponsorship

Sponsorship

Cultural Partnership

Support

Media Support

Communication Support

inTeRnaTional SuPPoRT

Embajada de Colombia en Brasil

inSTiTuTional SuPPoRT

Project supported by the State of São Paulo Government, Secretariat of Culture, Program of Cultural action 2016

RealiZaTion

MINISTÉRIO DA CULTURA

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Images and texts reproduced in this publication were granted by permission from the artists, photographers, writers or their legal representatives, and are protected by law and licence agreements. All texts and images in this document are protected by copyright. Any use is prohibited without the permission of the Bienal de São Paulo, the artist and the photographers.

All efforts were made to find the copyright owners, although this was not always successful. We will be happy to correct any omission in case it comes to our knownledge.

This catalogue was published on the occasion of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo – INCERTEZA VIVA, held from 7 September through 11 December 2016 at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo. Revised digital edition. www.bienal.org.br Cataloguing in Publication - (CIP) 32nd Bienal de São Paulo : Incerteza Viva : Catalogue / Edited by Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças. — São Paulo : Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016.

Curators: Jochen Volz, Gabi Ngcobo, Júlia Rebouças, Lars Bang Larsen, Sofía Olascoaga.

ISBN: 978-85-85298-52-4 1. Art – Exhibitions – Catalogues. I. Volz, Jochen. II. Ngcobo, Gabi. III. Rebouças, Júlia. IV. Larsen, Lars Bang. V. Olascoaga, Sofía.

CDD-700.74 1. Art : Exhibitions : Guides 700.74

Fonts: Sabon (Linotype), and Knockout (Hoefler & Co.) Papers: Cartão Super 6 Plus 240 g/m² and Off Set 90 g/m² Pre-printing and Printing: Ipsis Print run: 1,500