Cristina Ribas portfolio

Cristina Ribas Portfolio English version 2013

Cristina Ribas Born in SĂŁo Borja, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 1980. Lives in London.

I work as an artist, researcher and not very often as a curator. I also organize residencies for artists and other interdisciplinary projects since 2008. I write a lot about my practice and also about friends and collectives. My practice in the broadest sense provokes articulations between diagrams, memory, history, archives, the public sphere and politics.

In this portfolio I made a selection of my recent work and some longterm projects. They are not organised in timeline but by analogy and have to be considered somehow as part of a constellation of actions and themes. I can say that my art work and research-based work produces diferent dispositives, that vary, hence, according to each situation. A lot of it became print-matter, being published in magazines and art publications. Although, the final work in this portfolio exposes some actions and video performances in which my body is central, working both as an surface of reception and also intuition, expression.

My art works in particular address urban space, using photography, sculpture, installation and text. It shifted along the years from photography and installation to small scale urban actions (not really documented in this portfolio). The body, then, articulates another layer of this relation.

My production as an artist-researcher critically addresses the art field considering the concept of “militant research�, and through writing and organizing creates dispositives to share knowledge. Since 2005, I have developed the research project Archive of Emergency (finished in 2010), and in 2011 part of this research was transformed into the open platform Desarquivo.org.

In the past two years I was teaching at the University in Rio de Janeiro where I could share my research with colleagues and students. I am currently a PhD student at Goldsmiths College, in London, in the Fine Art Department.

Archive of emergency / Dearchive 2005-2013 research and archive, on line research platform Archive of emergency was a research made by me that took shape as an archive.

Conceived to follow the events celebrating the waves of gatherings constituted by artists, collective processes and group actions that took place in Brazil since the beginning of the 2000, the archive was purposed as part of this multiplicity, collaborating as a reflexive and discursive strategy to the field. In its own way, the archive also operated as a discursive enunciation of critical, experimental and anticonservative art events attesting a critical position to the contemporary art world. The archive was designed by a series of “entries” that function as the concepts of the Archive of emergency, exposing and arguing about its mode of operation, conceptual and historical frame and methodology. My work consisted on interviewing (in the first years), mapping and collecting material. Later on I started writing more and more about the practices of those whose material is in the archive.

In 2011 part of the Archive of emergency was transformed into the online platform Desarquivo.org. We call it a “platform” because now the archive is open to contributions directly from the website. Corroborating with this recent upload, four more “entries” were added (Field, Learning, Public Sphere, Substitution) and a selection of material to be digitalised was made from the Archive of emergency. A strong body of this initial virtual archive are about 400 articles including researchers, artists, historians and curator’s texts, newspaper articles and more. The platform is then understood as going a step further than the printed archive, not only because of its different materiality but because of the way it explodes the idea of in/out of the archive in general. This had already been problematised in the first instance somehow, with the initial proposition of a field (instead of a circuit or art system).

Archive of emergency, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, 2006

The Archive of emergency was ehxibited in several institutions and projects in Brasil, including Centro Cultural Sao Paulo, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Museu da Mare, Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Pernambuco, entre outros.

Archive of emergency http://arquivodeemergencia.wordpress.com Dearchive http://www.desarquivo.org CRISTINA RIBAS_portfolio

Dearchive, print from the entrance of the website, 2013

Knowledge (Do conhecimento) 2011 poster A3 500 copies Poster produced for the festival Diálogos Abertos, Perdidos no Espaço / Open Dialogues, Lost in Space held in the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Porto Alegre, Brasil The poster states an inflection to the university: the contrast between its constant renovation amongst its possible ruin. The contradiction wants to incite the thinking on how art works can promote the conservation of the knowledge in this context. Which systems or fields does it create? Through which kinds of dispositifs? How the space to keep the knowledge is conserved and how does it collapse?

The poster plays with the expressions “construction site, destruction site: let's be lovers”, floating on the background of the main affirmation: “From knowledge – in order to build, something must be destroyed”. The diagram of words related do destruction/construction was created by me in 2009, from the series Prototypes, exposing a game of words and meaning, performing the reality of economical speculation and forced reconstruction that washes off contemporary cities.

More information: http://www6.ufrgs.br/escultura/z/

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Project Title: Research into an Art Publication 2010 text-intervention 5.000 copies (part of the Meio: Volume 1 book) The motivation to write this Research Project was the invitation to write a text to be published in a compilation and re-edition of an art publication. It made me think more in a format I call text-intervention instead of writing an artist’s text or a critical-historical narrative and analysis. The attempt of the text is to create an intervention that works as a reflexive and critical reading tool for the publication but can also be applied to similar publications. The text also intents to dislocate the format of the project usually applied in universities - so creates a crossing over from arts practice and arts critique to academic research.

Published in Meio (Volume I). Editors Daniele Marx and Marcos Sari. Porto Alegre: Editora Panorama CrĂ­tico, 2010. Bilingual: portuguese and english.

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Selected pages scanned from the original publication

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Project Title: Research into an Art Publication

Annotations 2010-2013 texts, photography, photocopy machine, drawing on wall Annotations is an assemblage of texts and images organised upon the wall. The texts are exposed loose in plastic folders, in a way that the participant can take them out of the folders and produce their own connections when reading/viewing the Annotations.

The Annotations are somehow the “internal” work of the Archivist to create the Archive of emergency. The work is named with clear reference to the much wider and longer time-framed Annotations from Art & Language (from which are selected 3 concepts/terms in this work).

The selection of texts follow the source of the research for the Archive of emergency, bringing together texts that could be “strange” to the field of contemporary arts practice and forcing through its self-enclosures.

Presenting some of the texts available, there is, for example, a critical work for network and communication like “The ABC of Tactical Media”, that can create links to the radical production of texts and critical approaches in the 60s and 70s in Brasil, like “Theory for a Guerrilla Art” from Decio Pignatari and “Block experiments” from Helio Oiticica. A few texts are selected for their meta-linguistic existence, within the materiality of the language and the space themselves, such as “The Page” (Perec) and “L'informe” (Bataille).

Some refer to the specificity of the archive itself, like “Artemicro” (Regina Silveira), what I call a fold on the meaning of the referent, or the “reference/inference” that archives are based on (the micro of the sign and the macro of the meaning or the content).

Playing with the scales of the text, in the first exhibition of the Annotations I made available a photocopy machine set to always amplify the image of the original prints, so anyone who wanted copies of the texts would only get amplified copies, blowing out sentences and exposing spare words, creating a more complex constellation for

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Panels from the first montage and (above) Warburg Institute, London (image used in the installation)

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Annotations

Archives of the present 2009 archive as laboratory, final exhibition Archives of the present was a 6-month project made as an artistic residency at the Maré Museum, a Museum that hosts an Archive organized by members of the community. Both Museum and Archive “tell” the story of this favela in Rio de Janeiro. As an extension from the independent research Archive of emergency, my purpose was to create strategies to “approximate” the two archives, the first one organized by me, with reference to artistic practice in Brasil (2000-2010), and the other one the archive that collects images, documents, maps, audio and several researches and books about the community and other issues related to favela in the context of Rio de Janeiro. The project, then, was thought of as a “laboratory” where I invited more artists, local actors and researchers and we organized workshops, talks, actions in public space and a final exhibition. (In this project I also developed the research about photography that lead to the Action-diagram: Photography.)

Issues worked through the researches and the project addressed the contemporary art production, art in public space, political art, public space in a favela, memory, power and anonymity, fear, criminality, disappearance, intervention, poetry and more.

Participating in the project: Antonio Carlos, Beatriz Lemos, Elisa Castro, Felipe Scovino, Francisco Valdean, Guga Ferraz, Leon Diniz, Marisa Flórido Cesar, Marli Damascena, Soraia Britto, Tiago Rivaldo, and more...

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Archives of the present

Action-diagram: Photography 2009-2010 printed diagram (next page) and group This diagram belongs to a series that is part of my PhD Research - the development of problematic diagrams that can be performed collectively.

Action diagram: Photography was built selecting excerpts from a research made for several months in a Favela in Rio de Janeiro, interviewing photographers from a community that faces daily violence and conflicts.

From the research, I selected words, sentences and quotes to make the content of the diagram.

Headlines of newspaper articles, subject-terms pointed out in the interviews, two very short transcripts of those, and a text that explains the methodology of the research and the “mode d’emploi” of the diagram. This diagram is then projected onto the wall and participants are invited to intervene together on the paper framed by the projection. From this a dialogue on paper begins and the paths and issues then follow this new situation that takes on its own drifts as the participants interact with each other’s signs, lines, words, stories.

The Action-diagram aims to set in motion a significant amount of the initial research, creating a public sphere to discuss the political production of images and the forces in action in a territory in conflict.

Interviewed photographers: Davi Marcos, Francisco Valdean, Naldinho Lourenço, Ratão and Aude Chevalier.

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Anonymous 2010 off-set print 1.000 copies size A2 (newspaper format 62 x 42 cm) In March 2010 Cristo Redentor in Rio, the famous statue, was graffitied with tags and words of protest. Two workers took responsibility for the act thus freeing themselves from confinement. Two years before a group of graffitiers intentionally attacked the walls of the building of the Art Biennale Foundation of São Paulo, Brasil. One of them, a 23 year old woman was imprisoned for two months.

Interested on exposing how the press and the State expressed themselves and conducted the process, I copied a series of newspaper articles available online, choosing the ones written by the two most famous newspapers in Brazil and reorganising them according to the day and time they were published. With the aim to reconstruct the steps of the police investigation, speculation about the ‘criminals’, real facts and discourses involved, the Anonymous newspaper retraces the paths of the history as a novel, as a an urban fiction.

It was crucial to point that, relating to the most recent case, I have noticed that reasons why the two men were not arrested were exactly the same why the woman in the first case was.

Caroline Pivetta could not shown working proofs, did not have a regular place to live and had previous records with the police. This made sense for me to expose in the Biennale two years later. (This also initiated the action “She” in this portfolio). In Anonymous the names of the two men were substituted by this unknown subject, who is a graffitier from São Paulo.

The newspaper was distributed parallel to the 27th São Paulo Art Biennale and distributed and sold at the tram station that takes to the statue Cristo Redentor, in Cosme Velho, Rio de Janeiro.

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Anonymous

Prototypes/Cut 2011 installation with several media Galpão Funarte MG, Prêmio Brasil Arte Contemporânea, Award, Belo Horizonte, MG The installation Prototypes/Cut starts from a personal archive of images displayed in different formats in order to problematise contemporary urban space and its transformations. The exhibition plays with the scale of the city, the exhibition and the model, so it is created in as if an amplified model.

Prototypes, named here Cut, is a series of works related to regeneration sites, demolition, reconstruction and war times. I started this series in 2009 when in London in an artistic residency.

The exhibition aims to create space to exchange about the experience of such realities using the notion of prototypes to think about temporary and unstable cities. The prototypes can be thought as the modes of life that exist in the urban experience; of the subjective, economic and political aspects of it, having the urban as the common terrain in contemporary world.

The images of ruins, war, regeneration and gentrification sites take shape in the form of video, models, photography and backlight photography. The public is invited to participate making collages using the photographs, giving their own versions of their relation with this contemporary common landscape (the insistence on the image of the destruction wants to reinforce the drive of contemporary society towards the power of the capital, the unanimity of reconstruction). The collage produced at the exhibition were added to the installation during the duration of the show.

The frame of the exhibition is set by a series of gray panels cut as if a profile of a demolition site.

More images can be seen here http://azulejista.wordpress.com/cristinaribas/atual/prototiposbh/ CRISTINA RIBAS_portfolio

Film photography (left) and backlight in the installation

The installation presents several works: backlight photography “Lições de Arquitetura, Liçoes de Urbanismo” (“Lessons on Architecture, Lessons on Urbanism”), a juxtaposition and overlying of pictures of modernist buildings; “Maquete-ruína” (“Ruins-model”), model constructed with cut photography and light projection to make a shadow in the wall; “Anotações urbanas” (“Urban annotations”), photography and paper on roll, to be written on; “Maquete” (“Model”), a model of the exhibition with exhibits that are and are not there in the installation, playing with the reality of the model and vice versa; “Regeneração/Demolição” (“Regeneration/Demolition”), four videos made in London in 2009 shooting sites of demolition and construction, showing monotonic movements by machines, repetitive rhythms and actions.

> next page: collage made by the public (unknown author)

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Prototypes/Cut

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Prototypes/Cut (collage)

Lessons on Arquitecture and Lessons on Urbanism 2011 photography and backlight size: 32 cm x 22 cm (each sheet) The collection of images used in Lessons register several modernist buildings: the COPAN building in São Paulo (designed by Oscar Niemeyer); the School of Archicture in Belo Horizonte; and some images of the under passage-ways in Brasilia. Amidst that my body appears as an intervention to the frame and the stillness of the image, before it became a quick possible fetish of that style. The images were not produced as classical documentary photography, and were gathered as annotations or brief studies of what I can call “memory” and “sculpture” of a very short part of the Brazilian modernist architecture. The juxtaposition and overlying of the pictures is also a formalist attempt to look through the images, accessing details of the architecture. The white blank spaces cut out from the print are then a comment on the loses of this history, opening “complete positives”, gaps, acting as spaces to observe this architecture as some kind of depiction, demontage. The hand that appears in the top images acts literally as “The hand over the city” (Francesco Rossi) modeling the urban space as an act of power.

The photos were organised as a contact print, printed on backlight paper.

Images above: exhibition of the Lessons in the installation Prototypes/Cut (in this portfolio) CRISTINA RIBAS_portfolio

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Lessons on Arquitecture and Lessons on Urbanism

Anechoics 2008 sound installation car, radio, audio recording and foam. crossing of 22 tunnels in Rio de Janeiro foam size: 38 cm (h) x 160 cm (l) x 56 cm (w.) audio duration: 44 min

The sound of a car radio crossing the 22 road tunnels of the city of Rio de Janeiro is played on the CD players. It is suggested that the public lay down on foam blocks that have the same size as public stone seats in the centre of the city. The radio loses the signal and produces a noise when inside the tunnels so you get the length that is gone through. The piece exposes an isolation from the city and is a commentary on the geography of Rio. The work was comissioned by an art gallery, so the value of each sound piece could be sold separately, priced according to the length of the audio.

Exhibition at Anita Schwartz Art Gallery, 2008. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

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Preparation for Anechoics, centre of the city of Rio de Janeiro The measure of those stones-public seats was used in the art gallery, reproducing as foam

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Anechoics

Teacher’s Strike 2010 video (avi), 7 min In March 2010 70,000 teachers, students and other militants took to the streets of the city of São Paulo. I followed the demonstration walking against the flux of the people. A storm in the sky and the close surveillance from the Police helicopters give a special tension to the video, whose strong aspect is the audio – the discourse of one of the leaders of the strike shouting about the governors from the top of a truck that we never see in the video. We only see the sky.

The movement and the shooting of the camera are also very important: pointing the sky and not the crowd in manifestation, what we see is the tension of a body deriving amongst the other bodies and the contemplation of the storm building up in the sky.

Video shown at «Modo de Empleo / Desobedecer a toda costa», 2011. Museo de Arte Carillo Gil. Mexico DF. Videos curatorship by Miguel López.

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Teacher’s Strike

Deep sleep 2010 videoperformance 6 min Observing people sleeping in the public transport in S達o Paulo I decided to perform the movement.

I try to translate to my body the constant shaking of the bus and underground, that seems to work as some kind of hypnotic lullaby to the workers and students I observed. I choose the wall of the building I was living (an artistic residency) to scratch my face and the side of the body onto the wall, bringing heaviness and relaxation, looseness and uncontrol as in a deep sleep, not public as the other ones, but inhabited by those dreamers. The editing of the video reframes my body in a rectangle, to remember the condition of the first sleepers.

COPAN Building, Capacete Residency, S達o Paulo, Brasil.

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Deep sleep

Inventory of Hands (drawing) 2008-2012 photo still (hands) performance

Inventory of Hands is a collection of images produced as a sensitive attempt to reach, to touch, the invisible, the visible, or the imagined worlds.

The performance of those hands usually happens in very special moments, acting as a cluster of thoughts and sensibility, reporting to the camera a mind-body status of intensity, activity, relation.

It is an on-going project and the images can be exhibited as still photos framed as film-still narratives or animated in video.

Dimensions can vary according to the exhibition.

Trip Veneza to Trieste, 2010

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Inventory of Hands (reaching) 2010 At Warburg Haus, Hamburg

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Inventory of Hands (reaching)

The work of the Ants (O Trabalho das Formigas) 2011 photo still and video performance From 2006 to 2008 I made several art works and investigations related to precarity, informality and immaterial labour related to arts practice. From this I created texts, actions, performances and installations. This is a late recovering of one of the performances (Unemployment: verb) that became The work of the Ants. In this video/still performance I use and carry diverse costumes I had used before in group or other artistic actions/performances. The work of the Ants is a comedy on how the artist might became an Ant doing an invisible and repetitive work when carrying its own load, what can be thought as its “curriculum”, stories, narratives, and above all the huge amount of work that never become, never happen, but is somehow “accumulated” in the body and knowledge of the artist.

The pile of clothes described in the piece conceived for a magazine (next page) became a cape, a protection, a luggage or the stone of Sisyphus...

The next page shows an edition of images from the performance Unemployment: verb, edited for the magazine Elástica (Rio de Janeiro), 2011. The main sentence says “You are not my public”.

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Education

Reviews of Art Work

Research Networks

Im currently a student/researcher doing PhD in Fine Arts. Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Supervision: Susan Kelly.

MA in Visual Arts. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Visuais. Instituto de Artes. Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2006/2008.

Supervision: Dra. Sheila Cabo Geraldo BA in Visual Arts (Print), Faculdade de Artes Plásticas.

Instituto de Artes. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre/RS, 1999/2004. Supervision: Dra. Maria Ivone dos Santos.

ALBUQUERQUE, Fernanda. Sobre arquivos vivos e outras emergências. In: Número Nove. São Paulo, dezembro de 2006. p. 14-16. (revista) BUENO, Guilherme. O outro como matéria. (e demais textos para a exposição Elogio ao tempo: laboratório autopoiético.) Edição dos autores, 2007.

BERNARDO, Bianca. Azulecer. Em: Geração da virada: 10 anos + 1 na arte brasileira. Instituto Tomie Ohtake: São Paulo, 2006. (catálogo) Bolsa Pampulha 2003 – 2004: 27º Salão Nacional de Arte de Belo Horizonte. Org. Rodrigo Moura. Belo Horizonte: Museu de Arte da Pampulha, 2004.

OLIVA, Fernando. Editorial de Exposições. “Grupo Laranjas”. Revista Bravo!. Janeiro de 2006, p. 66. (revista) ________. Cristina Ribas: Apartamento. In: Temporada de Projetos 2003-2004. Paço das Artes, São Paulo, 2004. (catálogo) ________. As paredes estão ruindo ou estão sendo pintadas? In: Número Quatro. São Paulo, 2004. p. 12. (revista) SANTOS, Alexandre dos. Da cidade como resposta à cidade como pergunta: a fotografia como dispositivo de representação/apresentação do espaço urbano. In: A fotografia nos processos artísticos contemporâneos.

Alexandre dos Santos e Maria Ivone dos Santos. (org.)

Porto Alegre: Unidade Editorial SEC, Editora da UFRGS, 2004. (p. 38-60) VELASCO, Suzana. Uma volta ao Rio pelos sons de 20 túneis. Em: Segundo Caderno, Jornal O Globo. Rio de Janeiro, 16 de Julho de 2008. (jornal) De volta ao Coral. Em: Segundo Caderno. Jornal Zero Hora. 16 de Setembro 2004, p. 5. (jornal) MORAES, Rodrigo de. Arte para refletir. Em: Jornal Correio Popular. Campinas, 08 de Abril de 2005. (jornal)

Red Conceptualismos del Sur Network for researchers working around the issues of latin american art & archives http://redconceptualismosdelsur.blogspot.com/

Artworks in Museum’s collections

Contact

MAC - Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil MAC RS- Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil

Cristina Thorstenberg Ribas Email: crislaranjaribas@gmail.com

Selected Prizes and Residencies 2011. Protótipos/cortado / Prototypes/cut. Galpão Funarte MG, Prêmio Brasil Arte Contemporânea, Award, Belo Horizonte, MG [image above] 2010. Capacete residency program (at Copan) / 29 a.

Bienal de São Paulo. Capacete. Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo, SP 2009. The history and the conception of the Warburg Institute, Programa Artist Links. artist-in-residence programme. British Council. London, UK 2008. Archives of the present, Interações Estéticas Funarte/Minc. Museu da Maré. Rio de Janeiro, RJ 2005. Serviço Público: AIP IAB MAC / Public Server: AIP IAB MAC, 46º Salão de Artes Plásticas de Pernambuco, Artists-research grant, FUNDARPE, Recife, PE 2003. Bolsa Pampulha, artist-in-residence programme, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, MG

Projects as Curator and Researcher 2009 – 2010. Artist-in-residence in Pedregulho.

Organized with Beatriz Lemos.

2009. Archives of the Present: Stories and Actions toward the Future.

2007-2009. Interações Florestais / Terra UNA Artists-inresidence programme. Organized with Domingos Guimaraens, Flávia Vivacqua e Nadam Guerra.

Universidade Nômade Militant research and open university. I am also part of the editorial team of Revista Global and Lugar Comum, based in Rio de Janeiro, edited by those groups http://www.uninomade.net

Articles A wide index for my articles can be found here http://www.azulejista.wordpress.com/cristinaribas/ escritos and also in the platform Desarquivo.org http://www.desarquivo.org