17 Jul 2012

2nd Vide Urbe exhibiton, Rio de Janeiro

2nd Vide Urbe Exhibition
Website: www.videurbe.com.br/mostra;
email: videurbe@gmail.com
Locations: Praça Mal. Floriano, Cinelândia- Centro; Praça Luís de Camões – Glória; Museu de Favela (MUF)- Cantagalo; Biblioteca Parque de Manguinhos- Manguinhos – public spaces in Rio de Janeiro city.
Admission: Free
When: July 19th, 20th,21th , 25th, 26th, 27th and 28th , from 7pm to 12am

In its second edition, Vide Urbe, the first exhibition entirelly dedicated to video art and expanded cinema in public spaces in Rio, will take place in four different locations in South, North, center and favela areas of the city. Installed in public spaces, video art projects by 23 artists and collectives will create poetic connections with different themes and issues regarding the city. Though developed a priori, the installation of the image and its devices, for a few hours in full view of the public passing by, will make some experiences and momentary redesigns of the (discursive and always under construction) city landscape possible.

At the interface with the city and its multiple devices meeting, reinvention and construction of the common, Vide Urbe believes on the power of video in the streets, squares and other vital spaces of coexistence of differences, as a language expanded through hybrid and plural artistic approaches. Speaking of video, in this context, includes productions, which overflow the possibilities of the moving image, its temporality, plasticity, interactivity, and spacialization. The cinematic experience is mediated by various technologies and situations, enlarged by the displacement of traditional spaces and circuits, and full disclosure through greater access to their means of production. Cinema's place in contemporary art has also transformed its own theory, so that we can think the image also as a phenomenon, the intersection of forces, relations and affections. Vide Urbe is the first exhibition entirely devoted to video art in public spaces in Rio de Janeiro. The idea is to support the production of works capable of creating new visualities over the city itself, through this language and its hybrids, understanding landscape as a network for exchanges, thought, transformations, tensions and contemporary political and aesthetic intersections.

The research focuses on expanded video on alternative surfaces or in connection with performances, as well as on more open, collective and collaborative territories of the city. In uniting so many interests, we sought to articulate increasingly collaborative contexts that enable the convergence of artist proposals, collectives and other participants in this field, investing in their power in creating other intersections in contemporary art and poetic dialogue between video, the public and the city.

Curated by Moana Mayall, also a visual artist and creator of the event, the Vide Urbe project proposes the city as a support and interface: their architecture, furniture, reliefs, monuments and textures themselves from large concrete surfaces, to all sensorial interferences generated by urban daily life. 'In direct contact with the street, video art is exposed to the general public perceptions, provoking even more heterogeneous reactions on the construction of its particular poetic reinterpretations, in touch with the urban locus, bringing not only the question of support for video, the site-specific or oriented-but also the question of public and circuit for the assimilation of the production of contemporary art ', says Moana Mayall. It is also about creating environments responsive to both experimentation and the inclusion of the public as a participant in the projections.

Video art, today, is embedded within a long history of critically addressing the traditional and commercial formats of the moving image. The dark room, specially, a model taken from the Elizabethan Theatre, which has been the most hegemonic form of 'film-installation' until the present. The video installation, or even works of so-called expanded cinema , as well as the device-cinema, have contextualized video in space, and exposing its structure, mechanisms, and its own specific discourse strategies. Closed-circuit video installations have expanded ideas related to intrinsic questions of 'live' imagery and surveillance systems; site-specific projects, offering institutional critiques inside the very galleries and museums where they are exhibited.

For just over a century, the language of film has built imagery and symphonies of the city, incorporating and inflecting the urban landscape in time. The mimesis city-cinema has made itself present in bodies and in ways of seeing. The dynamic perception of the city takes on the 'beat' of cinema, much of it coming from forms of collage/bricolage, and of cinematographic editing. The passerby's bodily time turns into a fragment-editor, with the construct 'urban landscape', generated by cinema as support, affecting both our (current) vision as well as our (virtual) memory of the city, among clichés, deletions and epiphanies. By itself, expanded video in the expanded field of city streets can generate, through a diversity of sign operations and through the projection-device, not only experiments related to previous discussions in the history of video art, but also actual technological possibilities. Video in the expanded field can also generate the most varied aesthetic responses and a specific, plural and relational experiential environment, unlike the movie's dark room silence or the white cube of galleries and museums .

About some works in the exhibition:

Nefelibatederia (Cloudmixer), by Claudia Hersz
Hands are shown, and with the aid of an electric mixer, they turn egg whites into small clouds. Among the various meanings listed in dictionaries for the word art, contained 'fitness or ability to do something,' 'mischief, romp' and 'activity considered as a set of rules to observe: cooking.' Nefelibatedeira is a clear metaphor for the artistic, as well as a remembrance and reverence for the human ability to play, invent and pleasure, and, why not? Create metaphors …

Relandscape, by Ivan Henriques
Interactive video installation in real time, developed as a research on landscape, memory and time. Live images from the city are captured and processed. The video is recorded, processed and played four times, simultaneously, in real time: a composition consisting of four different tempos, from the same source of images: the landscape where the projection is installed. Another landscape.

Pixel Mirror, by Cristina Amazonas
'Pixel Mirror' suggests to the public the excitement of observing themselves on live, large scale images, modulated by aesthetic and or mathematician criteria. The projected image shows the captured images in several shapes and colors of pixels calculated by the algorithm adjustments in real time. The developed research aims to explore the most of the attributes of the image processing parameters.

Cabeção (Big Head), by Aline Couri
Who builds the city? Who are the significant players to be honored with statues in public squares? From an understanding of the city as a collective construction (physical, social and ideological) performed daily by their 'ordinary practitioner', the video project consists of images of the faces of the participating public, captured in real time by a video camera installed in the Praça Luís de Camões. They are mapped and projected onto the face of Getulio Vargas, dictator president of Brazil during the decade of 1930 and, in 1950, also known as 'father of the poor'. The 'big head' statue - a reference point in the imagination of those who pass or make reference to this square - is no longer Vargas, but all of us.

Ótica abstrata/ Cinema Manual (Abstract optics/ Handmade cinema), by Nadam Guerra
A repertoire of objects interact with the local landscape and the body of the performer, creating unusual images that are returned in real time to the place where they are captured. This mixed performance consists of handmade veeJaying, a theater of objects and experimental cinema. All technological advances are supposed to be useful for the production processes and image quality, though what we actually see in this work is that the 'real' are not the objects themselves. What we see is only reflected light that carries information about the bodies.

2ND VIDE URBE EXHIBITION'S AGENDA

July 19th, Thursday :: Praça Floriano, Cinelândia
(OPENING COCKTAIL)
Re-paisagem (Relandscape), by Ivan Henriques
Gentri, by Gustavo Torres 
O homem que come o mundo, by Cadu Lacerda +
Série em trânsito, by José López e Luisa Macedo

July 20th, Friday :: Praça Luís de Camões, Gloria
(NIGHT OF TESTING AND COLLECTIVE INTERVENTION)
Pixel espelho, de Cristina Amazonas 
Instante Constelado, by Eta Aquaridea
Sessão Pirata + 20 vídeos, by Filé de Peixe 
Projeciclo/ Video Ataq, by Azoia lab 
TV Parede, by Careca Arts Sanduba 
Nascente, by Marcella França 
Poema diluído, by Gab Marcondes

July 21th, Saturday :: Praça Luís de Camões, Gloria
Nefelibatedeira, by Claudia Hersz 
Cabeção, by Aline Couri 
Ótica abstrata / Cinema manual, by Nadam Guerra 
Outros cinemas, by Coletivo Vide Urbe/ Oi Kabum!

July 25th, Wednesday :: Museum of Favela (MUF)-Cantagalo - slab / outdoor
(NIGHT OF TESTING AND COLLECTIVE INTERVENTION)
Actinote Surima e o Fio da Bola, by Gabriela Gusmão
Ka'a Eté Ty, by Alice Dalgalarrondo 
Projetando idéias, by MV Hemp 
Ver é diferente de olhar, by Estética Central

July 26th, Thursday :: Museum of Favela (MUF) - Cantagalo - slab / outdoor
Pixel espelho, by Cristina Amazonas 
Outros cinemas, by Coletivo Vide Urbe/Oi Kabum!
Projetando idéias, by MV Hemp 

July 27th, Friday :: Biblioteca Parque de Manguinhos (área externa)
(NIGHT OF TESTING AND COLLECTIVE INTERVENTION)
Mostra de vídeos, by Regiões Narrativas 
Ver é diferente de olhar, by Estética Central 
Ka'a Eté Ty, by Alice Dalgalarrondo
TV Parede, by Careca Arts Sanduba
Poema diluído, by Gab Marcondes

July 28th, Saturday :: Biblioteca Parque de Manguinhos (área externa)
Poez Pix, de Pedro Paulo Rocha/ A_Factory
Batalha da Imagem, com Careca Arts Sanduba, Nuno Dv e Mcs 
Mostra o Filé, Filé de Peixe