Texts

The fact of mixing old and new technologies also relates to previous works, a kind of multimedia storytelling. In some ways, the recent history of decentralized finance recalls the history of photography, which is also an invention made from natural laws. 

It’s not to say that knowing how to manage money is equal to generating the necessary autonomy for self-management. It also doesn’t mean that we don’t need money. What’s said here is: there is an abstract world, completely encrypted, which has been erected for over twenty years in the cracks, rifts and basements of the internet. And that this world must be, first of all, understood, for it’s the foundation of the worlds to come, and only after understanding it will it be possible to dominate it, in the sense of using it with sufficient skill to generate other possible worlds.

It all comes from a desire to achieve visual and critical repertoire from the realities I experience. This involves writing, reading and the need to put visuality into a check, a take on the corrupting role that the images bring. Overlaps occur at the technical and formal level, bringing some social alert. The problem I have posed is to try to make these moments of radical transparency work in favor of a permanent transformation of some structures. To disagree with the opulent uses of information is also to claim a space of opacity, wherein possibilities of interference, chaos, and subversion arise; a fracture through which another light gets in.

Considering the multiple ways in which the Internet shapes our social and commercial relationships, Pedro Victor Brandão approaches with acute critical thinking the interfaces that mediates the vast universe of zeros and ones, bits and bytes of the virtual space. From our cell phone to the ATM machine, more than mere luminous devices, such interfaces (and what they reproduce) are the most symbolic form of our era. Far from being free of intentionality and consequences, these artifacts, although inanimate, create certain types of behaviors. Each tool offers its users a specific way of viewing the world and interacting with others, according to the values and aspirations – benign or malignant – deposited in them.

The first axis, which generated the film-essay A oferta não equivale à procura [Supply does not equal demand], was the observation of some of Odebrecht’s works in Panama City. What most caught our attention was the Cinta Costera III, a bizarre maritime viaduct, which both cancels out the horizon line and threatens the status of the World Heritage Site of Casco Viejo, the historic centre of Panama City. Phases I, II and III of the construction have already been completed, but there is still a planned sequel phase IV.

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The second axis, which led to the creation of the photographic series Cynthia nos vê de perto [Cynthia sees us closely], functions as a kind of counterpoint; a self-surveillance experiment, using a camera designed to photograph animals.

2101 of the Pop era: it repeated itself. They ate the fruit. Nibbles of meat layers reach the thorny bone. That was when a curtain of inhumanity greater than the seas fell all over the world. The bear grabs the bull by its long tail. The weak base collapses the pyramid. The end of metal sovereignty, a new era of electrical storms will have begun. Millions of groundhogs will reveal an early spring through block chains, awakening the Entity from the deep.

Depois da Fonte proposes a new fountain for the gush of wealth. It also proposes another way to administrate collectively produced resources. Depois da Fonte blurs the boundaries between public and private and activates collaborative modes of production and financing, which are neither hierarchical nor speculative. Depois da Fonte does not dam. Rather, it distributes.

Combined with intense real estate speculation, current plans of urban development compromise people’s rights to the city and undermine the creation of common spaces. The artists’ work of mediating public, labor, and space offers a counterpoint to these plans. Depois da Fonte requalifies the function of art.

The young Förster knew of these plants. The Donnerbarte are the sempervivum and the Schlehe is that spiky little tree, known for that old time liquor. But he’d never heard that one day these plants were known for having special protection powers, or that they were found in many roofs. Superstition, so these texts must be really old, he thought. A second fragment:

“(…) and so, on this day I celebrate having found my new roof. For here I shall be distant of the eyes of men, of the eyes of power. Here I shall be free to live as I please, and carry on with my practice. The villa I lived in for the last fifty years is not safe anymore. I am already a very old woman so nobody minds me much, but now that that poor Anna Spiekermann has met her tragic death, I cannot risk being hunted too. Not long ago, men like these left corpses of rebels rotting in Münster’s cages, way up high, at everyone’s sight. No, I shall not be hunted! I see a curtain of inhumanity, bigger than the seas, which have fallen upon the entire world. Happy place now is only here where I shall now live, alone, with the plants that protect and heal me and my good friend, Geneviève.”

This exhibition presents pictorial senses after alterations in the procedures of the photographic system, leading the view of the public to landscapes created in dilated times. There is the deviation of the domain of the visible from its objective aspect. The set of series points to questioning over permanence, selective urbanity, visibility, ramdomness, and the manipulable nature of today’s technical image. The works have been created between 2008 and 2012 and they are part of a major research about different processes of generation, construction, and understanding of images. The observations of the environment happen as a contiguous process and the use of photography and its devices build fields of signification between visuality and memory.