Research Catalogue

Through a dialogue with an historical archive the project seeks to construct a fluid story of a confined landscape on the point of transformation. Through the negotiation of a multitude of images the project constructs a narrative that transcends the photographic vision as evidence, and questions whether vision can be more than comparable to the ground of an archaeological excavation. Through the use of the photographic essay as a method the intention is to try and interpret the changeability of the urban landscape.

Desenvolvimento de investigação artística em teleperformance entre os anos de 1999 e 2001, quando não existia uma taxinomia adequada. As teleperformances do Perforum Desterro partiram da pesquisa da linguagem intermídia da telecomunicação síncrona. As teleperformances foram a prática artística e, paralelamente, subsidiaram o levantamento teórico sobre telepresença realizado como parte de meu doutoramento no Programa de Pós-graduação de Comunicação e Semiótica da PUCSP (COS). O Perforum nasceu em São Paulo das ideias de Artur Matuck acerca dos “Colaboratórios de Mídia e Performance” a serem criados em diferentes cidades. No segundo semestre de 1998 cursei a disciplina Escrituras Eletrônicas, ministrada por Artur Matuck na pós-graduação da Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo, ECA/USP. Entre minhas idas a São Paulo, passei a fazer parte do grupo de pesquisa da disciplina, antes mesmo de ingressar oficialmente como doutoranda em um Programa de Pós Graduação. Parte dos integrantes atuaram no início do projeto Perforum. Paula Perissinoto e Ricardo Barreto, fundadores no ano de 2000 do Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica, FILE, Tereza Labarrère, Otávio Donasci, o artista criador das videocriaturas, Edson Luiz de Oliveira, Cesar Barros, Suzana Moraes. Outros, como Daniel Seda, aderiram ao grupo mais tarde. O Perforum no ano de 1999 se bifurcou em Perforum Desterro, coordenado por Yara Guasque pela Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina, UDESC, e Perforum São Paulo coordenado por Artur Matuck pela USP. Os dois grupos desenvolviam colaborativamente scripts como proposição de interação e performance a distância.

Art activism is powerful. Also known as activist art, protest art, visual activism, artivism and creative activism, it changes lives, situations and is and has been a powerful weapon across a whole spectrum of struggles for justice. Teresa Sanz & Beatriz Rodriguez-Labajos(2021) relay that art activism has the unique ability to bring cohesion and diverse peoples together and it can, as Zeynep Tufekci notes, change the participants (2017). As Steve Duncombe & Steve Lambert (2021) posit, traditional protesting such as marches or squats are no longer as important as they once were. As a result of my own lived experience in activist activities, I very much agree with Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell (2012) that the reason people use art activism is that it works, by enriching and improving protest. In the past, when I lived in a metropolis and was not a parent, I used to be an activist. Now I no longer have immediate access to international headquarters at which to protest and I have to be concerned with being arrested, I am hindered from protesting. This project is an attempt to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism. By devising methods which include at least one of the following: that do not require on-site participation, that can take place outside the public gaze, that reduce the risk of arrest, that open up protest sites that are not “big targets”, that include remote locations, that involve irregular timing, my thesis aims to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism to those who are underserved by more mainstream methods of conducting art activism. Textiles have unique properties that enable them to engage in subterfuge and speak loudly through care and thought(Bryan-Wilson, 2017). They have strong connotations of domesticity, the body and comfort that can be subverted within art activism to reference lack of this domestic warmth and protection(O’Neill, 2022). Being a slow form of art-making, they show care and thought, attention in the making, so that the messaging is reinforced through this intentionality in slow making.

This Exposition is a brief ironic comment on the ongoing degradation, commodification, and colonisation of food and its many dimensions — recipes, ingredients, context — and a reflection on the territorial definitions that shape identity, in this case of South Asians and the Global South, once bound together as a people and still united in the brieftopian world of the Author’s Greatest Biryani: an amalgamative dish of political and cultural reproductions, drenched in time, where old and new contest identity. Through a conversational, autoethnographic lens, the exposition blends historical, colonial, and territorial reflections, using Biryani as both departure point and metaphor for shared identity and dislocation. Visual collages — archival, familial, and sourced — act as probes connecting memory, culture, and belonging. Ultimately, the work offers the Author’s Greatest Biryani as a living document of generational knowledge and a utopian gesture, inviting both insiders and outsiders to gather around a dish transcending borders and time.

There are moments within a performance where destruction and deviation from reality allow an alternative scenario to reveal itself. I argue that these moments can be called ‘brieftopic’, fleeting glimpses into a possible future (Behzad Khosravi Noori, 2024). But what are the connections between reality, deviation and alternative scenario? How can this brieftopia, which materializes for brief moments within a performative event, reverberate outside of it, propagating at a social and political level? During the site-specific improvisation series [in situ], it became evident to me that this brieftopia is tied to an artist’s relinquishment of control, leading to a decentralization of the performance. By introducing the case study, specifically the [in situ] performance held in September 2023 at the Maremma National Park, we will see how unforeseen, unpredictable, and non-linear interactions between myself, the audience, and the non-human components of the ecosystem in which we were immersed, shaped the performance itself, steering it in an unexpected direction and removing it from the continuum of artistic intention, audience perception, and everyday life reflection. In this brieftopia, in a sense, it is existence itself that is reduced to rubble, not for the love of rubble, but for the way out that passes through it, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin.

The photographic image has always historizised; an artifact of the past, photographic moment. But just as it is conditioned by the temporal and material context of its making, its essence – if there is one – is conditioned by how we encounter the image. This encounter involves both the situation in which the image is seen and our individual selves in relation to it – our histories, beliefs, and expectations. To further reflect on this unstable, temporal quality of the photograph, we explore the meaning of looking at the future by looking at photographs. Artistically and philosophically a contradiction in terms, it is still a practice we experience: How to look ahead with something temporally bound to the past. To do this, we reflect on ‘Regarding the Pain of the Future’ by the first author and develop and discuss an artistic practice emphasising a second, photographic moment.