“If we think of actualization as the incarnation of an idea of “an education”
within one particular educational system, we arrive at the duality we inhabit and work with.”
Irit Rogoff, e-flux, Journal, 2010233 Reflecting on the biennial’s history and her own eight-year tenure over the course of four editions, former pedagogic coordinator Mônica Hoff suggests that the geopoetic mix of art and
231 Grant Kester has noted in relation to participatory and collaborative practices that this implies a “model of reception and set of research methodologies that are potentially quite different from those employed to analyse object-based art practices.” To engage in “the extemporaneous and participatory nature of these projects” requires the art historian or critic “to employ techniques (field research, participant-observation, interviews etc) more typically associated with the social sciences.” Grant H. Kester, One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011) 10.
232 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, 6.
233 Irit Rogoff, “Editorial,” e-flux Journal # 14: Education Actualized (March 2010) http://www.e-flux.com/journal/“education-actualized”-–-editorial/
publicness was, from an institutional perspective, a simultaneously unintended and sanctioned detour – “constructed by what overflowed or was left over from the biennial structure.” The free and decentralized school pulsating through various editions of the biennial, and perhaps, most vitally realized in the 8th with Casa M: “is the biennial that the Mercosul Biennial [as institution]
doesn’t know.”234 Despite all the geopoetic rehearsing, geopolitical realities withhold. As hired education “sticks,” however brilliant – Camnitzer, De Caro, Helguera – whom ironically can only function within a locality already up to their measure, are brought in as outsider catalysts and shapers, welcomed in so far as their projects are linked to a particular edition of the biennial and its curatorial discourse. This leaves the school susceptible to the vagaries of event highs and lows, curatorial trends and names, and ready made and deferred modalities. This maybe, as the song goes, “all there is.”235 Yet given that the stop-start nature of biennial culture is writ large in Brazilian society, the trauma of discontinuity a palpable presence, it raises questions around the practice of working “behind the exhibition’s back” even with the most radical, critical and generative of intentions.236 True, a sense of constructivity in its organic, experimental and proximal nature is about bodies and minds not buildings. Without a doubt the vitality of the 8th Biennial’s expanded pedagogy was the local community of artists, educators, and producers who used the biennial, like the activists of the World Social Forums’ “encuentros”, as an event to refashion and renegotiate identities, discourses and practices.237 The effusive and potent legacy of this artistic pedagogy and pedagogic art will continue to be a part of the life of Porto Alegre, and if not the biennial’s future, its counter futures.
Yet while this human resource energy and life skill development is fabulous, Roca and Helguera’s bet on local/regional impact and infrastructure, five years post the 8th Biennial, looks fragile. As former director of Pinacoteca and currently Secretary of Culture in the state of São Paulo, Marcelo Araujo has pointed out such cultural projects have contributed to advances in professionalization in the field, however, there has been almost none on the level of structural problems.238 “Working behind the exhibition’s back” may require an even greater sleight of hand.
Here Ted Purves’ notion of “interlocality” suggests a way to strengthen infrastructural practices
234 Hoff, “Publicness at the Mercosul Biennial,” Revista MESA.
235 “Is that all there is?”Song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It became a hit for American Singer Peggy Lee and was recorded on her 1969 album. See version: “Is that all there is?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M
236 Stephen Wright, “Narratorship (Talking Art),” Toward a Lexicon of Usership, 43.
237 Sonia E. Alvarez, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Ericka Beckman, Maylei Blackwell, Norma Chinchilla, Nathalie Lebon, Marysa Navarro, and Marcela Ríos Tobar. “Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms.” Signs 28 (2), (2003): 537-580; Also see http://www.havenscenter.org/files/Alvarez_3_alvarez-etal.pdf p.2
238 Marcelo Araujo [former director Pinacoteca, São Paulo and currently Secretary of Culture for the state of São Paulo]
“Ideal Museum: Jean Galar, Paulo Sérgio Duarte, Marcelo Araujo and Fernando Cocchiarale: Interviews conducted by Martin Grossmann, in Museum Art Today eds. Martin Grossmann and Gilberto Mariotti, Fórum Permanente Series (São Paulo: Hedra, 2011) 25-40, 38.
not through producing localities but rather interconnecting them, creating and reinforcing links between and across existing organizations and structures.239 A practice that needs to draw on, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos advocates, a pedagogy that respects the ecology of temporalities and repositions the consequential and the emancipatory as recriprocity between subjects.240 In this way, affecting a membrane, scaffolding, zone of proximal development, and laboratory, a sense of constructivity is not just site specific, as in Miwon Kwon’s terms were “originality, authenticity and singularity” are “evacuated from the artworks and attributed to site,” but is rather organically co-constructed in co-relation.
Here was the strength of the “geopoetic” proposal, that even without the realization of long-term infrastrutural impact, in its success and failures, its sense of constructivity was co-created with localities (individuals, collectives, organizations etc) and with, within, by and for specific contexts.241 This mobilizes the potential of both art and pedagogy as practices of encounter, between worlds, practices, individuals, and communities, opening up the possibility for what Ricardo Basbaum has called a “terreiro of encounters” and “conglomeration of alterities”242 – a constructive and anthropophagic forest school that actualizes itself as a sense of constructivity – constructing and subverting institutionalities from within and without.
239 Ted Purves, “Thoughts for the archipelago,” Education for Art/Art for Education, 349-356, 354.
240 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Para um novo senso comum: a ciência, o direito e a política na transição
paradigmática,” 3ªed. A crítica da razão indolente: contra o desperdício da experiência (São Paulo: Cortez, 2001) 103-112 and Danilo R. Streck, Telmo Adams, Cheron Zanini Moretti, “Pensamento pedagógico em nossa América: uma introdução,” in Fontes da Pedagogia Latino-Americano: Uma antologia Fontes de Pedagogia, 31.
241 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge/Mass/London: The MIT Press, 2004) 52.
242 The term “terreiro” in Portuguese means a public square or gathering place and the site where the rituals of Candomblé and other Afro-Brazilian religions take place. Ricardo Basbaum, “Quem é que vê nossos trabalhos,”
Seminários Internacionais Museu Vale–Criação e Crítica, 203.
4.0 MEGAFONES, ANTS, ARCHIVES AND CLINICS: RADICAL LOCALITY AND