Al Nordeste: Nuevas ideas desde un lugar plural

"Al Nordeste de qué?" Esta provocación del artista cearense Yuri Firmeza fue el chispazo que dio origen a la muestra colectiva À Nordeste. Realizada en las salas de Sesc 24 de Maio, en el centro de San Pablo, la muestra aborda un debate público en torno al tema "Nordeste", una región de Brasil que fue cuna de la colonización y de la gestación de una cultura brasileña, y que hoy está asociada a estereotipos y prejuicios relacionados con atraso, pobreza y privación. Este gran tema y sus narrativas están impregnados por un marco histórico que está siendo revisado, y por los procesos de reinvención contemporánea que cuestionan todo un conjunto de valores hegemónicos, apuntando a un lugar de amplia resistencia creativa.

Desde esta perspectiva, desde mayo a agosto de 2019 el público local tiene la oportunidad de ver un vasto conjunto de contenidos provenientes de diversos contextos y tendencias artísticas que configuran y articulan mentalidades, disensiones y disputas en torno a la región Nordeste de Brasil. La muestra presenta más de 343 piezas – incluyendo obras de arte, documentos, acciones y diferentes registros – reunidas y amalgamadas por la curaduría relacionando y poniendo en contacto las iniciativas y experiencias de 160 artistas, colectivos y asociaciones artísticas.

The exhibition is a project by three Brazilian researchers and curators – Bitu Cassundé, Clarissa Diniz and Marcelo Campos, combining their different researches, strengths and experiences to weave a dialogic platform consisting of artworks and cultural manifestations, from a complex and broad sociocultural, political and economic context.

The initial provocation was intensified in the context of Brazil’s 2018 national elections, when the Brazilian public debate was fueled by clichés, myths and historical prejudices about the Northeast, motivating the efforts for the materialization of this project. As the curators state, the exhibition “is dedicated to presenting the case of the sociocultural invention of the Northeast as a background in light of which we can (re)conceive Brazil.” Moreover, “it is necessary to always question, to escape from essentialist positions and to shed light on geopolitical questions.” The main question dealt with here is what it means to be “to the northeast.”

From the modernism of the past to naïve art, from popular manifestations to mass culture, from established contemporary art to the young expressions of art today, from bidimensional artworks to performances: everything is presented in mutual entanglement, without hierarchies and with multifold cross-influences, dissolving the borders between art genres. In order to ensure a better mediation with the public, eight different sections were defined: The Future, Uprisings, (De)coloniality, Work, Nature, City, Desire, and Language. The curators consider the sections in the exhibition space as isolated formations interconnected by the sinuosity and continuity of the proposed architecture. Archipelagoes are created giving rise to connections between different eras, authors, languages and trends, around questions that kindle often-unforeseen dialogues between different traditions and ambitions.

Besides a vast mapping of artworks and actions, the project features commissioned projects by artists from various states in the Northeast: Alcione Alves, Arthur Doomer, Ayrson Heráclito and Iurê Passos, Daniel Santiago, Gê Viana and Márcia Ribeiro, Isabela Stampanoni, Jota Mombaça, Marcelo Evelin, Marie Carangi, Matheus Britto, SaraElton Panamby and Naýra Albuquerque, Pêdra Costa and Ton Bezerra.

In keeping with its raison d’être, Sesc São Paulo promotes activities and reflexive platforms and activities involving art with the aim of stimulating the perception of alterity and fostering critical production in relation to traditions and conventions that disregard alternative histories and decentralized perceptions in ways that maintain the “other” in a state of invisibility or otherwise subject to limiting geographic and symbolic conditions. Beyond a geopolitical struggle, À Nordeste comes precisely to deconstruct Brazilian myths, such as the idea of national cohesion, allowing other nonhegemonic thoughts, shapes and voices to emerge.