VIZINHOS - networked art in Brazil

VIZINHOS - networked art in brazil

14 - 28, May 2006
opening hours: 12.00 - 18.00h

In January 2002, an experimental ground for media and fine arts was established in the northeast of Brazil: a house as site for production, presentation, and public discourse. Within two years the communication and networking between artists was aggravated over all of Brazil, and the house- referred to as BASE- was transformed into the joint of the young art-movement of Brazil. In this period not only exhibitions and movie screenings, but also round table discussions and lectures were realized by artists from e.g. Fortaleza, São Paulo, Brasilia, Recife and Rio de Janeiro.

All actions of BASE focus on the build-up and consolidation of communication and cooperation of artists from various brazilian metropolises. All artists participating in this project are part of a new generation of artists, which take a strong interest in the artistic discourse of their city and contribute a lot to the development of the city's contemporary art scene. This new generation of artists posesses a profound understanding of social networking. If the significance of the "small world phenomenom" in modern society is recognized, it enables us to use personal acquaintances as shortcuts. In todays increasingly networked world, real and virtual space, regarded as interlinked communication-networks, provide a basis for new artistic means. Even if new media hasn't been used as an output channel, it still has influenced, changed, and formed the essence of the artistic work.

The exhibition "VIZINHOS- networked art in Brazil" by the project BASE, lasted for 2 weeks in the Freiraum of Museumsquartier Vienna, and introduced positions of the synergies of situationism, media art, and architecture. In the period of the 4th EU-Latin America summit in Vienna the group 5uper.net invited five brazilian artists in the framework of the Artists in Residence programme of the Museumsquartier Vienna. Thanks to the open space of 5uper.net's Cuisine Digitale a workshop/researcharea was created, which gave insight to the process of production by the artists. Thematically related movie screenings and musicevents made the event complete.

Transiçao listrada, 04.05.06:

"In the beginning BASE was not more than a house close to the center of Fortaleza in the Southeast of Brazil where we started to work together. Our work as artists was mainly focussed on public space, but we soon started to shift this work from the street to the inside of the house.
We invited other artists, initially friends and colleagues, later everybody who was interested in discussing and showing his or her artistic work or various related topics. By and by people started to approach by themselves to suggest projects which they would like to realize in our space. Numerous exhibitions took place, both from local artists and invited artists from other federal states, which also had the possibility to live in BASE during their time of working and
exhibiting there. We started to collect texts, books, photographs, catalogues and artist works documenting events happening there and got invited from other institutions to talk about BASE and our experiences.
We talked about our way to organize, the way of getting with other artists into contact, exchanged information and finally got to know other projects which where organized like ours.

After a while traveling around we elaborated the idea of a mobile institution – BASEmóvel. We packed all our material into a compact shape and brought it to as much locations as possible within an oversized suitcase. In every city we assumed to initiate an artistic process and always implicated our relation to the specific place. It was very important to us to see the process as an own project that deals with urban questions and is responsive to an audience, which is acting different in a non-artistic surrounding. With BASEmovél we had the chance to enlarge our network consisting now of people from various
areas and locations."