Avant-garde audiovisual production - 1960s and 1970s

• Grant number: 22/11065-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: January 01, 2023
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Fernão Vitor Pessoa de Almeida Ramos
• Grantee: Patrícia Mourão de Andrade
• Host Institution: Instituto de Artes (IA). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/21498-1 - Films made in America or for America: Brazilian Artists' Dialogue with the U.S., BE.EP.PD

Abstract

This project aims to map and historicize the experiments with audiovisual media carried out by Brazilian artists between the years 1967 and 1977. It will situate these practiceswithin the debates that have shaped the cultural arena in Brazil as well as in relation to Cinema Novo and cinema marginal. At the starting point of this arch, we locate the crisis of Neoconcretism and the radicalization of Brazilian art, when an antiart spirit pushes artists toward experimentalism with nontraditional media. At the endpoint, the cooling down of this cycle of experimentalism and a growing institutionalization of the field, with the establishment of festivals and departments in museums dedicated exclusively to artists' audiovisual production. The research is structured around the trajectories of four artists who were central to Brazilian art in the 1960s: Antônio Manuel, Antônio Dias, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape. It will be concluded with the first generation of video artists that emerged in the country in 1974, most notably Anna Bella Geiger, Letícia Parente e Sônia.Andrade. Following the path opened by these artists, the research will reflect upon the contingent, nonprogrammatic and experimental features that have shaped these incursions into audiovisual media. By looking at these artists we intend to explore how they have articulated two problems that were central to Brazilian art in the late 1960s: precarity and constructive will.