argos TV@pivô

02/03 - 26/02/23

Ursula Biemann

Ursula Biemann (b. 1955, Zürich, Switzerland) is an artist, author, and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations from Greenland to Amazonia, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests and water. In her multi-layered videos, the artist interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, SF poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Biemann’s pluralistic practice spans a range of media including experimental video, interview, text, performance, photography, cartography, props and materials, which converge in formalized spatial installations. Her work also adopts the form of publications, lectures, and curatorial as well as collaborative research projects Her earlier writing and experimental video work focused on the gendered dimension of migration. She also made space and mobility her prime category in the curatorial projects “Geography and the Politics of Mobility”, “The Maghreb Connection“, and the widely exhibited art and research project Sahara Chronicle on clandestine migration networks. With Black Sea Files (2005) Biemann shifted the primary focus to natural resources and their situated materiality. In 2010 she co-initiated the World of Matter collective project on global resource ecologies. The artist participated in the video program that took place in parallel to the itinerancy of Oriana, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's solo show at the Argos, in 2023

Ardélia Istarú

Ardélia Istarú (Costa Rica, 1998) is a French-Costa Rican filmmaker graduated in videography from the school of graphic research ERG, in Brussels. She has an experimental approach to politics around intimacy through documentary and animation. The artist participated in the video program that took place in parallel to the itinerancy of Oriana, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's solo show at the argos, in 2023

Lazara Rosell Albear

Lazara Rosell Albear 1971, Ciudad Habana, Cuba) is a Cuban-Belgian artist dedicated to the research, performance and production of cross- media projects, events and films. She is a drummer, dancer/performer, extended voice performer, visual artist, filmmaker and poet. Her aim is to explore and enhance our/your experimental awareness beyond the usual stereotypes, expansion at different levels, at different layers. She is exploring crossmediality, interactivity and media input/output and striving for innovation, discovery, fusion, collaborations in touch with integrity and in service. Evolution has brought us ‘new’ means to work with such as computers and digital semantics, video and 3D which gives new approaches and broaden the paradigms in which we can express ourselves. But also traditional means as dance, music, theater concepts are used in contrapuntal togetherness. Using them in relational combinations creates exponential possibilities. A total inmersive performance within and without.

The artist participated in the video program that took place in parallel to the itinerancy of Oriana, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s solo show at the argos, in 2023

Annabelle Aventurin

Annabelle Aventurin (b. 1991, France) is film archivist and responsible for preserving and distributing Med Hondo’s archives at Ciné-Archives in Paris. In 2021 she coordinated, with the Harvard Film Archive, the restoration of Hondo’s films West Indies (1979), and Sarraounia (1986). She is also a film programmer. In 2022, she completed her first documentary film, Le Roi n'est pas mon cousin (30 min. France/Guadeloupe), screened at Cinéma du Réel, Third Horizon Film Festival (Miami), Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal and in France, Martinique and French Guiana. The artist participated in the video program that took place in parallel to the itinerancy of Oriana, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's solo show at the argos, in 2023

In recent months, Fernanda Brenner, artistic director of Pivô and Niels Van Tomme, curator of the Argos, a cultural institution located in Brussels (Belgium) collaborated with artist Beatriz Santiago Munõz in the creation of a new installation version of Oriana, the artist’s first feature film, which dates from 2022. After an initial presentation at Pivô, in São Paulo, in a parallel show to the 34th São Paulo Biennial, Santiago Munõz filmed extra scenes, which were added to the original material. The new version spreads over all the floors of the argos building and remains on show until May 7, 2023

Oriana is based on the book As guerrilheiras, by feminist writer Monique Wittig (1969). Since her adolescence, the artist has revisited the poignant environment created by the French author, and in recent years she has dedicated herself to reinterpreting it in this open and processual feature film, in which important women in Santiago Muñoz’s community and life are invited to inhabit an undefined space-time, proposed and conducted by her.
In The Guerrilla Women, Monique Wittig subverts her mother tongue to describe the hardships of a tribe of bodies read as a female that rises against the semantics of patriarchy and its implications. The author is one of the first to question – already in the 1960s – heterosexuality and the gender system taken as natural, actively rejecting them by proposing a transformation of communal relations by creating a grammar that escapes the original binary programming. In her way, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz stages a visual translation of this universe in which language can no longer account for these hybrid entities and presences, which tense and contradict the dominant words.

As an offshoot of Oriana, the show argos tv@ Pivô is being held simultaneously at Galeria Vitrine and at argos. The program brings together the production of women artists – Annabelle Aventurin, Ardélia Istarú, Lazara Albear Rosell, Ursula Biemann – who, with their specificities and contexts, deepen and bring other perspectives to the questions raised by Santiago Munõz in visual-performative experimentations.