In recent months, Fernanda Brenner, artistic director of Pivô and Niels Van Tomme, curator of Argos, have collaborated with Santiago Munõz to create a new installation version of Oriana, the artist’s first feature film from 2022. Following an initial presentation at Pivô in São Paulo, Santiago Munõz filmed extra scenes that were added to the original material, creating an intricate audiovisual experience across the two floors of the Argos building.

As an offshoot of the exhibition, a video exhibition takes place at Galeria Vitrine and also in the institution hosting the itinerancy as part of the argos tv@ program. The video program gathers the production of artists who, in a certain way, dialogue with Beatriz Santiago Munõz’s research.

The show takes place between March 1st and 28th at Pivô.

Below is the synopsis of the works, which will be shown simultaneously in the space.

Ursula Biemann. Writing Desire

Synopsis

Writing Desire is about the rapport between words and body and the creation of desire. The fast-paced video links the writing of romantic desire by means of electronic communication technologies to the increasing disembodiment of sexuality and commercialized gender relations. The booming bride market emerges as a site where the virtual and the physical exchange of bodies converge. The video examines the different subjectivities produced through this exchange in both the industrial world and in post-socialist and Southeast Asian countries and looks at their respective desires.

Electronic communication technologies challenge the boundaries between private fantasy and the public sphere. In this compressed electronic space, the notion of the self undergoes transformations that also affect questions of boundaries, gender, and sexual relations. Writing Desire links the creation of romantic desire through writing to the production of desire in consumer culture.

The bride market in general, and the virgin market in particular, are evidence of the capitalisation on sexual relation on the Internet. russian.bride.com, tigerlilies.com, and blossoms.com are among the many sites which advertise large numbers of women from the former Soviet Union and the Philippines to the global male community.

Lazara Albear Rosell. Yoko Osha Chapter III or The first day is the day of the river

Synopsis:

The third and final chapter of the Yoko Osha trilogy. “Making Saint” is an autoethnographic, sensorial and multilayered portrait of Santeria or Regla de Osha (The rules of the gods); the AfroCuban religion, forcefully imported from West Africa with the slave trade and falsely syncretic for survival. Not anymore punished by the government, the practice is even more flourishing as the socioeconomic situation in the island remains precarious for the majority of the population. As proposed by the priest in the previous chapters, Lazara Rosell Albear intended to go through the 7 days initiation ceremony. A crowning, a rebirth, a highly performative event. On becoming, on belonging. Eulogizing the body as a language, spontaneity and improvisation. Engagement for black female representation in the arts and social change. In time social unrest around the world, Can a film be a tool for social change, for social healing?

The pandemic placed travels on hold and most of the film was shot in Brussels and Gent self exploring the rituals and the states of being to which they lead. Straddling trance and control, fixed and moving images the artist is both a participant and a spectator of the ceremonies she documents. A compelling, unconventional diaristic meditation that reveals the deep involvement with her roots and the relationship with her artistic practice.

Annabelle Aventurin. Le Roi n’est pas mon cousin

Synopsis:

The author of the book Sunny Karukera, Stranded Guadeloupe (1980), Elzea Foule Aventurin engaged, in 2017, in a series of interviews with her granddaughter, the filmmaker Annabelle Aventurin. Together they trace—not without malice—a family history, sailing from one side of the black Atlantic to the other. A history of silences, pride, and revolt.

Ardélia Istarú. PRUEBAS

Synopsis:

“In 1982, accompanying my father to Paris, my Costa Rican mother sent a series of letters to her parents when she arrived in the French capital. Forty years later, I found these letters and revisit a story full of pain in order to better understand my own arrival on the continent.”

WHEN
02 March until 26 March
Wednesday to Saturday, 11am to 7pm.

WHERE
Pivot Showcase Gallery