voltar

We realize the urban space as a place of confrontation, threat and abandonment; a place for the fight for survival and entertainment, as a place for traffic and passing within a society.

Through the pieces of work presented we have a significant sample to start the reflection about these ambiguities preset in the big cities as well as about the massive influence of the media, as it is at all times, creating new idles and new objects of happiness as a constant downpour of alienation and collective euphoria, on the other side of the economical, scientific and technological development living with the social demands, negotiations between worker and company, as well as unemployment running side by side with the religious confrontations, safety systems abuse, territorial disputes, as complex zones of understanding, as if the hyper-communication of the means of information lives with the huge alienation of the masses (escapism). To talk about beauty and poetics among these parallel realities could seem naive, but as the need to keep searching for new references in images and poetic perceptions changes every decade, it would be also a need and a challenge, as a continuous expansion of reality and an attempt of development of what we understand as consciousness.

Even among this constant transition of identity in which we find ourselves and the constant dispute between institution and individual, where the individual sees himself as impotent most of the times, damned to develop kindness as a way of adaptation and survival.

Art didn’t belong to the linear/systematic world as Artaud put it, but as urgency and necessity of a dialogue of the being in the world, in a constant search of confrontation and reevaluation, a way of subsistence, a space always open, even if utopia, but still a space of concept fight and change of perception, a nomad territory.

Part of curatorship is dedicated not exactly to the urban space but to the instrumentation of it, videos made with procedures that build our society of information; information that is processed and reprocessed. Information in various layers. The videos talk about this society with the same kinds of resources that they use, assuming the “modus operandi” itself. Another important fact is the analysis of the mass media – which is another element that unites the society and fills it up with super-structured values. It’s the authentic substitute for religion, nurturing society with desirable values for the continuity of it. The video art joins in as a kind of antidote to the expected and pacifying reading of the television and other means of information. In this way this collection tries not only to talk about the “critical point” but also to use part of its strategies and esthetics elements; to re-mean its fantasies and its symbolic production.

The name “index generator”, taken from a book of the curatorship, implicates, to us, exactly this capacity that the contemporary capitalism has to generate discourses in a non-stopping way, so that it seems to us almost massive and aleatory.