Rosa Menkman: Week #2-3 in Sao Paolo        While the first week was a short week, with only 3 working days, it was also a week that threw me right into the chaos of Brazil. I hope the next few weeks will be more relaxed because I need some space to produce something special in my residency. The start of the working week however, has to wait one more day because I receive a message that the power of the museum will be out the whole monday - so working in the MIS is not possible. I decide to stay one more day in the jungle. The house in which we stay (which is on a mountain outside of Sao Paulo) is build by Alexis and his father. It is beautiful; there is a winding stairs, glass sinks, wooden floors, a balcony and a fire place with a view looking into nothing but the jungle. The bugs are everywhere; I find a cockroach in my beer can and at night a huge butterfly (its as big as my hand) lands on my head - wahooooo. But mostly they are nice - they have strong and colors make funky sounds and are really big. Eavan and I climb to the top of the mountain that is shared with an ayahuasca church (which is actually more like a psychotropic cult; In the night the church is lid by a 100 candles in the front garden and sometimes I can hear the people 'sing'). On the top we can see all over Sao Paulo. There is also a skate ramp and the sun that burns me into a giant lobster. After I am roasted we start a meat barbecue and I sit on the flag of Brazil, which is actually the first time I get to really see it from up close - it reads: ordem e progresso: Order and Progress, which somehow feels very fitting... Tuesday I come back to MIS to run into a completely new scene. My desk is taken over by a visagist and a hairdresser who are frantically spraying their smelly stuff over a woman who is being transformed into a model. I learn that it is the day of the opening for the exhibition of last years residents and so my working room is taken over by a lot of people; the old residents, a camera crew, guests and a lot of stress. One of the artists who has a piece in the show is Ricardo Nascimento. His work is a dress consisting of a 110 computer fans, covered by “fitinhas do Senhor do Bonfim” ribbons. The fans are activated when the detection system registers mobile telephone waves in the atmosphere. It kind of reminds me of the cellphone disco, which is made by a Dutch/Slovenian couple (friends of mine), but then turned Brazilian and wearable. It is interesting to see the works of the MIS residents that came the year before me. Most works are focused on technology - some completely and others partially. There are a couple of them that look very well put together, but what I miss is a piece that includes a bit more philosophy, or that teaches me something about the person behind the work. The works in the exhibition seem to only focus on the technology and don't always take one step further or beyond - something I would like to do in my project, but which is I think a very difficult thing to accomplish - so we will see if I can really pull that together. On wednesday I finally get to work in peace. There is still a vague hint of yesterdays opening mayhem; clothes and ribbons covering the floor and the scent of perfume in the air but at least I am alone in my white walled laboratory. The sounds and the atmosphere have changed; I now hear a woman singing (its part of a work in the exhibition) - a psychedelic soundtrack to the day that lasts until 5pm, when the light goes out and everything goes dark. The electricity has ended and nobody knows when it will be back again. I later learn that this is a regular thing in the MIS, so its time to learn to regularly safe the work! I decide to meet Miguel (and Elena and Eavan), who is celebrating his birthday - in what is quite a big party for a dutch/african-man in Brazil. Thursday a friend of mine, Johan Larsby from Sweden gets in touch with me. We met in Norberg festival 2 summers ago and talked a lot about compression (art). We never met after the festival but he did make some softwares that were very interesting to me right after, and I have been thinking about working with him for a while. I propose to Johan to work on a software that supports and expands the Vernacular of File Formats text I just finished a couple of months ago and he reacts very positive. The Vernacular of File Formats is a text I wrote/made just after the Kanye West-glitch-commodification-incident; because I noticed a trend of particular glitches becoming more and more popular and eventually getting standardized and commodified - they passed a particular tipping point from being garbage and unaccepted to acceptation and later even incorporation. In the Vernacular of File Formats I tried to actively demystify the most used glitch effects. The Vernacular is, at the same time, an essay, a tutorial, a critique and a collection of experiments. I mention the Vernacular of File Formats in the middle of the rewritten version of the Glitch Studies Manifesto (which will be published in the Video Vortex reader in March). The middle of the manifesto is marked by a tipping point, where I change my way of describing glitches as something to celebrate into glitches as a new dogma or fashionable commodity. I hope that maybe this software can be part of my work in the MIS because I think it is a very important … So I send Johan some sketches about my first thoughts. I am also looking for ways to solve the porblem of translating the texts of the Glitch Studies Manifesto into a movie, without flooding the movie with text. One of the solutions I am thinking about is by not using a standard font for the text that I want to be part of the movie; It would conceptually not make sense to use a Mac or Windows native font. I decide to create a new font based on Helvetica; the 'neutral' font that has existed for over 50 years and has lately been used to make 'stylish' adds. I used it before (somewhat cynically) as the standard font for the Vernacular of File Formats ("a Guide to databend compression design") - which was in its whole some kind of ironical wink to databending, commodification and hot and cool. I start working on a compressed, a glitched and a feedback font. In the weekend videoartist César Meneghetti, who I met during Miguels birthday, invites me to come with him to a favela. The favela actually turns out to be not a real favela - it is the last Bairro of Sao Paulo, which in the future will probably grow into a favela - because this is the way the city has been growing naturally. But right now this neighborhood is organized and pretty clean and cozy. Césars friend Willem, who is an artist at the collective Casadalapa, has co-produced a movie about graffiti in the barrio and it will premiere under the central bridge. During the premiere Willem and César tell me about the different sub-cultures that are organized in loosely tied groups; the motorboys (or motoboy / motorcycle couriers) of which Sao Paulo counts over 250.000 and of whom one or two die in crash-accidents every day. They are everywhere and they cycle like bicyclists sometimes cycle through Amsterdam, especially when they have a death wish, but in Sao Paulo the motoboys bike even a bit faster (it also makes me think of the courier culture we have in the Netherlands - except its a lot more extreme). Willem also tells me about pixação, which I have seen on the walls of the buildings in Rua Augusta. Pixação is some kind of cuneiform graffiti or tagging style that looks very aggressive and is very hard (or sometimes impossible) to read. It is made by rivaling gangs that come from outside the city center and meet at specific points from where, in groups, they climb over walls in some kind of parkours (free running) style to get their tags covering whole buildings, as high and difficult as possible. Many pixadores have died by falling from roofs and edges, while others have gone to jail. The pixação hits something close to home. When I was young I always wanted to make beautiful pieces; me and my friends set out a couple of times to go and make some under the bridge and on the bench in the forest. But because the people that I knew that could really do graffiti -that knew the techniques and tricks- were all boys, I never dared asking for help. So we ended up not being really good at it (ugly style-masters) and very soon abandoned the practice of real graffiti. I just kept putting some ugly tags until I decided me and the world were better of when I would draw them in a sketchbook and make photos of the good ones under the bridge, instead of disfiguring the city and the walls by ego-tripping my tag over them. The pixação tags at first sight reminded me of my failed first graffiti adventures. Of course later I recognized that there is a style and sometimes a message behind it and that these pixadores actually have a lot more skills and come from a very different place. But I still feel a connection to pixação and I have started thinking about doing a pixação-style font as well. Week 3 (21->28 nov) Order and Progress After the weekend I am coming back to the museum and somehow the white walls are starting to creep up on me. The MIS is a very sterile environment in which I feel not very alive or able to think of anything interesting. I am just starting to feel nervous and tired at the same time. When I call my friends to complain they tell me I should not worry, but the one and a half weeks have flown by very fast and I didn't get anything done that I was planning to do (I did however get things done that were not on the list … ). Alexis emails me to ask if I want to come on a trip to the Rio Favela, where he is doing a project similar to the Videoguerrilha we did in Rua Augusta here in Sao Paulo. At first I think it is a great idea, I will learn so much more about Brasil and get inspiration. But as the days go by and the organization is getting more and more vague, while my work in the MIS is slowing down, the news from the favelas in Rio gets more and more grim. The police and authorities have started a drugs war and everyday there are shoot-outs and more news of innocent deaths. I decide to stay in Sao Paulo and safe my trip for another time - staring at the white walls that have started to feed my anxiousness - My mind is still tired of all the things I have seen the last weeks and I need to just hang out and do not a lot but have a beer and relax. But when I ask people in the MIS to come out with me after a day of work, to clean the head, nobody wants to join to take a beer and talk a bit (actually in the MIS, a lot of people dont seem to drink anyway). They do tell me to be very careful where I walk, especially after work and in the evening (in the night I am not supposed to walk outside alone at all). When I do walk through the streets of Sao Paulo to clear my head (which is what I would normally do when I feel stuck in my work at home) it does not really seem to work the way I hoped it would. In Amsterdam walking through the street especially at night is making me feel empty and relaxed and I often find the space to rethink and reflect on ideas. Here, when I walk from the museum to the appartment (which is about a 30 min walk) I dont get to feel that kind of emptyness because there is to much to see and think about; the first 10 minutes of the walk from the MIS to my appartment are perfect; I pass the stores of Bentley, Mercedes and Lambourghini and it is really boring (I get to zone out a bit). But once I come out of rich people car territory, Brasil starts again and other things catch my attention. On the right side of the Rua Augusta there is a busstop that doubles as the house of a 30 year old man. He is almost always asleep. When he is awake he looks almost normal but when he is asleep he lies under the edge of the bench of the busstop, in the rain or under a carton box, often moving spastically, like he has seizures. His eyelids are very swollen and it looks like he has been crying or drinking. A 100 meters up the road the shop portiques start. There is one porch in particular in which, after 9 pm when the shop closes a group of young children (up to around 16) starts building houses of cardboard boxes. They use wires and clothespins to make walls of paper and fabric. It reminds me of the houses I used to build in the attic of an old friend of mine. One hundred meters from my hotel, a man is lying on sidewalk, puke dripping out of his mouth, wet from the rain that is still coming down on him. Underneath him the mosaic that signifies the city of Sao Paulo is slightly interrupted by some work that has been done on the drains. And when I finally come home a group of beer drinking man and dogs just arrived at their place under the porch of the DIA supermarket; getting a bit rowdy and loud every night. I am considering if I should make some photos or videos of what I see, but I also think it might not be smart to take my camera out in front of these people and besides this, the result would be something that is maybe more esthetically interesting than conceptual. - I don't know the stories of these people in the street, and I would just estheticize their misery; it does not feel right. I end up just making some videos of the beautiful sights, the thunder passing by and the sun shining… (which as a source material feels pretty uninspired most of the time). When I walk down the streets of Ordem e Progresso, the motto that is written on the flag of Brazil seems to be far from reality - in fact, the paradox I witness reminds me of a paragraph from my Glitch Studies Manifesto: "Just like Foucault stated that there can be no reason without madness, Gombrich wrote that order does not exist without chaos and Virilio described that there is no technological progression without its inherent accident, I am of the opinion that flow cannot be understood without interruption or functioning without glitching. This is why there is a need for glitch studies." The country of Order and Progress, in this sense, cannot be understood without being the country of disorder and deterioration or degeneration; which is the reason why I decide to name my project Order and Progress. Finally, this week I do get to finish two true type fonts; a glitched and a compressed Helvetica font. But I am not sure about the glitch font and while I like the lofi font but I think I wont use it in Order and Progress - at least not in the "normal" state. --- they are still so clean.. On the end of the week I finally get to meet up with David Quiles, the director of Rojo Nova. I have been looking forward to meeting him because he has been curating some shows of which I was part in the past, but I only know him from email. We meet behind the cemetery and he tells me about the last Rojo show that took place in the MIS.- It turns out that one of my works has already been shown in the museum I am doing my residency at. During this show some graffiti artists were also invited to paint the insides and outside of the museum; something I have been secretly thinking about doing since I got more and more annoyed with my white walls. the videos on his website are suitable this way and will have to do for a while at least. David and I also talk about pixação; he tells me that there are at least two forms of pixa; on the one hand there are the pixadores that just tag their names, as the ego-tripping practice, and on the other hand there are the pixadores who incorporate political messages, voicing their unhappiness with political organizations. Besides these two basic differences, the style has actually become some kind of hype around Sao Paulo, not being real to its origins but instead very popular amongst younger, bored teenagers and high art followers and producers; this year pixa even got a place in the 29th Biennial in Sao Paulo. On the one hand this is disturbing news, as I have been thinking about incorporating pixação in my project, but now it seems a bit rotten. On the other hand, it kind of makes pixação even more analogous and fitting to glitch; as glitch has become part of popular culture over the last year (Kanye West used it in his videoclip and Tyra Banks uses it to style her new Americas Next Topmodel). Besides this, very fittingly I have introduced glitch art on MTV scraps in Brazil this week (oh how awkward, see photo). Another paragraph from my Glitch Studies Manifesto seems very applicable (to pixação and of course once more to glitch): "Realize that the gospel of glitch art also tells about new standards implemented by corruption. Not all glitch art is progressive or something new. The popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and unavoidable. Be aware of easily reproducible glitch effects, automated by softwares and plug-ins. What is now a glitch will become a fashion. […] I think that the popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and unavoidable. Even so, the utopian fantasy of 'technological democracy' or 'freedom' that glitch art is often connected to, has little to do with the ‘colonialism’ of these hot glitch art designs and glitch filters. If there is such a thing as technological freedom, this can only be found within the procedural momentum of cool glitch art, -when a glitch is just about to relay a protocol." A pixação font now really seems necessary to the creation of Order and Progress and I will research this possibility more in the next weeks. |
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