Credits: Xyk Lalayk
TransWEB
Curator: Rodrigo d'Alcântara
in collaboration with Gisele Lima, director of A Pilastra (Brasilia)
06/10 - 02/11
PROGRAM
Week #1
Friday October 30 2022
Program presentation
from October 3 to 7 2022
Romulo Barros's presentation and takeover
from October 10 to 14 2022
Yná Kabe Rodríguez's presentation and takeover
from October 17 to 21 2022
Dyó Potyguara's presentation and takeover
Dissident art platforms: a brazilian perspective
Roundtable & closing event
Friday October 22 2021: 5:00 to 8:00pm
Come and join us next Friday, October 21, to mark the closing of both the exhibition Vende tela, compra terra and the virtual program TransWEB.
The round table will bring together Vende tela, compra terra’s co-curator Daniel Dinato, TransWEB’s curator Rodrigo d’Alcântara and collaborator Gisele Lima, director of the art center A Pilastra (Brasilia). The conversation will be moderated by art historian Diogo Rodrigues de Barros.
DESCRIPTION
The TransWEB project connects Brazilian cultural agents from the so-called global South to the SBC Gallery of contemporary art (Canada, North America). Immersed in a virtual existence, we are artists, curators, and exhibition centers networked by thought and artistic production. We refuse dichotomies, we assume the error, the organic, the spiritual, the ancestral, and the everyday life as identity and poetic force. Coordinated by Rodrigo D'Alcântara (project proponent through The Elspeth McConnell Fine Arts Award 2022), in collaboration with Gisele Lima, A Pilastra Gallery’s director (Brasília, Brazil), the artists Dyó Potyguara, Romulo Barros and Yná Kabê Rodríguez shared 3 months of virtual artistic residence (June to August 2022), whose results are now presented to the public on the platforms of SBC Gallery of contemporary art. During this period, we have challenged the boundaries between North and South through TransWEB, by using digital platforms as a means of communication, creative expression, and intellectual exchange of experiences. Through this web, we are avatars that shuffle our life experiences and affection within virtuality.
As dissident bodies, our existences already challenge dichotomies. The choice of having the web as a platform for transnational and transcultural action is a reaffirmation of the non-binarity, present in the online flow and in the resident artists’ investigations and identities. Here, we take up the concept of glitch feminism proposed by Legacy Russell. By choosing glitch as the focus, the author proposes to think of dissident identity permeated by the virtual as a possibility of constructing the self freed from the body's materiality, being plural, like a hyperlink. On the Internet, we deal with multiple tabs, applications, and workspaces, in an intense and uncontrollable rhythm of information exchange. Among the TransWEB, plural Brazilian territorial and symbolic inquires stand out, such as the alchemist's life-death visuals explored by Romulo Barros, the travesti* symbolic force highlighted through the iconography of the jaguar by Yná Kabê, and the power of ancestral rescues through the anti-colonial sowing of Dyó Potyguara. During these months of intense exchange, the resident artists were stimulated in their creative processes through several theoretical and practical references, besides the integration of their art-life narratives and plural methodologies that result today in the public program TransWEB.
This contemporary kind of iconography, formed by the intersections of the real and the virtual, is permeated by emojis, gifs, memes and poetical processes, in which we highlight the chat, the online persona, and the video as platforms for research. Thus, the virtual avatar of each TransWEB resident artist is an extension of their own identities and practices, connecting to Russell's concept, and going beyond the gender limiters of the current hetero cis-patriarchal political system. TransWEB is performed in the gap between the South and North. The Internet crashes, the video fails, and the glitch is potency. In Abya Yala, a term coined by the Kuna people (Colombia & Panama) to name the Americas, we live in constant fault zones. We are wandering bodies in search of reinvention, remixing ourselves, resisting in society towards a liberating existence, here glimpsed by the virtual but also experienced in a tangible web collectively built in the real.
* Travesti is an identity marker specific to Latin American countries, being a trans-female gender identity that does not necessarily conform to hetero cis-gender binaries.
BIOS
Rodrigo d'Alcântara (he / him)
Rodrigo D'Alcântara (Niterói, 1992) is a multi-artist, curator and researcher. He is currently a PhD student in Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, CA; Master in Visual Arts at PPGAV – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (CNPq Grant) and Bachelor in Visual Arts at University of Brasília (Brazil). His artistic practice feeds Brazilian mythologies and allegories from a dissident, syncretic and multi-dimensional point of view. His artworks has been exhibited in institutions such as A Gentil Carioca, Mendes Wood DM, Museo Ettore Fico Turin; Salão Anapolino, Salão Luiz Sacilotto, Arte Londrina; Transformations Trans Film Festival Berlin, Aphrodite Athens & Epidaurus Film Festival, Valongo International Image Festival, Les Mains Gauches, Cineversatil - Festival Internacional de Cortometrajes sobre Diversidad, Festival de Arte Erótico Chile, Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, etc. . Winner of awards such as Culture and Citizenship Award: LGBTI Culture (FAC-DF, 2018),Trans[création] (ALN/ NT2, 2021) and The Elspeth McConnell Award 2022, which enabled him to organize the TransWEB project in partnership with SBC gallery of contemporary art (Montréal, CA). He has works in the collections of the Museu Nacional da República (BR) and Casa da Cultura da América Latina (BR). He has participated in Brazilian artist residencies at Aprosmig (Belo Horizonte, BR), Espaço Esponja (São Paulo, BR), NACO (Goiás, BR) and Jardim Botânico (Distrito Federal, BR)
Gisele Lima. Bachelor's degree in Theory, criticism and history of art from the University of Brasília. Since 2015 develops researches that investigate processes of creation, making, artistic work, cultural production and curatorship. As a cultural agent she keeps herself on the mission of making art events happen despite the regrets, becoming an expert in guerrilla production. Co-curator of the show Triangular - Art of this century (2019/2020), held at Casa Niemeyer - UnB, best institutional group exhibition by Select magazine (2019); Guest curator of the 14th International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Curitiba with the show Contraforte (2019) and Winner of the first curatorial call for proposals of OMA Gallery ( 2018), São Bernardo do Campo - SP, with the show Metric held in the same year. Today she is partner and manager of the Gallery and House of Culture A Pilastra and Assistant director of the
project Conexão Afro
Romulo Barros (they / them / she / her)
Romulo Barros (Medeiros, 1995) was born and raised in the countryside of Minas Gerais, a social environment where behavioral patterns culminate in the repetition of local stories, a process in which everyone ends up in the same bundle. They observe these experiences and insert them into their production. Always questioning their own identity, they try to express their perspective, of a being that searches, in themselves and their memory and ancestry, a relationship of affection, bonds, flux and reflux. Currently, they have an artistic production that wanders through the fields of painting, installation, sculpture, and engraving
Dyó Potyguara (Mamanguape, 1994) is a visual artist, environmental educator and researcher of the dynamics and intersections of body, seeds and other materials of the terrestrial crossroads. She is a mediator of landscape pedagogies in the Laboratory of artistic and ecological practices Terreiro Afetivo. She is curator and cofounder of the platform Gira_Itinerant Circuit of Performances. She is part of the collective ocultas, and has been in residencies, festivals and exhibitions in Abya Yala, Europe and Asia. Originally from Mamanguape, she lives and works between the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Niteroi and São Gonçalo.
Yná Kabe Rodríguez (she / her)
Yná Kabe Rodríguez is a 30 years old travesti from the city of Recanto das Emas in Brazil . I have a bachelor's degree in Visual Arts from the University of Brasilia, where I also completed my master's degree in the Graduate Program in Visual Arts in the research field of Methods and Processes in Contemporary Art. I work as an artist-curator-researcher, occupying the position of secretary in SEC-EIB (Secretariat for the Development of the First School of Indiscipline in Brazil) and acts as a producer of Brazilian Ballroom Culture, with the Grand Prize project.
View the mini-documentary TransWEB: Recording in Progress and listen to Rodrigo d'Alcântara exchange with the artists
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PARTNERS AND COLLABORATORS
