Events | Despina

carnaval impossível

SATURDAY, 26.03.2022

Marina Lattuca, Mayara Velozo and Stefanie Ferraz, artists currently participating in Despina Residency Program, propose the activation of the space through a performance show with guest artists Alex Reis, Dani Câmara, Mila Marques, Sanguessuga, Shion, Luiza Casé and Pat Fudyda.

“Since the beginning of January, this possibility, or rather impossibility, of Carnival has been echoing. Is Carnival dead? Yes and no.
We don’t know for sure, but we do know that, if there is Carnival in February, if there is Carnival in April: Carnival in March is missing.
Carnival calls for performance. And performance calls for carnival.”

All welcome, free entry.

SERVICE

Date: Saturday, March 26, 2022

Time: 6pm to 10pm

Location: Despina. Rua Hermenegildo de Barros, 73. Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro

Mina Mana Mona

Ocupação e Feira Mina Mana Mona

Mina Mana Mona é um projeto de ocupação coletiva, por mulheres cis e trans, do espaço da Despina como ateliê de produção e de experimentações de convivência durante outubro e novembro de 2021. Propomos articular colaborações, cruzamentos, construções comunitárias, redes de afeto e de geração de renda. Mais do que uma proposição, Mina Mana Mona é um exercício. O projeto foi finalizado com uma feira de artes e ativismos com 17 expositoras convidadas para participar: Aline Besouro, Amanda Seraphico, Anis Yaguar, Aya Ibeji, Cali Nassar, Consuelo Bassanesi e Marcela Fauth / Vem pra Luta Amada, Dri Simões, Ella Franz Rafa, Lanchonete <> Lanchonete, Lara Lima, Maria Palmerio, Mariana Paraizo, Mayara Velozo, Sabine Passareli, Sofia Skmma, Tapixi Guajajara, Yuki Hayashi / Fudida Silk. As cozinha ficou a cargo da KuzinhaNem, projeto de formação gastronômica vegana da Casa Nem. Outras edições da Feira Mina Mana Mona irão acontecer ao longo de 2022.

Occupational Therapy Collective

Sabine Passareli

09.09.2021 - 30.09.2021

“Occupational Therapy Collective” is an open, ephemeral, intersectoral and interdisciplinary group proposed by artist and therapist Sabine Passareli. The meetings will take place every Thursday of September.

How to disappear? How to reappear? How to join a group? How to break up with a group? These are some of the issues that will be addressed in a democratic, informal space.

Free participation, use of mask essential. Interested parties must bring materials for the production of individual sketchbooks.

All welcome!

Senado Tomado #13

Friday, 28.02.2020

SENADO TOMADO #13 – Despina´s open studio event

Artists:

Andressa Cantergiani, Roberta Vaz, Adrien Pelletier, Ana Bial and Francisco Luis Brandão.

Rua do Senado, 271 – Centro. Free entry.

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CURATORIAL SUPPORT
Anderson Oliveira
Guilherme Altmayer
Keyna Eleison
Leno Veras
Victor Gorgulho

IMAGE CREDIT
Performance “Colapso dos Sentidos”
Andressa Cantergiani and Roberta Vaz
Photo: Angelix

Pictures Gallery (horizontal scrolling)

Senado Tomado #12

Quinta, 28.11.2019

Convidamos todxs para a nossa última noite de ateliês abertos de 2019 – SENADO TOMADO #12 – que acontece na próxima quinta-feira, dia 28 de novembro, a partir das 19 horas.

Para esta edição festiva, preparamos uma mostra especial que marca o encerramento da residência dos artistas Mark Hilton, Matei Vogel, Mégane Voghell e Stine Kvam.

Reunindo pinturas, desenhos, objetos e vídeo, a mostra apresenta o resultado de um processo de imersão na prática em ateliê, que contou com o suporte curatorial de Dani Mattos, Keyna Eleison, Raphael Fonseca, Victor Gorgulho; e acompanhamento do artista Pablo Ferretti.

Além da mostra, destacamos a fala do curador Per Brunskog, que também participou do nosso programa de residências. Brunskog irá conversar com o público sobre a sua trajetória e apresentar suas pesquisas mais recentes.

No térreo, os ateliês dxs artistas associadxs à Despina estarão abertos à visitação pública – venha conhecer os trabalhos mais recentes de Ana Clara Mattoso, Carol Medeiros, Daniela Vasconcellos, Lara Lima, Laura Lydia, Luiz Arthur Ribeiro, Pablo Ferretti, Paula Santos e Sarah Knill-jones.

E nas carrapetas, os dj’s Carol Medeiros e Frederico Pellachin trazem uma seleção fina, provocativa e dançante.

Esperamos vocês!

Estamos na Rua do Senado, 271 – Centro.

Entrada gratuita

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A residência de Mégane Voghell contou com o suporte do Conseil des arts de Montréal, e é fruto de uma parceria entre a Despina e o centro canadense de arte Diagonale.

Senado Tomado Especial – Open Bodies Residency 2018 (Residência Corpos Abertos)

Thursday, 27.09.2018

Come along next Thurssday (27), from 7 pm onwards, for Despina’s “Senado Tomado”, our monthly open studios event. For this special edition, we bring together the works produced by Miro Spinelli (RJ, Brazil), Vinicius Pinto Rosa (RJ, Brazil), Henry McPherson (Scotland, UK) and Stephanie Black-Daniels (Scotland, UK) during their residencies in our space.

Selected for the Open Bodies Residency 2018 (Residência Corpos Abertos) – a programme conceived jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery, with the support from the British Council and Creative Scotland -, the four artists worked in our studios developing their researches and projects in response to the new environment and to the proposed dialogues.

On the same night, we will be sharing for the first time in Brazil the film “SING SIGN: A CLOSE DUET” (2015), by Finnish-English artist and musician Hanna Tuulikki, as well as video recording fragments of “ACTS OF SELF-LOVE” (2016), a performance by Scottish artist Jak Soroka.

On the decks, Fine Estirpe DJ Ensemble will entertain you all with a classy and provocative set.

See you all on Thursday! Despina is located at Rua do Senado, 271 (Centro). Free admission.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS IN RESIDENCY

MIRO SPINELLI is a performer artist and researcher who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a Master’s Degree in Performance from the Performing Arts PhD Programme at UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). Currently, Spinelli is investigating how performance and its radical connection with materiality, writing and dissent can generate forces on the subjects, creating possible counter-ontologies. Since 2014, he has been developing the continuous project and series “Gordura Trans” (“Trans Fat”), mixing performance, photographs, texts and installations. This project has been presented in several Brazilian cities and abroad with the collaboration of artists such as Fernanda Magalhães, Jota Mombasa and Jup Pires. In 2017, he was awarded a scholarship (along with artist Luisa Marinho) to take part in a residence programme at the Andreas Züst Library, in Switzerland, where they developed together the “Chupim Papers”, which shed light on themes such as precariousness, abjection, decoloniality, politics of affection and transgenderism, focusing on the body and its poetics and political potencial.

VINÍCIUS PINTO ROSA lives and works in Niterói (RJ). He currently holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and works as an assistant to Rio-based artist Laura Lima. His practice incorporates issues that cross identities and subjectivities in the production of objects and installations, with the body itself as a power of image and action, which, in turn, establishes new forms of relations, access and images of the world and of the other. His practice is very influenced by the universe of a carpentry (where his father works and where much of his experience within the studio space takes place). His works reach both performance and design fields and question constructions, polarizations and binary lines already established. They also reveal a hybridism and a multiplicity of activations and accesses that the body can create from a direct relation with the object. Vinicius has been developing the projects “Devices” and “Baseline” since 2014 and they have already been presented in several Brazilian galleries and art spaces.

HENRY MCPHERSON is an inter-media artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. His practice in composition, improvisation and performance is embedded in mixed-media score-production, devised performance, present-time composition, cross and inter-disciplinary practice, through which he explores personal and collective identities, musical and otherwise performative traditions. Henry’s work centres around the body-mind, score-object as mediator, the subject of invocation, impulse-led generation, queer and sustainable art practices, and meanings of ownership in collectively-generated improvisation. He is a founding member of Glasgow’s mixed-arts collective EAST (Experimental Artists Social Theatre), KUI piano duo, and the chamber trio Savage Parade. In recent years, Henry has collaborated with groups and individuals such as the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scotland, Martyn Brabbins, RedNote ensemble, The Glasgow New Music Expedition, Garth Knox, Zilan Liao and Germany’s Ensemble Modern. He is a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland composition dept., and is an award holder of the Dinah Wolfe Memorial Prize for Composition (2014); Scottish Opera’s Opera Sparks Competition (2016); the Patron’s Prize for Composition (2017); the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Composition Club Prize (2017); the Harriet Cohen Memorial Music Award (2018); and was a nominee for the inaugural Scottish Awards for New Music (2017). He has been awarded residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativiy (CA, Alberta, The Creative Gesture: Collective Composition Lab for Music and Dance), Despina (Open Bodies Residency, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, with the Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh) and Skammdegi Residency and Festival (IS, Olafsfjördur).

STEPHANIE BLACK-DANIELS is a Scottish based artist living and working in Glasgow, having spent most of her early years and education in the Middle East. Most recently she has completed her Phd in Fine Art practice, with a specialism in performance at The Glasgow School of Art. Since 2010 she has toured her work nationally and internationally to festivals and galleries in the UK, Berlin, Lithuania, Finland and Chicago. In 2011, she received the Athena Award by New Moves International and National Review of Live Art, Glasgow. Stephanie was also mentored by the late drag King pioneer Diane Torr. She has a well-established facilitation practice, which is vital to the way she makes, researches and produces new work. Her most recent workshop was at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, looking at the ‘Body as Sculpture’. Stephanie is interested how an object can change her interaction and intimacy with others, creating visual and poetic scores to act as a dramaturgical key to unlocking subject-matter or narratives for performance. Her work situates between a physical and sculptural practice, developing live and documented performative outcomes where sound, movement, image, object, light and costume intersect. Stephanie engages with performance as a way to explore the relationship between body and space, especially around gender and sexuality. She uses the body as a tool for measurement and is interested in the ‘extended body’ and ‘body as object’ to consider questions around ‘the self’, ‘the other’ and ‘the theatrical’.

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ABOUT THE FILMS

SING SIGN: A CLOSE DUET (Hanna Tuulikki , 2015) is a vocal and gestural suite created in response to the intimate world of Edinburgh’s historic ‘closes’ – the small alleyways that lead off either side of the Royal Mile. Sheltered in the confined space of a ‘close’, Tuulikki and her collaborator Daniel Padden enact an enigmatic encounter: a wordless dialogue conducted entirely through gesture and song. Inspired by the Baroque dance suite, a street-map dating from 1765 provides a visual score. The vocal composition, divided into four movements – Allemande, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue – takes the form of a hocket (a musical device where the melody is split between two voices), with the parts divided between the singers in accordance with the closes as they branch off the high street. Where Tuulikki reaches for the lowest notes of her vocal register, Padden sings at his highest, each undermining normative gendered vocal characters, to find a common tonal space between them. The choreography spells street names in British Sign Language, mimetic hand gesture, and exaggerated body language. Despite the complete absence of sounded words, at the heart of the work is an embodied reflection on language, and how the languages to which we have access shape our experience of the world around us.

ACTS OF SELF-LOVE (Jak Soroka, 2016) is a four-hour performance of on-going preparation and catwalking, in which Soroka struts a variety of selves along a spectrum of gender expression. In placing these live acts of gender fucking alongside Soroka’s video selfies of defecating, Acts of Self Love explores the fiction of identity and the reality of the body. Performed at The Arches, New Now festival in Amsterdam and Basel, and Buzzcut 2016.

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OPEN BODIES RESIDENCY 2018

A project by
Despina
The Fruitmarket Gallery

Support
British Council
Creative Scotland

Project Conception & Coordenation
Consuelo Bassanesi
Iain Morrison

Communications, Production & Documentation
Frederico Pellachin

Curatorial Support
Guilherme Altmayer
Raphael Fonseca

Financial & Legal Management
Clarice Corrêa

Public talk with artists in residence – Open Bodies Residency / Residência Corpos Abertos 2018

Tuesday, 11.09.2018

Come along next Tuesday (11), at 7 pm, for a public talk which will bring together artists Miro Spinelli (RJ, Brazil); Vinicius Pinto Rosa (RJ, Brazil), Henry McPherson (Scotland, UK) and Stephanie Black-Daniels (Scotland, UK).

Selected for the Open Bodies Residency 2018 – a programme conceived jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery, with the support from the British Council and Creative Scotland -, the four artists are already working in their projects in our art studios. At the end of September, a special event will take place at Despina showing the results of this process.

INFO
Talk with artists participating in the Open Bodies Residency / Residência Corpos Abertos 2018
When: Tuesday, 11.09, 7 pm
Where: Despina (Rua do Senado, 271 – Centro).
Free admission

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Miro Spinelli is a performer artist and researcher who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a Master’s Degree in Performance from the Performing Arts PhD Programme at UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). Currently, Spinelli is investigating how performance and its radical connection with materiality, writing and dissent can generate forces on the subjects, creating possible counter-ontologies. Since 2014, he has been developing the continuous project and series “Gordura Trans” (“Trans Fat”), mixing performance, photographs, texts and installations.

This project has been presented in several Brazilian cities and abroad with the collaboration of artists such as Fernanda Magalhães, Jota Mombasa and Jup Pires. In 2017, he was awarded a scholarship (along with artist Luisa Marinho) to take part in a residence programme at the Andreas Züst Library, in Switzerland, where they developed together the “Chupim Papers”, which shed light on themes such as precariousness, abjection, decoloniality, politics of affection and transgenderism, focusing on the body and its poetics and political potencial.

Vinícius Pinto Rosa lives and works in Niterói (RJ). He currently holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and works as an assistant to Rio-based artist Laura Lima. His practice incorporates issues that cross identities and subjectivities in the production of objects and installations, with the body itself as a power of image and action, which, in turn, establishes new forms of relations, access and images of the world and of the other. His practice is very influenced by the universe of a carpentry (where his father works and where much of his experience within the studio space takes place).

His works reach both performance and design fields and question constructions, polarizations and binary lines already established. They also reveal a hybridism and a multiplicity of activations and accesses that the body can create from a direct relation with the object. Vinicius has been developing the projects “Devices” and “Baseline” since 2014 and they have already been presented in several Brazilian galleries and art spaces.

Henry McPherson is an inter-media artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. His practice in composition, improvisation and performance is embedded in mixed-media score-production, devised performance, present-time composition, cross and inter-disciplinary practice, through which he explores personal and collective identities, musical and otherwise performative traditions. Henry’s work centres around the body-mind, score-object as mediator, the subject of invocation, impulse-led generation, queer and sustainable art practices, and meanings of ownership in collectively-generated improvisation. He is a founding member of Glasgow’s mixed-arts collective EAST (Experimental Artists Social Theatre), KUI piano duo, and the chamber trio Savage Parade.

In recent years, Henry has collaborated with groups and individuals such as the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scotland, Martyn Brabbins, RedNote ensemble, The Glasgow New Music Expedition, Garth Knox, Zilan Liao and Germany’s Ensemble Modern. He is a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland composition dept., and is an award holder of the Dinah Wolfe Memorial Prize for Composition (2014); Scottish Opera’s Opera Sparks Competition (2016); the Patron’s Prize for Composition (2017); the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Composition Club Prize (2017); the Harriet Cohen Memorial Music Award (2018); and was a nominee for the inaugural Scottish Awards for New Music (2017).

He has been awarded residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativiy (CA, Alberta, The Creative Gesture: Collective Composition Lab for Music and Dance), Despina (Open Bodies Residency, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, with the Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh) and Skammdegi Residency and Festival (IS, Olafsfjördur)

Stephanie Black-Daniels is a Scottish based artist living and working in Glasgow, having spent most of her early years and education in the Middle East. Most recently she has completed her Phd in Fine Art practice, with a specialism in performance at The Glasgow School of Art. Since 2010 she has toured her work nationally and internationally to festivals and galleries in the UK, Berlin, Lithuania, Finland and Chicago. In 2011, she received the Athena Award by New Moves International and National Review of Live Art, Glasgow. Stephanie was also mentored by the late drag King pioneer Diane Torr.

She has a well-established facilitation practice, which is vital to the way she makes, researches and produces new work. Her most recent workshop was at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, looking at the ‘Body as Sculpture’. Stephanie is interested how an object can change her interaction and intimacy with others, creating visual and poetic scores to act as a dramaturgical key to unlocking subject-matter or narratives for performance. Her work situates between a physical and sculptural practice, developing live and documented performative outcomes where sound, movement, image, object, light and costume intersect. Stephanie engages with performance as a way to explore the relationship between body and space, especially around gender and sexuality. She uses the body as a tool for measurement and is interested in the ‘extended body’ and ‘body as object’ to consider questions around ‘the self’, ‘the other’ and ‘the theatrical’.

Cine Clube Despina presents: “13th”

Friday, 22.06.2018

Art and Activism in Latin America – year III

For this edition of Cine Clube Despina, we are pleased to invite everybody for a special screening of the film “13th“, an acclaimed documentary by the American director Ava DuVernay, in which scholars, activists and other experts seek to analyze the path that has been building forms of contemporary slavery in the United States, articulated with public security programs and economic circuits.

The exhibition of this film is an invitation to think about the relations of the North American context with the Brazilian current scenario. After the screening, artists and researchers Luciane Ramos (Revista Omenelick 2º Ato) and Renata Codagan (Universidade das Quebradas) will talk to public about the film and other topics related.

This event is part of the activities that Brazilian artist Ana Lira is developing for her residency at Despina.

Come along from 6:30 on! Free admission.

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ABOUT THE FILM

13th is a 2016 American documentary by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the “intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States; it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which freed the slaves and prohibited slavery, with the exception of slavery as punishment for a crime. DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated in practices since the end of the American Civil War through such actions as criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weigh more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration of people of color in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, demonstrating how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations. (Source: Wikipedia)

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ABOUT THE GUESTS

LUCIANE RAMOS is an anthropologist, dancer, researcher, project manager at Acervo África (SP) and one of the editorial staff of magazine Omenelick 2º Ato. PhD in Arts of the Scene, holds a master degree in anthropology from UNICAMP. Works in the fields of arts, African studies and education.

RENATA CODAGAN is an art educator, has been a member of the Tear Arts Institute team since 1996, where she coordinates the reading mediation projects. She is one of coordinator of Universidade das Quebradas / UFRJ. Also provides advice to institutions and social projects that work with education, art and culture.

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To learn more about Art and Activim in Latin America – year III, click here.

Talk with Ana Lira (Brazil), Danitza Luna (Bolivia) and Felipe Rivas (Chile)

Thursday, 17.05.2018

Art and Activism in Latin America, year III (2018)

Kicking off the activities of Despina’s Art and Activism in Latin America, with the support from the Dutch organization Prince Claus Fund, we are pleased to invite everyone for a special talk with the selected artists for this year’s 3rd edition – Ana Lira, Danitza Luna and Felipe Rivas. Come along next Thursday, 17 May, from 7:30 pm onwards. Admission is free (Despina is located at Rua do Senado, 271 – downtown area).

This residence is in tune with the purpose of the project to promote the exchange between Latin American and Brazilian artists and activists, so that new narratives – more democratic, transgressive and multicultural – are spread, amplified and heard. For the third edition, the objective is to converge practices that address issues related to the creation of new worlds and hereby the foundation of other modes of organization, forms of subjectivization, production models, exchange systems, remuneration mechanisms and educational methodologies: a path for a transformational existence capable of performing other ways of living, focused on affection and common sharing.

Apart from carrying out their projects and researches during their residency, the artists will also participate in a series of activities, including seminars, workshops, special visits to public schools, among other actions and events. Stay tuned here on our website, Facebook (www.facebook.com/despina.org) and Instagram (@despina.rio) for more news and information.

About the artists

Ana Lira is a Brazilian artist who lives and works in Recife (Pernambuco, Brazil). Her work seek to discuss political experiences and collective actions as processes of mediation. Power relations and implications in the dynamics of communication are among the main issues of her art projects, which articulate visual narratives, press material, printed media and independent publications. She is a specialist in Theory and Criticism of Culture and in recent years has developed independent research and curatorial work, as well as educational projects articulated with visual arts. Lira has participated in more than seven collectives for two decades. She is the head of the educational projects Visual Cities, Entre-Frestas and Possible Circuits, the latter related to the elaboration of photo-books and photo-zines. She received the 2015 Funarte Arte Contemporânea Award for the Non-Dito exhibition, which was presented at MABEU / CCBEU in Belém do Pará (2017) and at Capibaribe Centro da Imagem, in Recife (2015). She is the author of the book Voto, published by Pingado Prés, in 2014 (1ª ed.) and 2015 (2ª ed.). The book is part now of the São Paulo Pinacoteca collection and also of the Museum of UFPA Photo-book Collection. She is also a researcher in audiovisual projects – currently Lira is doing a research for the Terrane project, a visual narrative about women working in construction in the Brazilian semi-arid region, an experience related to the Casa da Mulher do Nordeste (“Northeast Women’s House”). During her residency at Despina, Ana intends to investigate the relationships between invisibility and power, through the mapping of knowledge and the sharing of information-culture which does not pass through large communication circuits.

Danitza Luna is a Bolivian artist and activist who lives and works in La Paz. She holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, specializing in sculpture. Since 2011, she has been part of the anarcho-feminist collective “Mujeres Creando”, one of the most important and influential art and activism platforms in the country, which develops artistic intervention and performance projects in public spaces, as well as art and screen printing workshops and educational programs in universities and women’s unions, with emphasis on gender issues and ethnic minorities. Amongst the recent exhibitions she participated as part of the collective, we highlight: “Muros Blandos”, held at the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum in Santiago de Chile (2017), where she developed, alongside artists and activists Esther Angollo and Maria Galindo, a series of provocative and ironic murals that brought the attention to some political and religious controversies around the discussions on gender identity. In 2016, she developed (also with Esther and Maria) a commissioned work for the Bolivian International Biennial of Arts – the public intervention projects “Altar Blasfemo” and “Escudo Anarco-Feminista Antichauvinista”, which took place on the external wall of the National Museum of Art City of La Paz. In 2015, she participated in the Medellin International Art Meeting – “Historias Locales / Prácticas Globales”, in Colombia, where she coordinated with other members of the collective the screen printing workshop “Grafica Feminista, No acepto ser cosificada” in the Muesu of Antioquia. The results of this experiment were displayed on a public mural in the streets of Medellin.

Felipe Rivas San Martín is a Chilean artist living and working in Valencia, Spain, where he is a fellowship PhD student at the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) – Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV). He holds a Master’s Degree in Visual Arts from the University of Chile. His practice includes painting, drawing, performance, video and it’s related to technological image (virtual interfaces, digital codecs). He is the co-founder of the Sexual Dissidence Student Collective (CUDS), and has been participating in this activism platform since 2002. He also directed the magazines “Torcida” (2005) – about culture and queer criticism, and Disidenciasexual.cl (2009). Rivas links activism and artistic production with research, text and curatorship in relation to arts, politics and technologies, queer theory, post-feminism and performativity.

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ART AND ACTIVISM IN LATIN AMERICA is a Despina project, with the support of the Dutch organization Prince Claus Fund. The project extends for three years (2016, 2017 and 2018). Each year, a theme will guide a series of actions, including occupations, workshops, talks, film screenings, exhibitions, public talks with important names of contemporary artistic + activist thought and a residency programme. For this third edition, the project brings DISSENT AND DESTRUCTION as its main theme and it runs between May and June 2018.

Check below a short piece on the theme for this year’s edition.

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ART AND ACTIVISM IN LATIN AMERICA – YEAR III (2018)

Dissent and destruction

Like an earthquake, artistic and activist practices, through avant-garde and revolutionary actions, are capable of causing cracks in structures hitherto regarded as unshakeable. Discordant forms of life organization have long coexisted – equidistant, clandestine, or even in conflict – within normative and dominant models.

Given the incontestable failing of current social and political systems, which are still founded on inequality, indifference and injustice, what other forms of survival will be possible from this dystopian scenario?

Based on this question, we propose to articulate connected strategies of action in order to make the overthrow, the collapse and the implosion of the hegemonies possible: to think of new futures.

In this third year of Despina’s Art and Activism in Latin America project, we will look at those who turn discontent into incendiary ideas and everyday conspiracies, having as tools of struggle collaborative spaces for insurrection and configurations of networks of counter-conduct.

Among topics as relevant and urgent as racism, mass displacement, cuir, indigenous extermination, gender violence, fake news, political persecution, normative processes and moralization of bodies, discourses and practices; we will welcome proposals permeating fields such as artificial intelligence, crypto-coins, hacktivism, algorithms, network regulation, afro-futurism, deconstruction of whiteness, legal activism, active education methodologies, community health, alternative spaces and systems of art and culture, alternative agricultural practices, speculative fiction, among many others.

We look for dissonant existences, ongoing tensions, radical positions; not as mere allegories but as the opening of loopholes in the economic, political and social operating systems. Transgressions that offer alternatives to cohabit the present, in full acceleration of the process of the ruins, which we can no longer stand to contradict without counter attacking.

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Selection Committee
Consuelo Bassanesi
Guilherme Altmayer
Pablo Leon de La Barra

Selected artists in previous years
Year I- 2016 (Theme: Public Space)
Bubu Negrón (Porto Rico)
Crack Rodriguez (El Salvador)
Luciana Magno (Belém, Brazil)
——
Year II – 2017 (Theme: Body)
Carlos Martiel (Cuba)
Cristiano Lenhardt (Recife, Brasil)
Mariela Scafati (Argentina)

Talk with Nina Wöhlk and Matthieu Laurette

Tuesday, 30.01.2018

We are happy to announce the first event of 2018 in our new headquarters! Come along for an evening of talks with Danish curator Nina Wöhlk and French artist Matthieu Laurette, with the participation of curator Pablo Leon de la Barra.

Wöhlk will present some thoughts that she has been invested in during her residency at Despina. Through an investigation of the creative processes of speculative fabulation – the telling of new (his)stories as an artistic method, she will address her interest in Donna Haraway’s notion of “string-figures” in relation to the Brazilian Cordel – stories on a string, and the possible agential potential of the literary genre. A reference to the Danish writer and artist Amalie Smith and her next book “Et hjerte i Alt” (roughly translated to: “A Heart in All”) will be made. In this book, a collage of texts written throughout 10 years forms a “Moebious strip”. From there, she will speculate of the connections between the Brazilian cannibalism, addressed by the XXIV Sao Paulo Biennial in 1998, and its relation to the Danish method of “vandalism”, voiced by artist Asger Jorn in his initiation of the movement “Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism” (SISV) in 1961 (-1965). The aim will be to say a few words about deconstruction and speculation as two artistic methods and generators of new (hi)stories.

On the other hand, Laurette will talk about his artistic career and his latest project, “Tropicalize Me,” an experiment that seeks to dissect the notion of “tropic” and the different perceptions within this concept. It started in Bogotá in 2010, consisting of Laurette asking diferent personalities of Latin American art world whom he knows personally to give him a list of tasks, actions or experiments to enact in attempt to “Tropicalize” him. Dealing with the fantasy of the exotic, and underlining its discontinuous nature, the project merges conceptual practices with in situ resources. “Tropicalize me” unveils an ambiguity in contemporary artistic communities longing for frsthand identifcation with socially constructed post-ideological productions turned into commodities.

We kick off at 7:30 pm. Our new address is Rua do Senado, 271 – Centro (the blue and yellow building between Cruzeiro College and the Biscoitos Globo factory). Admission is free. There’s a 24 hour parking in front of our building.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

NINA WÖHLK lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Since 2012, she has been engaging as an independent curator and a writer in discussions and knowledge production within an expanded field of contemporary art. Her main research interests lies in the inseparability of the art work and its context. At the moment, she is researching performative practices in contemporary art and its relation to emerging discursive thinking. Her connecting fields of awareness are the nordic indigenous cultures and trauma as past experience through re-doings (as opposed to re-enactments). In Rio, she is familiarising herself with the performative practices of the Brazilian neo-concrete movement and its presence within the arts today. As a curator of the art institution Læsø Kunsthals three year programme for 2016-2018, she is unfolding the profoundly inspiring and progressive work by Danish artists Per Kirkeby, Jørgen Haugen Sørensen and Asger Jorn through solo exhibitions, that are branching out into many different contexts and situations, making them relevant, present and engaging again. In 2018, she will curate an exhibition with Asger Jorn, founding member of the movements of Situationist Ideale, CoBRA, Bauhuas Imaginiste and non the least Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism in Europe, the latter being emphasised in the coming exhibition through contemporary artists engaging in dialogues with the legacy of Jorn’s artworks, theories and ideas. Her residency at Despina is generously supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and Knud Højgaards Fund, Denmark. More information: www.ninawoehlk.dk

MATTHIEU LAURETTE lives and works in Paris, France. One of the frst “new media” artists to have operated in the 90’s, Laurette has used stereotypes, role models and processes borrowed from the media and more largely from the idea of the “Society of the Spectacle,” thoroughly in his work. His practice directly questions the relationship between art and life, from his first works in which he appeared on popular television programs to later more complex apparatuses about value and economic circulation, and now to his current work, which is centered on the artistic persona itself, registering actions via certifcates, photographs, and social media. Having used dematerialization as his main strategy for over 20 years, Laurette can be seen as a visionary precursor of current artistic strategies afirming the virtual and the network as efective, IRL artistic material. His best known works are “Apparitions” (1993), “Produits Remboursés” (1991-2001), “Citizenship Project” (1996) and “El Gran Barque” (2000). He has already exhibited at the Pompidou Center (Paris), Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Venice Biennale, among others. He is a laureate of Institut Français Hors les Murs program and his project has been selected and supported by Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques. More information: www.laurette.net

INFO

Talk with Nina Wöhlk and Matthieu Laurette, with the participation of curator Pablo León de la Barra*
When: Tuesday, 30th January
Where: Despina
Rua do Senado, 271 – Sobrado
Centro – Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Free admission

* This talk will be held in English only.