For the exhibition (+=-) PLUS IS EQUAL TO MINUS celebrating 18 years of the Fiteiro Cultural at the SESC in Sao Paulo, I looked back at the history of the cultural kiosk and identified what makes relational works so special.
According to the poem from which the title of this exhibition is borrowed, the more the sun shines the less it does, and the less it does the more it shines! Paradox. Come rain or come shine, come in, the Fiteiro Cultural is happening.
The present exhibition offers an overview of the extraordinary story of a simple wooden construction that morphed into a powerful site of cultural and creative collaborations along the meandrous course it took across the world and the continents over the past 18 years, thanks to the ingenuity, genuineness and generosity of its creator and caretaker the Brazilian artist Fabiana de Barros.
An original body of new media works – models, casts, video projections and photographs – were created especially for this event in order to revisit the sites, contexts and various forms of the kiosk as it became a major work of public art. The exhibition is a site-specific installation made of a selection of enlarged cutout works turned into display panels, which feature 8 original models of the different kiosks as well as video projections. Each station presents a variant of the Fiteiro Cultural along an edited film featuring the events and actors of each of its enactment. Through this set-up it becomes clearly evident how it is not the object but the sum of each context and group of people that created interrelations through which each time a new piece emerged. The modest timber shack became a strong symbol of social interactions.
Discover its origin as an ameliorated replica of a northern local fiteiro installed on the beach of Joao Pessoa, when the artist Fabiana de Barros decided to build a work of art that could be useful not just to her but to all her fellow artists engaged in residency. Follow it across the globe as it provided a site for educational activities to a settled communities of gypsies in the suburbs of Athens, Greece; as it morphed into a theater and a camera obscura in the mountainous regions of Switzerland or was buried in the forest, part real part virtual; as it became a canvas for the graffiti artists of downtown Brooklyn, defying the very question of public domain and occupation of territory; as the playground for the children of a school in Yerevan, Armenia and as the symbolically skeletal site of mediation on the campus of the University Al Quds in Jerusalem, Palestine. Look for it in Berlin as it reminisces in the form of a slanted red cube emerging from the ground after it has been symbolically deconstructed; and many times back in Brazil where it multiplied in many iteration of socio-cultural projects at the heart of the SESC mission.
From the very start, Fabiana de Barros had planted the seeds of its unconditional right to remain open and of its duty to create links between opposites: just by simply being a sheltered site of human gathering. Thus, the history of the Fiteiro Cultural is a collection of stories, singular and collective, deeply rooted in the fantasies of each one of the communities it became a part of, in their dreams and aspirations, narrating the possibilities that emerge when a group of people cease to be mere individuals but get together to do something, construct, play, write, discuss, argue, and share it among each other and with the others. These stories have invented a multitude of kiosks, all different, all essentially similar, all related to these individuals that together form a constellation of like-minded people, who all possess very strong positive energies that coalesce in the multiple manifestations of the various Fiteiros Cultural.
The kiosk is by conception and definition open. It is this very openness and emptiness that allow for all the fantasies to be received, to find a place and to grow. The artist has willfully reworked the form of the kiosk several times, whenever it was necessary, to adapt it to its environment and the needs of its users, but it has always kept its basic proportion, shape and specificities (slanted roof, openness, sheltering, etc.) that participate in its magic. It is precisely the simplicity of its structure, its plastic capacity for transformation, the clarity of its proposition and its adaptability to the unpredictable environment, as well as the generous ‘authorless’ position of its author that has enabled the Fiteiro Cultural to be such a powerful “transitional object” in which people negotiate their relation to the real, change and are changed.
It is a fact that something fundamental happens every time the Fiteiro Cultural is installed, something that goes beyond its social impact or artistic relevance, something that happens on a deeper, primal level. But it has not been obvious to understand what is really at stakes beyond all the various interpretations and readings that have already and brilliantly been made of the Fiteiro Cultural and that are collected in the beautifully revised edition of the book ABERTO / OPEN that accompanies this exhibition. The ‘object relation theory’ of the psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott provides us with the key elements to fully grasp the mechanisms at play. Indeed according to Winnicott, there is a third part of life in any human being beside her external life and her inner reality: it is called “an intermediate area of experience” and it allows for both the external life and the inner reality to remain both separate and interrelated. A transitional object is thus a symbol of the journey of progress towards experiencing. What takes place around the iterations of each Fiteiro Cultural can be described as “the intermediate area as transitional phenomena” and it happens via the “transitional object” that is the kiosk itself. In the seventies, the artist Lygia Clark created objects aimed at interactions with the spectators who became participants. She called them ‘Relational Objects’ (Objeto Relacional) as she had observed, “that the experience that her objects presuppose and mobilize as the very basis of their expressivity run up against certain subjective barriers in the participants”. The experience of using the objects and the relations engendered became more important than the object itself. The object, here the Fiteiro Cultural, is the pretext why the experience can take place, where it is altogether safe and daring.
Going further in the analysis of the mechanisms that make the Fiteiro Cultural so successful, one must address what is at the core of this object, namely the void. The kiosk is empty. It is one of its fascinating characteristics, not only regarding the literally empty space delimited by the wooden structure but also importantly the absence of the author, which allows for the presence of the others. This level of detachment on behalf of the artist has been a true gift: this apparent “loss of control” became the fuel that empowered each project to take on a life of its own. Indeed, it is exactly this twofold empty space that has been the motor of its success, allowing anyone to grasp it and fill it with their own desires: physically, symbolically and metaphorically it has become a site-specific place for fantasies to be enacted. Fabiana de Barros has noted this specificity and its potential power as a site for utopia. Thus, she has drawn this void to tame it, like a work of exorcism: “when you are afraid of the bull you draw it, to possess it, to grasp it and understand it”.
In a necessary act of re-appropriation of her own work, Fabiana de Barros has produced an entire new series of works in a purely plastic form and with insightful intentions. Thru a complex process of negatives and positives, starting from drawing the kiosk slice by slice according to various architectonic axis, cutting it and reconstructing it anew, then carving plates from the drawings, casting them and recomposing colored tableaux, alternating voids and solids, that echo the juxtaposed color fields of Josef Albers. She then formed new epoxy 3D models of the kiosk in its various configurations that she filled with silicone to give flesh to this inescapable void.
In 2004 Fabiana de Barros had already taken a similar introspective position towards the Fiteiro Cultural when she worked with her partner Michel Favre on the photographic series D’après, also exhibited here. This series attempts to discover the residual image of the kiosk after the artist’s interactions with paint have either revealed of covered the events happening on the surface. In this process the initial photographic document becomes a place of disappearance of the representation itself, in a process of re-encountering the artwork that was left behind.
Since its first implementation on the beach of Brazil, it has come and gone like a wave. It is this movement of coming and going that the artist Fabiana de Barros is attempting to render: the strength of the current when it arrives and takes you with it, lifts you in the air, climbs up, up, up and recedes slowly, washing all on its way. The force of the wave has brought the Fiteiro Cultural here and there, on the right and on the left, far away and close to home. And like water, linking all in the universe, the kiosk has grown like a constellation, a rhizomatic network of people and place interconnected, bringing one to the other, as a metaphor for the huge constellations that individuals form in the universe.
Text originally written in February 2017 for the exhibition in Sao Paolo
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