The 33rd São Paulo Biennial opens to the public on September 7
The 33rd Bienal takes “Affective Affinities” as its theme. Curated by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, it brings together twelve individual projects and seven group exhibitions organized by artist-curators such as Waltércio Caldas and Sofia Borges. There are several new projects, and one commissioned work particularly caught my attention: Brazilian artist Bruno Moreschi’s project, Outra 33 Bienal.
Moreschi proposes building an archive of experiences that differ from those of an official Bienal archive. Bruno says: “In the near or distant future, someone will study the 33rd Bienal and find the expected official archive, but also another set of documents resulting from our actions.” With this statement, Bruno addresses a question that prompts us to think about a crucial contemporary phenomenon: the expansion of documentation channels and repositories, and how they will affect our future understanding of the past.
We are witnessing—and fostering—an unprecedented production of records of our present. Around 70,000 images are posted on Instagram every minute. And if you think that is a lot, an estimated 75,000 videos are viewed on YouTube every second. This mass of data encompasses much of what we do and produce today. Major exhibitions, as we have discussed before, have become inviting spaces for these processes, even though they are often driven by marketing rather than cultural initiatives. What will these records tell us about the history of exhibitions in the future? And if these services cease to exist, what will happen to this collection, which is undeniably a testimony to our time?
Beyond these questions, artist Bruno Moreschi raises a whole new set of issues, such as interpretations made by artificial intelligence systems unfamiliar with works of art. He mentions an AI system that read a Bienal exhibition wall as a “vast horizon.” Bruno says that “someone might regard this non-specialist interpretation as something not to be taken seriously, as an error. But he and his team view these readings as expansions.”
I would call them challenges for thinking about the future of memory.
Transcript of Giselle Beiguelman’s Ouvir Imagens column, broadcast every Monday at 8 a.m. on Rádio USP (93.7 FM).
Access the playlist with all audio recordings of the Ouvir Imagens column on Rádio USP | Read all transcripts and posts.