Solange Farkas | Solange Farkas Solange Farkas has been in the forefront of mapping electronic art production in Brazil and its diffusion internationally, having waged a battle in the art circuit that began 22 years ago. Quietly facing up to hurdles and difficulties to introduce and disseminate the language of video in Brazil, she was often rebuffed by disinterest or dismissal, particularly from art spaces - museums or galleries. Eventually, she was to see this mentality beginning to change.
By organizing the International Electronic Art Festival Videobrasil, an event that now takes place every two years, she worked for a situation in which that artists could produce, exhibit and spread their work, do research and reflect in this field. A collection of videoart was built up and Associação Videobrasil is now an international referent for video in Latin America.
Over these 22 years, the International Electronic Art Festival has often had to struggle in terms of logistics and infrastructure. It was also confronted with the need to broaden its original aims to contact different realities in electronic art outside Brazil. By the time it was ten years old, the Festival had to move on and become an event of international reach, which implied changing its status.
It was at that time (1982) that Videobrasil had to move from Museu da Imagem e do Som (locally MIS) to Sesc-Pompéia, where it was able to continue to grow as a Festival. Partnership with Sesc facilitated contacts with still other partners, such as Prince Claus Fond of Holland. Thus it was possible to create a permanent basic structure that allowed serious research work to be done, as well as cooperation and partnership on the international circuit through media centers, festivals and artists.
So from an isolated event, Videobrasil evolved to gradually become an institution capable of holding its own collection and meeting the commitments required of it by the international community. But all this was still not enough when video art in Brazil went through a crisis in the 1987-1989 period, with the absence of referents or opportunities to exchange experiences leading to weakness in the work done here, which was affecting the response from the art public and the media. On the basis of this diagnosis, one of the ways of "saving" the Festival was to open up its program and incorporate successful experiments from the international circuit and so create new opportunities for exchange with artists in other countries. But this perspective also posed the challenge of the event's bringing out great unevenness between works - which could lead to exclusion of Brazilian works as they were more fragile, for obvious reasons.
An initial move was to lengthen the period between Festivals to give artists more time to reflect and produce new work, or obtain more resources. From these needs, there emerged an event - Mostra Competitiva do Sul - that provided visibility for other Latin American countries that had also been left out of the circuit. This was a channel that led to more work circulating, particularly for Brazilian artists. These exhibitions drew people from other countries interested in seeing our production and perhaps having it shown at their own exhibition spaces.
Solange Farkas sought support from TV stations such as TV Cultura and TV Educativa in the hope that they would act as co-producers and disseminators for videoart in Brazil, as is the case in other countries, but the attempt was in vain. So she sought partnerships with international media centers, including CICV in France, and Brazilian artists were able to spend some time abroad. Curators from museums that were exhibiting, acquiring and organizing collections or temporary exhibitions of electronic art were invited to the Festival. A partnership with Prince Claus Fond was crucial in maintaining the collection of almost four thousand Brazilian and international works for Videobrasil, and for the recent annual production of documentaries, and the organization of curatorial designs for other institutions in Brazil and internationally. Evidence of the successful outcome of this proposal has been the acquisition of these titles by institutions such as MoMA-NY, the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art of Chicago.
By its actively intervening on all these fronts, Videobrasil has become an important center of contemporaneity and is dislocating geopolitical points of view. Today, this field is open to diffusion, analysis, exchange, research and experimentation. Solange Farkas seems to have a vocation for taking the invisible and providing it with visibility. For her meticulous and painstaking work, she is receiving - not before time - the Hors Concours award and the gratitude of the entire collectivity for whom her cause, or her dream, was quite simply crucial.
Summary of points made by Solange Farkas at the Forum of Debates for 2nd Sergio Motta Award (December 3, 2002). See the publication Mídia Arte: Fomento e Desdobramentos. São Paulo: Institute Sergio Motta, 2003, p. 33 - 43.
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