A Selection of the BIENALSUR Video Programme

In each of its editions, BIENALSUR works on the basis of an extensive, open, free and international call, without pre-established topics or formats or other limitations (career, background, etc.). The curatorial axes that conceptually organise the different itineraries of each edition emerge from the more than 5,500 projects received from artists and curators from over one hundred countries. The works that make up the exhibitions, actions and different presentations of BIENALSUR throughout its vast cartography are selected from this call. The videos chosen especially for this collaboration with PROYECTOR 2021 come from this enormous stock of proposals.

A call for attention regarding the advance of conservatism in the Western world is perhaps the common denominator of this selection that departs from the video by Brazilian Fernanda Pessoa, who chooses the Rosa Luxemburg’s text Order Reigns in Berlin for the off-screen voice that gives continuity to a succession of images across seven countries that went through the socialist experience: by means of experimental montage, the text from 1919 sheds light on a critical reflection on other alternatives for the present. The other videos address the problem of conservatism by focusing on what this perspective usually denies or seeks to eschew: the assertion of rights and memory. In Defeating the Movement, Uruguayan Emiliano Grassi poetically revisits the tragic disappearances during the military dictatorship in his country while seeking to uphold the right to life and memory. In turn, Emilio López, María Belén Cerdá and Pablo Sabando Aburto from Argentina reinstate the presence of the marches for the right to legal abortion with an aesthetics and a materiality that contribute to situating the memory of a struggle that continues in everyday life in the space of art, as well as in the pursuit of other causes that advocate the right to diversity.