Frestas: Trienal de Artes: Sorocoba, São Paulo, Brasil
Frestas: Trienal de Artes aims to promote exchanges and rapprochement between local, regional and international artistic productions, stimulate research and studies related to contemporary art, as well as providing access to various forms of art and broadening the artistic repertoire of those who attend.
Between Post-Truths and Events
Frestas Triennale 2017
Daniela Labra
Art pierces.
This edition of Frestas associates the name of the event with the notion of interstice: a space in between full of sensitivity and transformative creative power, where the ambiguity and vagueness of concepts, forms and models is explored in a poetic and critical way. While existing in cities seems to be reduced to numerical digits in homogeneous scenarios of shopping malls, conglomerates and condominiums, we are betting here on the maxim “to create is to resist”, understanding the practice of art and its fruition as unique propositional paths that liberate from the context of exalted productivity, competitiveness, surveillance and the spectacularization of life.
Considering that the regulated and academic nature of art collapsed a long time ago, we reflect on the impossibility of defining Truth in contemporary work, and also discuss the political narratives sustained by memes and media populisms supported by moral and dogmatic discourses, which gain strength and constitute part of the context that art itself mirrors and reacts to.
The title of the exhibition came before the term Post-Truth was named the most talked about on the internet in 2016. The term is not new and its germ already appears in Hannah Arendt's Truth and Politics (1967). Recently, it has become a protagonist in international political commentary, driven by the eagerness of major journalistic publications to disseminate opinions online as consistent facts that quickly gain the status of truths.
The idea of Event refers to the nature of a Triennial, and its definition in anthropology and philosophy: Events, always feared and expected, such as a climatic, military or political event, which carry the risk of an irreversible break with the past, marking profound transformations in the historical and social course of communities.
Participating in the show are artists from different nationalities, generations and languages, whose works address issues such as formal ambiguities; transdisciplinarity; temporality; performativity; gender and sexuality; social criticism and artisticity. More than half of the projects are commissioned and unpublished, and will occupy the Unity building as well as public roads, other institutions, stores and historic ruins, creating circuits of thought-provoking aesthetic experiences between Sesc and the city.
