Fotini Gouseti

Experiencing connecting issues“- CAPACETE Athens 2017

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Fotini Gouseti is a conceptual artist and PhD researcher in anthropology. She studied art at Athens School of Fine Arts (BA), Dutch Art Institute (MA) and she is currently a PhD candidate at the Dept. of History, Archaeology & Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly, Greece. Accordingly, her practice is research-based, socially-engaged and quite often called political. Her learningprocess derives out of her connection with others, while she focuses on the role of art in negotiating issues of memory.

She is the initiator of the art project Renkonto. For the past few years she has been engaged in the research projects The Present as a Result of the Past and The Least Wanted Travel the Most. The artistic outcomes of her projects are presented in various contexts worldwide.



Daniela Mattos

Artist, educator and curator, currently teaching at UFRJ.

“O Capacete tem sido um espaço fundamental de produção artística, encontros e pesquisas no Rio de Janeiro, atuando de forma independente e também em parceria com instituições locais. Tive a chance e a felicidade de participar e colaborar com atividades do Capa em diferentes projetos e momentos, listo aqui alguns deles: como integrante do grupo Máquina de Escrever (RJ), como propositora do workshop O artista como curador (RJ), como artista convidada do evento Feminismo e Feijoada (RJ) e como integrante do grupo Máquina de Escrever (SP) que culminou com a publicação Livro para Responder. Além disso, assisti a inúmeras palestras, tive encontros, conversas, celebrações e também fiz amigas e amigos entre os artistas, curadores e pesquisadores residentes que participaram desses 20 anos de atuação. Espero que essa iniciativa se mantenha viva e atuante, oxigenando as estruturas formais e não-formais do circuito de arte carioca, brasileiro e internacional.”

 


Bik Van der Pol

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Bik Van Der Pol. is the artists duo Liesbeth Bik (born 1959) and Jos van der Pol (born 1961) who work together since 1994 as conceptual artists and installation artists.

 


Nicolas Robbio

Herramientas para captar la realidad

El punto de partida es el reconocimiento de una realidad que nos supera, pero

con la que podemos entrar en contacto de distintos modos. Disponemos de dos grandes herramientas para acceder a esa realidad: la lógica (para organizarla y hacerla así manejable) y el lenguaje (para hacerla sólida y poder así compartirla). Gracias a ellas (aunque no sólo con ellas) construimos teorías científicas y sistemas filosóficos, discutimos y argumentamos. Es decir, construimos nuevas herramientas de las que nos servimos para tratar de domesticar la realidad.

La justificación de este artificio es práctica: necesitamos manejar la realidad para poder operar sobre ella, aunque al manipularla la desfiguremos en alguna medida.

Teniendo en cuenta esta radical diferencia entre una realidad continua, compleja y gigante, y unas herramientas que la fragmentan, simplifican y reducen a un tamaño manejable,

Vaz Ferreira habla en numerosas ocasiones de la inadecuación del lenguaje y del pensamiento discursivo para expresar la realidad, y, en general, de la insuficiencia de los sistemas para pensar el mundo que nos rodea. La sistematización, por una parte, es una tendencia natural del espíritu humano que (“todo lo completa, todo lo simetriza”) y, por otra parte, es una tendencia que da sus frutos en muchas ocasiones (la sistematización aporta simplicidad y, en consecuencia, facilidad para el manejo y capacidad de previsión). Pero seríamos dogmáticos si creyéramos que esa herramienta tan útil puede sustituir a lo real, o que puede aplicarse con igual éxito a cualquier realidad. Dicho de otro modo, ya que los sistemas simplifican, siempre hay algo de la realidad que el esquema no atrapa; y ya que cada situación concreta es distinta, el querer aplicar un sistema ya hecho en lugar de ponerse a la tarea de pensar equivale simplemente a negarse a mirar la realidad que se tiene delante.



Nicanor Araoz

Nicanor Aráoz (Buenos Aires, 1981) produces objects, installations and sculptures using as reference images from comics, imagery from the Internet and romantic mythologies taken from gothic art. In his works, procedures involving the making of a surrealistic object, such as the assembly of dissimilar elements and a oneiric component, take on frantic forms resembling nightmares where pleasure and pain seem to merge. Aráoz uses materials as if they were to expiate sadistic sensations and takes them to the utmost limits of expressivity and torsion. In narrative scenes, he mixes plaster monsters, amorphous masses of resin, trainers, neon lights and biscuits with embalmed cats, mice and birds, thus shaping a world of emotional psychedelics with visual references to the domestic environment of an adolescent.



Jonas Staal

Jonas Staal (1981) is artist and founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012-ongoing) and the campaign New Unions (2016-ongoing). Staal’s work includes interventions in public space, exhibitions, theater plays, publications, and lectures, focusing on the relationship between art, democracy, and propaganda. Recent solo exhibitions include Art of the Stateless State (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 2015), New World Academy (BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht-Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2015) and After Europe (State of Concept, Athens, 2016). His projects have been exhibited widely, among others at the 7th Berlin Biennial (2012), the 31st São Paulo Biennale (2014), and the Oslo Architecture Triennial (2016). Recent books by Staal include Nosso Lar, Brasília (Jap Sam Books, 2014) and Stateless Democracy (BAK, 2015). The artist is a regular contributor to e-flux journal and completed his research Propaganda Art in the 21st Century at the PhDArts program of the University of Leiden.

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Parallel Cities, Parallel Histories

“During my 2012 experience in Capacete, São Paulo, I developed the project Nosso Lar, Brasília.

A friend had taken me for various walks through the city, to try to make me aquainted with its complex urban infrastructure. In various corners we encountered evangelical and spiritist centers, the latter of which struck me due to posters and imaginery of a futuristic society, which I imagined to be a depiction of some form of “heaven.” How was it, I wondered, that the left had so much difficultly imagining a post-capitalist society, whereas the spiritists seemed to have no hesitancy to use three-dimensional modelling to represent their ideal, eternal and utopian looking world?

I began researching the background to these images, and quickly came across the work of psychographer Chico de Xavier, that was a messenger on behalf of the dead throughout his life: writing countless books on behalf of wise spirits and diseased poets. Most of the stories he transcribed related to Nosso Lar, or “Our Home”: a hyper-modernist regeneration colony in the afterlife, where spirits either prepare for their re-incarnation on earth, or to move further into new levels of spiritual awakening.

I had not yet made the comparison between Nosso Lar and the Brazilian modernists, such as Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. But when I was preparing for a travel to Brasília, and a psychographed map of Xavier depicting Nosso Lar accidentally was laying next to a map of Brasília, the resemblance struck me. The engineered nature of both cities seemed nearly identical. Had there been any connection between the spiritist movement around Xavier and the Brazilian modernists? Did these two city models – one in the beyond, one in our present-day reality – have anything to do with one another? Did they match size, function, ideology?…

The answer was neither yes or no. The models had much to do with one another, too much almost. But just not enough to say that they were the same. They form parallel cities, and parallel histories, hovering over and nearby one another – touching at unexpected moments. And just as there is not a single narrative that could account for the endless cities within the city of São Paulo, I realized that I had to develop an approach that could narrate the history of both, without ever becoming the same.”

Nosso Lar, Brasília was developed between 2012-13, co-produced by Capacete, the 31st São Paulo Biennial, and Extra City Antwerp. The resulting installation was presented from 2014 onwards, and the book of the same title published by Capacete and Jap Sam Books, Heijningen, the Netherlands.

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Beto Shwafaty

Beto Shwafaty is an artist and researcher based in Brazil. He has been involved with collective, curatorial, and spatial practices since the early 2000s, and as a result, he develops a research-based practice on spaces, histories and visualities, that connects formally and conceptually political, social and cultural issues that are converging to the field of art.

“Capacete is like a studio without walls. It is a multibrain outside of our heads. A network. It is also like a community. It is like being lost, and find the path (maybe not the one you were looking). It is never the same as before. It is food. It is exchanges in micro scale which you will carry with you. It is risk and failures, challenges and construction. Capacete is a house, walls and roof. It is friendship, a multitude of diversities, creating fluxes contexts. It is.”


Alicia Herrero

“Como si las palabras almacenaran tesoros, ritmos y sentidos infinitos, residir puede derivar en re-incidir. Así, todo el secreto de una residencia artística estaría oculto en la acción que implica su coloquial nominación. Su mejor meta. ¿Qué otra cosa podemos aspirar de esta experiencia, que no sea incidir una y otra vez de forma intercambiable entre lxs unxs y lxs otrxs? Solo re-in-ci-dien-do una y otra vez, habrá trabajo compartido. Deslocalizarse es siempre grato para mi, no siempre se logra, muchas veces las exposiciones y actividades de agenda, hacen que esto no sea posible, incluso cambiando de lugar. En Capacete se logra, y lo digo por mi propia experiencia ya que la residencia me tomó en medio de la realización de un proyecto para una bienal y dos exposiciones en otros dos paises. Se logra porque Capacete incide en unx y abre el corazón a ser incidido. No solo durante su estadía. Cinco años despúes, un tramo de esa experiencia reaparece en una nueva serie. Incide, reincide, y vuelvo a incidir. Pero hay otros secretos ocultos en las palabras. Residir reincidir puede derivar en resistir. ¿Qué otra cosa se anhela, sino, que una residencia de artistas, logre ser el lugar dónde resistir ciertas normas epocales? Una zona de resistencia, lo es también de emancipación, de aventura y solidaridad. ¿Capacete? Un lugar extra-ordinario del planeta. Una residencia que reincide en ser una resistencia existencia”


Trine Mee Sook Gleerup

Trine Mee Sook is a visual artist working within installation, text and performance. Deeply invested in historical, national and political tendencies her artistic performance-based methodology also questions the politics and history of performance art itself. From a post-colonial and gender-related perspective her work is debating cultural and racial stereo-typing and representation, as well as it strives to (re)negotiate overall power structures, and identity building.

“My heart and body remembers my time at Capacete with beats of joy. And my mind does not disagree on bit! Capacete was the perfect hub for contemplation, exploration, and important encounters with lots of great and dear artists & researchers traveling through. I was so lucky to experience the residency in both Sao Paulo and Rio, and I wish Capacete the best of luck with future adventures. Special thanks to: Tamar Guimarres, Rafael RG, Denise Milfort & Helmut Bartista.”





Joao Mode

JOÃO MODÉ, lives and works at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His work is marked by a plural notion of languages and areas of expertise. He works mainly with video, photographs, installations, actions with public participation and interventions in architectural spaces. He has a degree in Architecture and Visual Programming and a Masters in Visual Languages from the UFRJ – Rio de Janeiro. Some of his works feature in the collections: MAM SP; MAM Rio ; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and Frac Bretagne , France .