Guest Curator: Solange Farkas RT: 67 minutes

Prelude for Meditation by Edgar Endress. Chile, 2006, 1 minute and 40 seconds.

Travel-ling by Enrique Ramirez. Chile, 2009, 9 minutes.

Uyuni by Andrés Denegri. Argentina, 2005, 8 minutes and 8 seconds.

Round and Round and Consumed by Fire by Claudia Joskowicz. Bolivia, 2009, Colour, 8 minutes.

Social Cleansing (Limpieza Social) by Regina José Galindo. Guatemala, 2006, Colour, 2 minutes.

Cows by Gabriela Golder. Argentina, 2002, Colour, 8 minutes.

Invisible Garden (Jardim Invisível) by Roberto Bellini. Brazil, 2008, Colour, 15 minutes.

Four Thousand Shots (4000 Disparos) by Jonathas de Andrade. Brazil, 2009, Colour, 8 minutes.

No One’s Lands (Les tierras di nadie) by Cesar Meneghetti. Brazil, 2007, 6 minutes.

This programme engages themes of resistance, frontiers and utopias through a series of works that use original strategies in their approach to the South American condition.

In part due to Thomas More’s seminal book, Of the Best State of a Republic and of the New Island Utopia (1516), the term ‘utopia’ later became the most widely used noun to describe a perfect world or society, replete with lofty ideals.

By establishing a dialogue between the poetic works featured here and the poetics brought about by this idea of utopia, we investigated the concept in its contemporary connotations in an attempt to understand the place of Moore’s ‘utopian island’ within the realm of the artistic. Our guiding question: what is the transforming power of art?
The notion of resistance is also at the core of each of these works. Resistance, here like elsewhere, is conceived as an opposition to something – a power of any form, a potential agent that deprives of collective or individual freedoms – and prohibits taking a political, social and poetic position.

Each in his particular way, these works speak of the freedom of movement between territories, beliefs, discourses and spaces. They also speak of the freedom to create and build new modes of interpersonal or transnational relationships.

In contemporary times, it can be said that the notion of the frontier, as a boundary and a contour, is increasingly closer to its opposing meaning: fusion, intersection, range. Population displacements and uncontrolled flows of information, which have always crosses territorial limits, engender a constant need for building new types of frontiers, perhaps ones that contradict themselves. These films speak of frontiers that set boundaries within the territories and spaces occupied by nation-states, beliefs and even artistic practices. The relationship of human beings to these spaces in our contemporary moment guided this selection as well as the attempt to span numerous conflicts, intersections and formations.

April 2011