Overview

Revista MESA

Revista MESA is a bilingual (English and Portuguese) digital periodical published biannually by Instituto MESA. The magazine explores the complex interchanges between art and society with a particular focus on contemporary ethical and aesthetic paradigms and practices that traverse the fields of art, curatorship and education. Featuring critical articles, “think piece” contributions, Brazilian and international case studies, videos, interviews and photographic essays, MESA presents critical reflections on art and society that draw on the experience of professionals working in the field–artists, curators, educators, researchers, and activists–and on research from a broad range of disciplines: art history, Latin American studies, museum studies, education, anthropology, sociology, geography, and philosophy. With a national and international circulation MESA seeks to be a catalyst and conduit for dialogue exploring contemporary critical and creative practices in their distinct contexts, formats and situations. Revista MESA editors: Jessica Gogan and Luiz Guilherme Vergara with guest editors, contributing authors and collaborators on each issue.

Nº 1. Territories and Practices in Process
February 2014

Territories are defined by their practices; and in turn, practices are embodied in their territorializations–moments of instantiation amidst the daily flux. The material gathered for this first edition explores this complex and mobile territory within the areas of contemporary art, curatorship and education. Critic and scholar Tania Rivera was invited to contribute a “think piece” to accompany this edition exploring these shifting territories and practices, in which she explores the poetic resonance of art in the world and the importance of a curatorial, critical and pedagogical practice of dispersion and dissemination.

In two International case studies German curator Claudia Zeiske describes the town as venue practice of Deveron Arts. Portuguese curator Nuno Sacramento, born in Mozambique, provokes a political discussion about the production of a new common through his Makers ‘ Meal project that brought together artists and artisans to create a dinner–including the tables, plates and cutlery as well as food. The two projects, both occurring in the northeast of Scotland, speak to the vitality of contemporary art in rural contexts.

Two additional national case studies, explore the public life of art and the experience that art inaugurates as a richly emergent critical and creative field in itself: an edited selection of interviews with curators, artists, participants and educators involved in the geopoetic world of the 8th Biennial of Mercosul, Porto Alegre and essays reflecting on the experiences visiting Ernesto Neto’s The Animal SusPensiveIntheLandGenscape with different audiences.

These contexts also offer new artistic horizons and poetic practices re-imagining and mining practices of caring and healing such as the collaborative process between Brazilian artist José Rufino and Alzheimer patients–part of an exhibition and an artist residency at The Andy Warhol Museum in the US–discussed in an article in this issue.

In addition to these artistic and curatorial shifts a video interview with Jailson de Silva e Souza, director of the Favela Observatory in Rio de Janeiro, shows the importance of adopting new critical lenses and ways of thinking about the city as a creative and pedagogic territory. In another, yet entirely different popular context, the photographic essay by Leonardo Guelman, which captures The House of Miracles, shows the vitality of the folk religious world of people in northeastern Brazil.

Collaborators/Contributors Nº1: 
Anita Sobar, Bernardo Zabalaga, Bianca Bernardo, Claudia Zeiske, Ernesto Neto, Imagens de Povo, Jailson de Souza e Silva, Jessica Gogan, José Rufino, Leandro Almeida, Leonardo Guelman, Luiz Guilherme Vergara, Nuno Sacramento, 8ª Bienal do Mercosul, Tania Rivera, e Virgínia Kastrup.

Nº2. Poetic Spaces = Ethical Languages: Diverse Practices in Latin America
April 2015

The second edition of Revista MESA explores conceptual resonances that are part of an unfinished and open critical discussion that engages in the expansive possibilities of the aesthetic at the service of the ethical.

As Fred Coelho’s provocative think piece suggests the themes and practices at play in this issue emphasize a quest for “how to live together”. In the case studies, Angela Carneiro introduces the reader to the outreach course called the University of Quebrada and points to the vital flow of affection that simultaneously mobilizes and enables the creation of a lived cartography of encounters, driftings and multiple crossings and circulations of the city. Felipe Moreno writes about René Francisco, who leaves the studio and the classroom and moves into the “real world,” creating collective interventionist actions with his students. Argentine collective Ala Plástica describes their environmental and bioregional activism with initiatives that engage communicative strategies and actions connected to social contexts that sharply contrast with modernist ideologies of art’s neutrality. And Roberta Condeixa sketches the micro-utopias made possible by Juan Manuel Echavarría in his therapeutic painting laboratory of existential recovery and release together with former guerrillas of drug trafficking in Colombia.

The video interview for this edition features the artist Carlos Vergara who, with his constant practice of dislocation and world travel, enacts a unique creative gesture of reverence and (in)vocation to the singularities that inhabit each place where the artist is a kind of “supporting actor”.

Peripheries are not only urban, but also of the natural world. Guilherme Vaz brings us to a Niterói Atlantic forest in the state of Rio de Janeiro, once traveled by Charles Darwin, evoking other margins, indigenous peoples and cultures, and an environmental consciousness. His sound performance with rattles inaugurates a ceremonial symbology of an “acontecer solidário” (happening in solidarity) between indigenous sounds and contemporary rituals produced simultaneously with the experience.

Finally, with the collaboration of 30 artists and researchers from various regions in Brazil, Cristina Ribas’ political vocabularies projects proposes a network of new transversal vocabularies to navigate and reinvent our place in the world.

Collaborators/Contributors Nº2:
Ala Plástica, Angela Carneiro, Beá Meira, Carlos Vergara, Chloé Le Prunennec, Cristina Ribas, Daniel Leão, Felipe Moreno, Frederico Coelho, Guilherme Vaz, Jessica Gogan, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Leandro Almeida, Luiz Guilherme Vergara, Noélia Albuquerque, René Francisco Rodríguez e Roberta Condeixa.

Nº3. Publicness in Art
May 2015

We see this third issue of Revista MESA as a magazine-as-process, an ecosystem of voices and writings, words and images, practices and politics that call out for global alternatives and new forms of publicness.

Peter Pál Pelbart initiates this web, associating the contemporary human being with the spider, in turn, intersecting with Rodrigo Nunes’ political practice of “counterpimping” and Danilo Streck’s reconfiguration of the public, then crisscrossing with the moving and poignant embodiments of the Brazilian 2013 protests captured in the film by the collective ¡NoPasaran!.

A specially expanded volume of the magazine, this issue highlights three national case studies with essays, videos, reflections, and testimonials resulting from the traveling project Publicness in Art, made possible by a grant award from the 10th edition of Redes de Encontros nas Artes Visuais (Networks of Encounters in the Visual Arts) of Brazil’s national art foundation, Funarte. The project held encounters in three distinct regions and cultural ecosystems of Brazil: Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, and Juazeiro do Norte, Cariri, in the north eastern state of Ceará. Cultural imaginaries and sensibilities were interwoven with geopoetic and regional singularities. There was no way to discuss publicness in art without exploring the diversity of contemporary Brazilian culture.

This web of insights is also cross-cultural with the inclusion of two international case studies. Four cardinal points of continental distance, yet also of ethical proximity, come together in this issue. Adversity and poetic resistance are threads that interweave practices from Cariri in Brazil’s northeast to the country’s extreme south in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and from Johannesburg in South Africa to Glasgow in Scotland.

Collaborators/Contributors No.3:
Alex Hetherington, Anthony Schrag, Barbara Szaniecki, Bia Jabor, Brian Hartley, Chloé Le Prunennec, Daniel Leão, Danilo R. Streck, Diana Kolker Carneiro da Cunha, Emma Balkind, Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, Felipe Moreno, Hans K Clausen, Jessica Gogan, José Rufino, Katie Bruce, Leandro Almeida, Leonardo Guelman, Luiz Guilherme Vergara, Mônica Hoff, Mysterious Creatures Dance Fusion, ¡NoPasaran!, Nuno Sacramento, Peter Pál Pelbart, Rafa Silveira [Rafa Éis], Rangoato Hlasane, Roberta Condeixa, Rodrigo Nunes, Sarah Barr e t s Beall.

Nº4. Past as Blueprint
Hybrid Practices/Limit Zones
May 2015

This edition of Revista MESA brings together critical reflections that draw on inspirational histories as vital contemporary touchstones. The subtitle of “Hybrid practices and limit zones” further hones this issue’s focus on forms of social practice – artistic, pedagogic, activist, collective – that challenge art/life and elite/democratic divides, particularly operative in critical cultural hinge moments such as the turn of the 20th century and, more recently, the 1960s/70s.

Edson Sousa in this issue’s Think Piece points to the border zone where art inserts itself to “block our certainties” and puts forth the notion of utopia as a potential eclosion of a linear sense of time, a movement that goes from the future to the past, a current against reality.

This counterflow of the future resonates with each narrative in this issue. In her photo essay Graciela Carnevale shares a selection of images from her archive of the radical experiments of the Argentine Artistic Vanguard Group and their collective projects Tucumán Arde and Experimental Art Cycle, in Buenos Aires and Rosario in 1968.

Two national case studies are presented. Rubens Gerchman: With the Resignation Letter in My Pocket and the Contemporary Laboratory at Casa Daros explores the years when the artist was director of Rio de Janeiro’s School of Visual Arts, Parque Lage (1975-1979) and a recent experimental course aimed at young artists inspired by this time period – Contemporary Laboratory: Proposals and Discoveries of What Art Is (Or Can Be). The second case study features the work of the Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art at the Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janeiro (MAM), active between 2009 and 2013, and explores experimental parallels in MAM’s history.

The international case studies are from USA and Chile. John Dewey and Jane Addams became historical touchstones for curators Mary Jane Jacob and Kate Zeller and their multifaceted project A Lived Practice, comprising exhibitions, publications and commissioned projects that mined the legacy of these activist histories for a new generation of practitioners in Chicago. In Santiago, Claudia Zaldivar narrates the 34-year history of the Museo da la Solidaridad Salvador Allende and its genealogy of hope and struggle.
In his article on free universities Sergio Cohn briefly sketches the history of anarchist-inspired schools in Brazil and explores contemporary projects such as Universidade Nomade that share rich parallels with these early 20th century “free” university ideals.

This issue’s video interview features an exploration of the legendary project The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1968 and The New Model: An Enquiry, a research project initiated by Lars Bang Larsen and Maria Lind in 2011, that investigates the legacy of The Model via a series of exhibitions, seminars and artist commissions.

Collaborators/Contributors No.4:
Beatriz Coelho, Bia Jabor, Chloé Le Prunennec, Clara Gerchman, Claudia Zaldivar, Daniel Leão, Diana Kolker Carneiro da Cunha, Edson Luiz André de Sousa, Gabriela Gusmão, Graciela Carnevale, Gunilla Lundahl, Jessica Gogan, João de Albuquerque, Kate Zeller, Lars Bang Larsen, Luan Machado, Luiz Guilherme Vergara, Magnus Bärtås, Mara Pereira, Maria Lind, Mary Jane Jacob, Michel Schettert, Palle Nielsen, Raphael Giammattey, Sabrina Curi and Sergio Cohn.

Nº5. Care as Method
December 2018

This special 5^th issue of Revista MESA Care as Method brings together multiple voices, practices and experiences to reflect on care: as a site of micropolitical action, artmaking and social reproduction. We are vested in a notion of care that thinks about and co-moves with the other that is, acts with, affectively and collectively. However, such possibilities have often been lost (or distorted) via the various uses or misuses of the word “care” in at times dismissive and authoritarian discourse. Drawing on this complexity as well as the potential of care practices in different socio-cultural contexts, this magazine is the result of three years of cross-cultural dialogue between Brazil and Scotland and aims to explore and understand how care can be mobilized as a method within contemporaneity and diverse forms of art practice.

With the collaboration of more than ninety people, across continents and divergent socio-cultural contexts and territories, MESA # 5 examines the possibilities of encounters that create affective relationships, embrace differences, and open up to new forms of communication. Principally informed by the International Encounter Care as Method # 2 that took place in Rio de Janeiro in September and October 2017, this special issue is a culmination of several years of dialogue. Building on the debates, site visits, performances and festivities of Care as Method # 2, this issue both provides a platform to deepen these discussions and to register the work of individuals, institutions and groups in Scotland and the work of the Art_Care project in Rio de Janeiro. The diversity and generative resonance of this international network of collaboration is reflected in this issue’s rich array of case studies (brought together for the first time in this publication), think piece, dialogues, interventions, as well as videos, articles and essays. 

Collaborators/Contributors Nº5:

Authors:
Alison Stirling, Abel Luiz, Ana Kemper, Ana Vitória, Ariadne de Moura Mendes, Bia Jabor, Carlos Arthur Felipe, Claire Barclay, Cristina Ribas, Daniel Murgel, Denise Adams, Diana Kolker, Eleonora Fabião, Eliane Carapateira, Elielton Queiroz Rocha, Espaço Aberto ao Tempo, Fernanda Magalhães, Gina Ferreira, Isabella Dias, Izabela Pucu, James Bell, Josemias Moreira Filho, JV Santos, Kate Gray, Kirsten Lloyd, Laura Spring, Leandro Almeida, Leandro Freixo, Lívia Flores, Loucura Suburbana, Lula Wanderley, Luiz Claudio Silva, Luiz Guilherme Barbosa, Luiz Guilherme Vergara, Luiz Hubner, Luiza de Andrade, Marcos Barreto, Millena Lízia, Nicola White, Nuno Sacramento, Márcia Campos, Maria da Penha, Mario Chagas, Pamela Perez, Paula Batelli, Rafael Zacca, Raquel Fernandes, Ricardo Resende, Shona Macnaughton, Steve Hollingsworth, Tania Rivera, Thatiana Diniz, Thelma Vilas Boas, Wendy Jacob.

Collaborating institutions of the case studies:
Artlink, Collective, Espaço Aberto ao Tempo, Loucura Suburbana, Macquinho Plataforma Urbana Digital, and Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea and all of their partners, collaborators and supporters, Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica (CMAHO), Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, Saracura, Lanchonete<>Lanchonete, Programa Médico de Família Niterói and the Postgraduate Programs in Collective Health and Contemporary Studies of the Arts at UFF.

Glossary Contributors:
Alison Stirling, Ana Teresa Derraik, André Bastos, Angela Carneiro, Annette Krauss, Casa Jangada, Catarina Resende, Cezar Migliorin, Cristina Ribas, Dai Ramos, Eduardo Passos, Enrico Rocha , Fernanda Eugenio, Gladys Schincariol, Iacã Macerata, Lidia Costa Laranjeira, Luiz Guilherme Vergara, Mariana Guimarães, Noelle Resende, Rafa Éis, Rafael Zacca, Ruth Torralba, Steven Hollingsworth, Tulio Batista Franco and Virgínia Kastrup.

Interviewees of the video Care as method:
Abel Luiz, Alex Venâncio, Ana Carvalho, Ana Teresa Derraik, Ariadne de Moura Mendes, Arlindo Oliveira da Silva, Bianca Bernardo, Carla Guagliardi, Clovis Aparecido dos Santos, Eleonora Fabião, Elielton Queiroz Rocha, Elisama Arnaud, Emília Miterofe, Frederico Morais, Gê Vasconcelos, Gina Ferreira, Gladys Schincariol, Glaucia Villas Boas, Hélio Carvalho, Izabela Pucu, Josemias Moreira Filho, Lívia Flores, Luiz Carlos Marques, Luiz Carlos Mello, Lula Wanderley, Luiz Guilherme Vergara, Luiz Hubner, Luiz Sérgio de Oliveira, Magda Chagas, Maria Célia Vasconellos, Pablo Meijueiro, Marcelo Correa, Rafael Zacca, Raquel Fernandes, Ricardo Resende, Rogê de Oliveira Candido, Tânia Marins, Tania Rivera, Túlio Franco, Vitor Pordeus and William Moreira.

Nº6. Hidden Lives
March, 2020

Focusing on the interfaces between art and contemporary socially engaged practices, the 6th issue of Revista MESA, “Hidden Lives,” explores the multiple meanings of the hidden in society. Throughout the quest to shed light on the issues that shape, inform, and threaten our existence is recurrent, as is a critical and (re)generative desire to question – what art can do in contemporary life? The issue comprises case studies, articles, interviews, dialogues, films, and photo essays that come together as a body of collective initiatives, counter narratives, and different poetic and political strategies. Art here is part of the struggles for: restorative justice and social inclusion; recuperating memory and fighting repression; dealing with trauma; investigating hidden places and unraveling entangled silences; questioning school, religious, and psychiatric systems; generating other perspectives of what art can be, some not yet or beyond defining themselves as art; and inhabiting and transforming adversities as a catalyst for re-enchantment and imagining worlds otherwise.

As a platform for documentation, collaboration, and reflection, MESA functions as a magazine-as-commons and school, acting as a vital connective ground for learning and discussion and working with multiple organizations, collaborators, artists, researchers, institutions, universities, communities, and professors and students from diverse disciplines and backgrounds both in Brazil and internationally. These processes have been key to the singular cartography of the hidden that the issue aims to profile. Developed over the course of 2019-2021, inspired in part by the exhibition Guanabara Bay: Hidden Lives and Waters held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói, in 2016, this 6^th MESA issue moves from local initiatives in peripheral “hidden” territories of Rio de Janeiro’s outlying regions – the Bumba favela in Niterói to the suburban region of São Gonçalo – to a web of connections with hidden lives and creative and imaginative worlds in Vale de Jequitinhonha in Brazil’s center-east; from questions of faith and religion to the legacies of dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile; and in turn from collective actions in Pequena África [Little Africa] in the center of Rio de Janeiro to socially situated practices in distinct geographic and socio-cultural contexts and organizations in Ireland, Scotland, and Cyprus. 

Collaborators/Contributors Nº6:

To authors and contributorsBrazil: Angela Mascelani, Anita Sobar, Cintya Ferreira, Cristina Seixas, Daniela Name, Diana Kolker, Diego Zelota, Dudu, Fabio Tremonte, Gabriel de Souza Vieira, Gabriela Bandeira, Gaby, Izabela Pucu, Izadora, Jeff Medeiros, Jessica Barbosa, Joyce Maravilha, Joana Mazza, Julio Verztman, Karina, Kaylane Rodrigues, Kaylanne, Kênia Maia, Larissa, Laura Lima, Leandro Almeida, Lívia Moura, Luiz Guilherme Barbosa, Madalena Vaz Pinto, Maria Clara Zameii, Maria Clara Carrielo, Maria Ignês Albuquerque, Mariana de Lima Silva, Mauricio Dias, Pedro Sá Morais, Priscilla Grimberg, Raquel Danielli Mota, Renata Bazilia, Renata Targino, Sandro Rodrigues, Tania Kolker, Thais, Thiago Haule e Walter Riedweg.

Cyprus: Alev Adil, Chyrstalleni Loizidou, Hüseyin Özinal and Twenty Three. In particular the co-editors of the case study Esra Plumer and Evanthia Tselika “Talking across the Cypriot Buffer Zone: Making the Invisible Visible.” AA_U, EMAA, Free School, Hands on Famagusta, NeME, Pikadilli, ReAfrodite, Rooftop Theatre Group, Sidestreet Culture, Studio 21, Urban Gorillas, Visual Voices e Xarkis.

Ireland: Anne Mulhall, Bernie Masterson, Doutsje Nouta, Reverend Val Rodgers, Seamus McGuinness, Vukasin Nedeljkovic and Willem Van Goor. In particular Helen O’Donoghue co-editor of the case study “Unveiling the Hidden: Socially Engaged Art Practice in Ireland”

Scotland: Caroline Gausden

Chile: José Santos Herceg and Maria Carolina Pizarro Cortes

France: Sandrine Teixido

Mexico: Mayra Martell

Institutions and organizations:

Casa Museu Rancho Verde, Glasgow Women’s Library, University of St. Andrews – Scoltand The Irish Embassy in Brazil, Rede Unida [Collective Health Network], Meta Tradução, Simultânea (MTS), The Institute for Advanced Studies (IDEA) of the University of Santiago de Chile, The Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos Contemporâneas das Artes da Universidade Federal Fluminense [Graduate Program in Contemporary Studies of the Arts] at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF).

_

The sixth edition was supported by the Emergency Call 2020 – “Retomada Cultural RJ” sponsored by the Federal Government and the Culture and Creative Economy Department of the Municipal Government of Rio de Janeiro through the Aldir Blanc Law.

The fifth edition featured a collaboration between Instituto MESA and Projeto Arte_Cuidado, Artlink, and Collective, in addition to the support of the British Council and Creative Scotland. It was also supported through the collaboration of the graduate programs in Public Health and Contemporary Studies of the Arts Studies both respectively at Federal Fluminense University (UFF).

The first four issues of MESA magazine were funded by the Prêmio Procultura de Estímulo às Artes Visuais 2010 Funarte/MinC (Brazilian Ministry of Culture National Art Foundation Pro-cultural Incentive Prize for the Visual Arts).