Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Over eighty people attended the launch of Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil 10: Uses of Memory at São Paulo’s Livraria da Vila bookstore. The event featured a conversation between this edition’s editor, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and the artist Theo Eshetu, a collaborator for Caderno, with Associação’s editorial coordinator Teté Martinho as host.

A brief overview of all past editions of Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil, now in its tenth year, was provided by Teté Martinho. Early Caderno editions, she said, focused on expanding on the themes and curatorial issues of each Festival edition, rendering them perennial as opposed to the event’s ephemerality. As a case in point, she discussed Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil 1: Performance, which was released during the 15^th Festival and honed in on this artistic language. The 4^th edition (The Occupation of space, curated by Marcelo Rezende) represented the “cutting of the umbilical cord” with the Festival, as Caderno became a curatorial platform of its own. She also said that, as a third stage of development of Associação’s self-reflexive actions, from its tenth edition onwards, Caderno has opened up to foreign researchers as curators, with Elvira Dyangani Ose as first guest.

In her speech, Dyangani Ose underscored Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil’s relevance as a platform to branch out with her curatorial research work, which she will also develop in curating the upcoming edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art. Ose’s Caderno edition takes on the processes whereby history is constructed, and how artists deal with the social and power systems that create said history. Ose’s choice to focus on archives and documentation is designed to show that the archive’s final destination lies not in its own narrative, but in the history it enables. “Portions of fiction act upon history, and this can be seen throughout the entire Caderno 10. History gets explained the way it was felt,” she said. Ose introduced the audience to the seven essays and artistic propositions featured in the publication, highlighting the historian Premesh Lalu’s interview to researcher Tracy Murinik, an inquiry into the possibilities in approaching historical narrative with the craft – and the subjectivity – of a work of art.

Although they had been in touch for several years, Caderno 10 was the first opportunity Esthetu and Ose had to actually work together. According to the editor, Theo Eshetu provided the magazine with one of its most poetical contributions; he was invited to discuss his essay “Blood. Of light and likeness”. Born in the United Kingdom, Eshetu spent only a portion of his childhood in Ethiopia, but said “there is always a connection with the cultures that we came from.” His interest in history, he said, came rather late in his life, and has been directly linked to his Ethiopian heritage. The fragmented visual narrative he presents in Caderno 10 was built using video footage from his trip to Ethiopia as a tribute to his grandfather, who belonged to the court of Emperor Haile Selassie (1892-1975). The trip also originated the pieces Blood Is Not Fresh Water (1997) and BLOOD (2003), which entailed a process of self-discovery and of connecting with his grandfather, Ethiopia’s foremost historian. “During the trip, I found out that Ethiopia was weaned on his books,” he revealed. 

The editor said Caderno is not simply about Africa or “African art” – according to her, this may well be just a coincidence. It’s about reflections that are not specific to Africa, but rather to humanity. “When all is said and done, it’s a story about human beings. Africa has been a territory laden with a sense of inventiveness that doesn’t always have to do with what Africans feel or are. There’s this beautiful text from the 1930s that reads: ‘I don’t want to be a negro poet, I want to be a poet.’ This is the key. I am very proud of being an African, but at the same time I’m just a curator, no matter where I’m from. It doesn’t mean limitation, it means expansion.”

Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil 10: Uses of Memory is on sale at Sesc São Paulo’s online bookstore.