Seminars Imagined Communities
A central axis on which the Public Programs are plotted at the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, the meetings are designed to generate opportunities to produce previously unheard-of forms of thinking the future, both around and beyond the works on display, and with room for discussion and dissension.
The importance of feeling the beating heart of the present and of imagining the future in the light of the pressing needs of our time—ideas central to the 21st Biennial—also sets the tone for the Seminars featuring, among others, the author and activist Lucy Lippard, the philosophers Peter Pál Pelbart and Vladimir Safatle, the psychoanalysts Maria Rita Kehl and Suely Rolnik, the Shuar leader and intellectual Ampam Karakras, the indigenous filmmaker Kamikia Kisêdjê, the artist Rosana Paulino, and the curators Lisette Lagnado and Paulo Herkenhoff.
Pooling voices sensitive to contemporary impasses, drawn from different fields, fronts, and backgrounds, the Seminars explore such themes as the invention of a new political imagination, the particularities of time that have emerged since the advent of virtual life, a de-colonial approach to current feminisms, and the reverberation of the symbolic production of indigenous peoples and social movements.
The Seminars are held at the Theater (lower ground) and Auditorium (6th floor), in two stages, spanning three consecutive evenings apiece. The first takes place between October 15 and 17, and the second, November 12 and 14. In the interests of more thorough access, all sessions will have simultaneous translation in sign language.
Before the 21st Biennial comes to a close in February 2020, the addresses prepared by the speakers will be edited for publication under the title Leituras [Readings], which, along with the catalogue of works and artists, completes the 21st Biennial’s editorial platform.