Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Edições Sesc São Paulo and Associação Cultural Videobrasil
2014-15, 352 pages
Portuguese/English
ISBN 978-85-7995-180-0
width: 18.5cm, height: 23.5cm, spine: 23cm x 2.5cm

This publication revisits the contents and changes in direction that marked Videobrasil’s thirty-year history, transforming a local initiative designed to foster and discuss 1980s Brazilian video into a platform for contemporary art production from the geopolitical South of the world. It looks back on the artists, artworks and ideas that helped build the Festival’s identity, shedding light on pivotal moments in its history, such as its internationalization and its embracing of all types of artistic expression. In doing so, it encompasses fragments from broader historical events: the discovery of video as an art material and medium by the international avant-gardes of the 1950s-1960s; the ideas that breathed new life into Brazilian audiovisual and art production of the 1960s and 1970s; the arrival of home video formats in Brazil, concurrent with the desire to renew the language and the thematic range of open television, in the 1980s; the incorporation of video artists by the art system, from the 1990s onward; and more recently, the discovery of video as a tool by artists not necessarily associated with it.