Short Documentaries

Juliana Notari

Juliana Notari

In her visual and theoretical research, Juliana Notari has created a body of works that face their singularities, moving between biography, the confessional, catharsis, or relational practices. With a multidisciplinary approach, she works with the most diverse languages: performance, installation, intervention, video, photography, drawing, and object. For years, the artist has been conducting research on gender and sexism. Questions regarding the presence of the female body as opposed to a society that prides itself on virility and phallocentrism have always been part of his poetics. However, in addition to issues related to the feminine and feminism, her work also encompasses issues related to certain important themes: birth and death, sexuality, the relationship between fiction and confession, trauma, relationships of complicity/testimony and encounters between animality and humanity. In his work, these themes are always crossed by the question of sexuality and death. “Diva”, 2020. vulva wound Intervention in the landscape, Reinforced concrete, resin, and pigment. It is a “prospecting-hole-sculpture” embedded in a land devastated by sugarcane monoculture and its social traumas. A deep abscess, the work reveals the historical violence on female bodies that continue to be daily injured in many – and, depending on their color or gender, in different and asymmetrical ways – just like Gaya’s body, our Mother Earth. In addition to these bodies, Diva brings to light the immeasurable colonial traumas that, against invisibility, continue to fight for reparation. While wounded, the Diva herself continues to re-enact – since she turns over open wounds – the racial inequalities on which Brazil is based. Juliana Notari,1975, born in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil where she lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Julio Villani

Julio Villani

Julio Villani was formed between São Paulo, where he grew up, and Paris, where he forged his identity as an artist. His deliberate choice for this unfolding and the constructive form he imprinted on it give his work a dynamic dimension, which is determined, paradoxically, by unity. Where others would be affected by division and dispersion, Villani finds material and reason for concentration and reunion, opening a path that strictly follows the obsession of a look that seeks to reveal the secret face of things. Thread, line, net, knot... Julio Villani’s art is inhabited by the idea of ​​bonding, counterpoint, sometimes opposition; it is built from the organization of a coming and going, of an exchange — and it is at the heart of this, in that “between-two”, that everything happens. The problem of identity, underlying his procedure, is apprehended by a whole work around memory. The recovery process adopted by the artist and the type of recycling to which he submits the objects he integrates is his way of bringing together two temporalities with the aim of constituting a new one. "Trois Échaffaudages pour un Portrait" consists of questioning who one is at an exact moment – ​​the exercise to which Julio Villani commits himself in his Scaffoldings for a portrait – his own – consists of trying to understand how the subject became the one he became. The self-referential piece, the foundation of the project – the conical shape, the two circles of different diameters connected by three rods – resembles a popular coffee strainer holder, on which the artist coupled various elements. The first construction was quickly followed by a second, to finally become a trilogy. Nothing prevents him from adding a fourth, a fifth, an nth scaffold to the set in the future. After all, the work of the self-portrait artist has no end; there is no definitive answer to the question "Who am I?" – and the search for oneself is likely to be always prolonged. Julio Villani, 1956 born in Marilia, São Paulo, lives and works between Paris and São Paulo.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Marcelo Silveira

Marcelo Silveira

Marcelo Silveira’s practice seems to question pre-established categories, by challenging and tensioning apparently consolidated definitions of sculpture, installation, popular art, crafts and collecting. His production moves from an interest in materiality. Everything can be an object of work: wood, leather, paper, metal, plastic, and glass are just some of the elements explored. However, the configuration assumed by them is also fundamental, which can be created from the formal repertoire common to those objects or by recreating familiar and common forms in unexpected materials. “Atrio”, 2016 reproduces the atrium of the Casa Grande at Usina de Arte. The project was born from the reality of a house, the ’Casa Grande’, which is the main house on the site. So, attracting a lot of curiosity on the part of people working for the property who wanted to know. Marcelo’s initial project was to really and conceptually open the house to allow visits where he thought of organizing some exhibitions. As the atrium has several entrances and independent access, he thought it possible to imagine such a visitation space. As the logistics seemed complicated, the artist then imagined faithfully redoing the atrium space in another space in the Usina park. As everything is in this atrium of the main house, this ’reproduction’ gives a greater amplification and conversation. For example, the openings function as frames for the landscape, like a collection of landscapes, a new space for contemplation. The atrium is a meeting point, with the good acoustics, today it also allows events. Marcelo Silveira (1962) born in Gravatá, Pernambuco, lives and works in Recife

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Paulo Bruscky

Paulo Bruscky

Paulo Bruscky is one of the exponents of conceptual art in Brazil and one of the main precursors of various manifestations involving art, technology, and communication. His artistic practice, based on the idea of art as information, is marked by constant experimentation, resulting in a plural body of works, composed of visual poetry, artist books, performances, urban interventions, Super-8 films and works in new media. Bruscky’s production is also characterized by the content of social and political contestation, a result of the artist’s critical and militant stance, whose early career coincides with the rise of military governments and the consequent establishment of severe dictatorial regimes in several Latin American countries, including Brazil. "Brasil", 2017, Bulky waste skip painted flashy gold on a concrete base painted white, surrounded by cactus. It was very important for Paulo to work with the local community and this work speaks of often separated worlds, that of an audience that does not have access to culture and that of art that is often too elitist. His work speaks of the ‘buraco negro da cultura’ (Cultural black hole). He then makes fun of what a monument is by wanting to magnify a bulky dumpster by transforming it into a magnificent object which thus loses functions. The cactus planted in a circle around the main work to make it almost unreachable speaks of the difficulty of accessing the culture. Paulo Bruscky,1949, was born in Recife, where he lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Regina Silveira

Regina Silveira

Regina Silveira is a multimedia artist, engraver, painter, and teacher. With different languages, her work explores themes that go through the composition of the image, the reinvention of representation, power, and politics. One of its characteristics is reinvention. From the questioning tone of traditional painting, Regina becomes one of the references in stimulating the revitalization of art with her illusionist perspectives breaking architectural environments and with drawings and paintings that distort the original space. “Paisagem” (landscape) 2021, a labyrinth formed by 59 transparent glasses measuring approximately 100 m2 and 2.50 m high, all marked by images of shots appropriated from the printed media, as a testimony to the daily violence we experience. With drilling and simulation of shrapnel carried out by digital procedures for printing and burning the glass, the 12 models of shots are strategically distributed throughout the glass labyrinth, to avoid being duplicated. All are placed at the same height (1.40 m), an allegedly generic measure capable of guaranteeing that they were experienced as more “accurate” shots... The work was initially shown at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo in 2021, before its deployment at Usina de Arte, in early 2022. The labyrinth often appears in Regina’s work, which is a way for her to talk about sharing, to create itineraries with, since the 1970s, the idea of ​​​​representing violence. It is a political work that she has been developing since the years of the dictatorship. In ’paisagem’, she selected a collection of 12 different images of gunshot impacts that she found in the Brazilian daily press. They are distributed in such a way as to never see the same one and allow the visitor walking into the work an experience of violence. But for her, the work remains phantasmagorical and artificial, even more so in its new context in the open air in the landscape of the Usina de art. Regina Silveira (1939) born in Porto Alegre, lives and works in São Paulo.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Tulio Pinto

Tulio Pinto

In the last twelve years, Túlio Pinto has developed research on sculpture and installation with industrial materials, which denote in the constitution and in the way they are presented, his intention to promote encounters of different potentialities and temperaments; of oppositions that are based on the limits of their possibilities. His work “Athar” means impact in Arabic. The family of works that bears this name presents more radical load situations suffered by the glass pieces that the artist intends to use in established systems. Athar #5 consists of three H-beams and a glass bubble. For Usina de Arte, the challenge was to install the piece over the water mirror of one of the institution’s dams, activating a new layer of perception of the work based on its duplication through its reflection in the water. The series of works entitled Nadir presents, in different systems, angled glass sheets, in an "interrupted fall" position. This pause in the falling movement is due to the interdependence generated between the glass and the system of ropes and stones. The minerals work as an anchor for the situation and a pendulum that "supports" the interrupted movement of the glass. Like Athar, Nadir #almost an island 02 was also installed over a water mirror in one of the institution’s reservoirs. In astronomy and geography, nadir is the lowest point of the celestial sphere, as seen from an observer on the planet’s surface. The Nadir is the diametrically opposite point on the celestial sphere from the Zenith, which is the point directly above the observer in the horizontal coordinate system. Nadir is the projection of the vertical alignment that is under the observer’s feet, as if "a hole" ran through the other side of the planet. Nadir, whose prefix nad has a connection with Sanskrit, would mean a channel, stream, or flow of nothingness. It would then be the channel in which the prana would circulate throughout the body to infinity. Túlio Pinto, 1974, born in Brasília, lives and works in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all