Frestas Triennial 2017
In Between Post-Truths and Events
12 August – 3 December 2017
Sesc Sorocaba, Brazil
This edition of Frestas has associated the name of the event with the notion of interstice: an in-between space full of sensitivity and transforming creative potency, where the ambiguity and the indefinition of concepts, forms and models is explored in a poetic and critical way. While existence in cities seems to be reduced to numeric digits in homogeneous scenarios of malls, conglomerates and condominiums, we have bet here on the maxim “creating is resisting”, understanding the practice of art and its fruition as remarkable propositional pathways to liberate from the exaltation context of productivity, competitiveness, surveillance and spectacularization of life.
Considering that the ruled and academic nature of art collapsed long ago, we have reflected on the impossibility of defining Truth in contemporary work, and we have also discussed the political narratives sustained by the media memes and populism supported on moral and dogmatic discourses, which are gaining power and constitute part of the context that art itself mirrors and reacts to.
The title of the exhibit was used before the term Post-Truth was stated as the most commented on the internet in 2016. The term is not new and its germ has already appeared in Truth and Politics (1967), by Hannah Arendt. Recently, it has become protagonist in the international political commentary, driven by the desire of great journalistic publications to disseminate, on the web, opinions as consistent facts that quickly gain status of truth.
Whereas the idea of Event refers to the nature of a Triennial, and its definition in anthropology and philosophy: Events, always feared and expected, such as a climatic, military or political one, carry the risk of an irreversible cut with the past , marking profound transformations in the historical and social course of communities.
Artists of different nationalities, generations and languages have participated in the exhibition, whose works have brought questions such as formal ambiguities; transdisciplinarity; temporality; performativity; gender and sexuality; social criticism and artisticity. More than half of the projects are commissioned and unprecedented, and will occupy the Unit building in addition to public roads, other institutions, shops and historical ruins, creating circuits of insightful aesthetic experiences in-between Sesc and the city.
Curatorial Team
Daniela Labra (Curator) is an independent curator and art critic. PhD in History and Art Criticism at the PPGAV/ EBA/UFRJ – Graduate Program on Visual Arts/School of Fine Arts/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She has developed projects on curatorship, critical writing and research with emphasis on contemporary production. She has acted mainly on the themes: modern and contemporary Brazilian art, history and aesthetic production of the global South, as well as performance. She lives and works in-between Rio de Janeiro and Berlin.
Yudi Rafael (Assistant Curator) is a researcher and curator, a doctoral student in cultural studies at Columbia University, where he has currently conducted research on Asian Diasporas and cultural identity in Brazil and the Americas. He was co-curator of the project Cambridge Artistic Residence (2016), at the Cambridge Hotel Squatter, and has held several curatorships in São Paulo in the recent years, having worked in spaces such as Ateliê397, Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade and Sesc Belenzinho.