Chad Rossouw's Sao Paulo Diary: Day One at the Biennale

Wednesday 27th

Wow. Thats all I can say.

The last few days have been absolutely amazing.

The bienal is full of art, and it can be a little overwhelming to take it all in. Some works that have stood out are David Claerbout's The Algiers's Section of a Happy Moment. It's a single photograph of a man feeding seagulls on a rooftop in Algiers. Its a slideshow, which shows the same image from hundreds of different angles and viewpoints. Its a masterpiece of compositing, and complete freezing of every possible moment of the photograph.

Aernout Mik produced a silent film of a political gathering. Without any clues as to motivation or intent, he gestures of the crowd become very loaded and intense

Chantal Akerman produced a series of videos called D'est. Many of them are slow pans across the streets of Russian cities, during the early nineties. Very moving

Chilling in between stretches at the Biennale, in the Park Ibipeura

Joseph Kosuth: Amazingly boring in the flesh!

Chad's São Pualo Diary

Wednesday, 27 October
Accursed Internet! Online but struggling to upload images. You can see some stuff on Facebook here; http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=544318&l=d123b1e7fb&id=623495290

Chad's São Paulo Diary: Computer Says No

Struggling with connectivity today. Apparently a virus on my camera destroyed the computer at the hostel! I don't think it was me. Tomorrow morning I'll find an Internet Cafe, and put up a double post. Lots of action today.

Chad's São Paulo Diary: Bienal

Monday 25th October

Even Sunday's in Sao Paulo are mad. Traffic, both human and cars, pack the streets. We woke up early, and did a little exploring of our neighbourhood before the madness. There's this strange graffitti everywhere called pixaçao. It's a mixture of gangland marking and bravado. You see this stuff on top of skyscrapers and other impossible places (apparently people literally abseil of the buildings). It looks kind of runic, or pictographic. At the 2008 Bienal, the one with the empty floor, pixaçao artists broke in tagged the whole interior. This year, some artists got invited especially (perhaps to avoid the problem through official inclusion). But more on that later.

Some relatively tame examples of pixaçao

The architecture here is really wild. My camera died in the afternoon, so some of the crazy Modernist stuff is going to be left to the imagination (though think strange cantilevers and raw concrete slabs). Here are some examples just from our neighbourhood:

The skyline is 360 degrees. Everywhere you look you see more and more buildings.

We walked down to the Bienal at around 9ish. It sits in the fabulous Parque do Ibirapuera in the Ciccillo Matarazzo pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer. This building is made for art.

I'll talk a bit more about the work on the Bienal when I have had a closer look. But here is a work by Ai Weiwei, Zodiac Heads/Circle of Animals, consisting of oversize reproductions of the heads which used to adorn the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, before being destroyed in the Opium Wars:

Chilling after a hard days looking:

In the afternoon we went to Liberdade. It's the biggest Japanese community outside of Japan. There was a Sunday market, and I ate a fantastic Udon soup from a stall.

I'm not sure how I ordered this, because there is very little English spoken. Apparently, I have enough Portuguese to say "One Udon Soup , please."

And then home on the efficient metro.

I'll post some more images tonight, as we also managed to squeeze in a visit to the enormous Cathedral.

Chad´s São Paulo Diary: Wide-Eyed

Sunday 24th October
It´s just before 7 in the morning, and I am uncharacteristically awake. This time zone thing is pretty bizarre.

First sight of Brazil coming into Guarulhos Airport

The flight was long and arduous, with the Wedding Singer on repeat, and a lot of cloud outside. But as we came down to land I got the first sight of Brazil. Green and hilly.

Things get interesting already: I lose my custom declaration form (How?) while one of my companions on the trip Mohau loses his passport in his pocket. But we get through alright, grab a couple of cabs and head out. The road from Guarulhos Airport to Sao Pãulois stunning, and really gives you a first sense of the city. High-rises in the distance, palm trees, and lush flowering purple green things. We´re staying pretty centrally in a suburb called Vila Mariana, and to get there we head through the centre of town. It´s awesome, an architect´s wet dream. Modernist brutalist concrete next to tiny colonial buildings, next to Japanese pagoda style stuff. The scale just keeps on shifting. And suddenly between two enormous shiny glass skyscrapers a little house straight from the Alps. I couldn´t get a good picture, because it was dusky and taxi-drivers here follow the archetype. They drive bloody fast. (In fact, even Saturday night traffic is crazy. Hundreds of cars speeding down central highways. Bridges and tunnels and crossovers)

Went for a wander around the streets and dinner, beer and sleep. Heading off to the Biennale tomorrow.

Some of my companions, drinking beer and shaking off the post-flight blues.

Chad Rossouw's São Paulo Diary: Pre-flight Jitters

São Paulo is the seventh largest city in the world. You could fit half the population of South Africa into the city. Or 4 and a bit Jo'burgs.

It still hasn't really sunk in that I'll be flying out there on Saturday. But the ticket is booked, the money is changed, so I guess it is happening. I'm going as part of my Master's programme at Michaelis to see the Biennale. Its one of the major perks of this degree, and an exceptionally generous gesture from the school.

The São Paulo Biennale is one of the longest running and biggest biennales outside of the US or Europe. This seems really significant as an artist working outside of those spaces. After the 2008 Biennale was a strange beast (self-critical biennale with no budget) and not particularly well received, I'm curious to see what the curatorial team pulls together this year. The line up is massive, with more than 160 artists from around the world. The theme too is broad, dealing with the political in art. The title is "Há sempre um copo de mar para um homem navegar" (There's always a cup of sea to sail in), a line from the poet Jorge de Lima. I'm going to try with this diary to share some of the experiences of the art and the city. I'll try and keep it fresh everyday with loads of pictures and interesting commentary.

Unless, of course, the caipirinha's get me.

K Smith in Moscow

Kathryn Smith is the only South African-based participant in Qui Vive? II Moscow Biennale of Young Art, which opens in Moscow on July 1. The biennale will present the work of some 500 artists from all over the world, the majority from Russia and Europe, in a number of venues all over the city of Moscow. See http://www.youngart.ru/en/

Context
It was towards the end of 2009 when I received a notice requesting applications for a biennale in Moscow I had not heard of before. Called Qui Vive?, it was to be the second presentation of a biennale of ‘young’ art. I immediately warmed to the title, which means to be on the alert, vigilant; historically equivalent to “To whose party do you belong?'” or “Whose side do you support?” It seemed like the recipe for an interesting collection of work that would have something to say, a position to declare. I made an application without thinking too much about it. I was interested to visit Moscow (who wouldn’t be) and also to think about another version of my project ‘In Camera’ where I could work specifically with the story of Andrei Chikatilo (watch Chris Gerolmo’s haunting film Citizen X before you stumble onto any weird websites).

Some months later I was notified that the project was accepted, and would feature on Darya Pyrkina’s exhibition ‘Glob(E)scape’, to be installed at ArtPlay Design Centre. Some online research attempts did not produce very much, and having to rely on Google Translate to understand the Russian made for some amusing interludes. My communication with the organisers and their assistants was prompt and detailed, but did occasionally end up being a bit confusing, what with technical matters being discussed and translated back and forth between Russian and English. There was to be no support for flights, but the biennale would cover accommodation. Although they also offered to ship works, I wanted to make a new suite of drawings, which would mean carrying them as part of my luggage as their work would not be complete in time. After a pretty terrifying experience in Stockholm last year, presenting the same project (it worked out wonderfully but the communication with the gallery was extremely difficult), I also realised I would have to make what was an extremely hardware-heavy project much more portable and flexible than its previous iteration, and so set about trying to find out who could assist and I was confident that it would be an amazing experience regardless of what could go wrong. The biennale team are very young – in their early twenties – but seem to possess an admirable energy and will and I want to be a part of this.

June 14, 2010
It’s less than two weeks before I am supposed to arrive in Moscow and the promised support for my flight has not yet materialised. And I must still apply for a visa. What to do? Coming very close to cancelling the whole operation, the Dean’s office at the University of Stellenbosch comes to the rescue and I suddenly have a flight. They have never once let me down and I am grateful for such a supportive environment in which to work. The visa is no problem - the biennale have organised it through the Russian Ministry of Culture and the Russian consulate in Cape Town has a telex about my participation, so the process is hassle-free.

June 22, 2010
My flight departs on June 25 (3 days away) and I have just received an email from the biennale to say they have moved my venue to a space called Proekt Fabrika (the Factory Project). I check it out online and it looks great. Instead of staying in a hotel, I will now stay in the residency apartment of the project. This sounds perfect to me. I had never seen images of the other space, so it’s no real problem. The only worry is that I was initially planning a room of 20 sq/m, and this space is now 120sq/m! Fortunately I went a bit mad with the drawings and ended up making them far bigger, and making more, than I had anticipated. Now it seems I will not have to edit them. I still don’t have photographs of the space, only a floorplan, so I cannot see if there are clean walls, windows, or what condition it is in. I have assurance of technical support, but just in case, I pack a mini-toolkit and every conceivable manner of fixing the unframed drawings to whatever surface I can imagine.