Program of Texts

The cmb Program of Texts is an initiative that offers the materials available in the archive to encourage authors and artists to unwind critical, analytical, propositive and/or poetic threads starting from key moments of the modern and contemporary artistic production.

Other eyes on the visual poetry of the Brazilian Northeast during the early 20th century: the case of Chyrino de Magalhães

Alexandre Alves

Círculo em suspensão

Cannibalism would be great for the environment.

Luisa Callegari

A peripheral cosmogony: On the 6th São Paulo Art Biennial

Erica Ferrari

Pedrosa's proposal for the 6th Biennial sought to remove the works of contemporary artists from the specialized isolation of modern art museums, then in vogue. By ending specialization, he contradicted the traditional historiography of art, which imposed on certain works and objects the label of “predecessors”: Aboriginal, Hindu, Baroque and the European 1800s, and Latin American art seem to ricochet in the photos of the construction of Brasília, in Alicia Penalba's bronzes, in Lygia Clark's Critter.

Of glass. Why does it not recoil, or die?

Laila Terra

It is necessary to understand more than the elementary set that makes the Farnsworth House an aesthetic sign. It is necessary to enter the historical context of the language that encompasses this specific sign, because every language is consigned to a certain time and space. It is necessary to identify the discourse ascribed to the house and to the characters who occupied it in the different situations. Who was Mies van der Rohe when he was hired by Edith, and what were the enunciations concerning him? Who was Edith Farnsworth, the contractor, and how was she represented by history (from 1940 to 2020)? When was the house designed and where? What are the constructive elements proposed by Mies? What was Edith's reaction after the house was finished and what did that entail? And, finally, what happened to the house over time (from 1951 to 2020)? Finally, with these data, we can confront the discourses.

The fire between past and future

Nathalia Colli

Five hundred and forty-nine thousand people killed by the coronavirus in Brazil, the dollar rate continues to rise, millions of unemployed and millions of homeless have can be counted. Central headline “Statue of Borba Gato is set on fire in the south of São Paulo, two were arrested”. This is a screenshot of a newspaper page from July 24, 2021. Nobody was hurt. Except the two prisoners. The blacks.

“Avoid the North American part because there is only television, you hear?”

Cássia Hosni

The inclusion of moving images into the exhibitions of the São Paulo Biennial in the early 1970s can be seen as a setting of technical, aesthetic, and geopolitical conflict. Such conflicts proliferated due to the very model adopted by the event (and abandoned only in 2006, in its 27th edition), which was based on national representations wherein the invited countries pay for the transport of works and equipment—and therefore have the final word on what will be displayed. It is not by chance that this regime attributed greatest importance to financial aspects, allowing the great economic powers to have greater prominence.

Arc

Frederico Filippi

While in the late 1960s artists are isolating themselves in the North American deserts, moving huge amounts of earth with machines and thousands of dollars and questioning concepts of landscape, industry, time, materiality and value, tractors and backhoes (probably similar to the ones that Robert Smithson called Robert Morris's paint brush) are opening immense trenches in an absolutely humid territory, where you can't see the horizon with your feet on the ground, maybe not even three meters ahead, and yet it's considered infinite.

The reflection of the knife

Caio Bonifácio and Renata Masini Hein

The gesture of refusal and the expression on Iole's face when facing her reflection in the mirror demonstrate an eloquent confrontation with her own body - a closed body, as if imposing, to a repression. The hardness of an armor of emphatic refusal, of a body that confronts at the same time that it retreats. The knife is ambiguously a symbol of violence: it is just an instrument, which, depending on who wields it, is capable of repressing or releasing.

Creation and care in mixing vibrating/material bodies

jialu pombo

The intertwining between life and death that Lygia talks about is what I call the expression of vulnerability-force: there is a force present in an embryo that carries potential information of life, and for such a life to come into existence, whatever carries it needs to open its hand to its form, reach the height of its vulnerability, and blend in to germinate something else.

Rayban

Wallace Masuko

There are 6 or 8 plastic faces, the same faces oppose each other, the different faces touch each other, the scratches are internal and the stiff white threads fill them, the events take place on or around the surfaces. The center of the object remains unscathed, silence surrounded by materials. Pulsars are neutron stars that transform rotational energy into electromagnetic energy. As it spins, its intense magnetic field induces a huge electric field on its surface. Neutral, it requires the space around it and attracts it.