‘We must respond to the aestheticisation of politics with the politicization of aesthetics.’
Walter Benjamin’s now infamous line echoes across this year’s Venice Biennale and across the wider artworld discourses of late. Indeed, politics seem to be becoming a more and more prominent subject in contemporary art. Often didactic or activist in ideology, far from creating any form of change or triggering any wider conversation on socio-political issues, the proliferation of white cube political art risks casting a spectacular shadow over this whole practice.
How then can artists (in the expanded term) manoeuvre in this context to generate aesthetic experiences that suitably percolate conversations about contemporary socio-cultural issues without reproducing radically grandiose statements, or clinical vitrines brimming with quasi-anthropological research?
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I am enticed into the Brazilian Pavilion by an electro drum-beat and a sudden drop in the club like baseline. Unlike anything you can gleam about pop phenomena from Drag Race, the cavernous space contains a cacophonous pool of energetic movements, sweat, and raw sexual energy. Who wouldn’t want to investigate!
Two rooms in the Pavilion are given over to the artist duo Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin De Burca to present the latest iteration of their long-term research with marginal communities in Recife, Brazil. Taking its name from swingueira – a modern day form of communal dance much like, square dancing or samba – Wagner and De Burca’s Swinguerra twists the words ending (from gueira to guerra - meaning war) imbuing it with political charge, and indicating the complex threads woven through the artistic research displayed. Don’t fret there are no vitrines in sight. Simply split over two darkened rooms, Swinguerra pairs simple photography with a genre blurring film, to create a clean yet highly enjoyable presentation, teaming with a socio-political undercurrent.
In the first room a series of photographic portraits capture a number of Recife’s urban dance troops. Popping with cinematic vitality, each portrait shows the regiments standing strong in formations against a dark backdrop. In an iconographic metaphor for the political climate in Brazil, this order and the petrified agency gained through the high contrasts, gives the troops a collective powerful sense of purpose and pride.
Moving into the second room the tempo steps up. The energy bound up in the portraits erupts onto the big screen (a two-channel screen, one at each end of the rectangular room) with full-on pop drama. In a hi-octane, S&M come High School Musical film, Wagner and De Burca blur documentary type footage of the works participants including the dancer’s lives, training regimes, and acts of self-progression, via social media, with the full-on spectacle of music video dance sequences. As the semi-narrative unfolds, perceptions of genders, race, and identity dissolve until we are left with a wonderfully ‘tasteless’ display of pop identity: one free from high or low culture binaries, and evangelistic ideals.
Sweaty and straight faced, recurring iconography and dance movements give the dancers’ routines a particular socio-political prominence: the exaggerated thrust, the cock grab, the twerk, and double handed wank, can all be read as signs of the male western hegemony perpetuated by digital media and indeed the capitalist idea of democracy that accompanies this flow of global nationalism. The infectious effect of this right-wing ideology is woven throughout the film. Dressed in black, we see the participants training in their clammy sports hall; and immediately a parallel image is called to mind; one of dictatorial regimens, of national strength, and shows of military power. If the sold mass of military might was once the primary gauge of a certain male fantasy of national power, in the digital present the speed of bullets has been replaced by the vibrations of bottoms.
Intermingled with the footage of the troops training and performing, under the guide of their captain, we see the participants going about their day to day lives, whether taking selfies, smoking or getting changed these small acts give the work a humanity, something often lacking in socio-research based practices. In these moments of respite, we glimpse the participants visions of their troop’s collective future: dancing in perfect synchronicity at the centre of a classically polis style stadium. But just like the smoke bellowing from their cigarettes, these hazy aspirations disintegrate before long, and they are back in sweaty reality.
More than just a racy stream of dew soaked youths dancing, given the political climate in Brazil (a country in the grips of a right-wing regime that does not support culture) and the global drive towards an ever more heterogeneous social whole, the film acts as a spectacular metaphor for the contemporary (2019) incarnation of the ‘order and progress’ ideology. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (the Pavilion’s curator) is keen to assert that the socio-political undercurrents that run through Wagner and De Burca’s work does not play a part in the construction of the films narrative: much like the issues themselves, social relations and the political situation are embedded within the artists’ research by the bodies, movements, scenes and traditions of the Brazilians they collaborate with.
I’m not afraid to say I freaking love this Pavilion! It has everything I could wish for in a biennale presentation, and art in general: depth, ethics, a little political charge, and of course beautiful bodies pulsating in time with some contemporary club classics.
Toby Upson
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca
Swinguerra
Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Swinguerra
Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Giardini Castello, Venice
11 May – 24 November 2019
11 May – 24 November 2019
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