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A cultural ecosystem named sertão [backlands] from a Biennale that “educates the landscape”

The sixth Bienal do Sertão opened with four performances on the subject of ancestry.

Yasmin Formiga staged a sertanejo [backland] landscape-action at Centro Cultural do Banco do Nordeste Cariri in Juazeiro do Norte, Ceará, where she used elements from the caatinga, the only exclusively Brazilian biome: charcoal, sand, cacti and bells were reminders that barren soil is not “useless land” – it is, in fact, a treasure to be preserved.

Marcos Martins assembled an ambiguous structure, using bricks made from rapadura and sugar cane; a bench or a bridge whose surface was ultimately blessed by honey, the same as that found in the jar, which he poured entirely over his head, bringing the performance to a close and reminding us that being part of the earth extends far beyond the elements contained in specific areas: life is universal. Robson Xavier opened up a dialog with his father, turning a blue jacket into an object-procedure, partially breaking it up to give away fabric ribbons to visitors: we always carry in our bodies the presence of the past, the relationships that wash up on the vast sea of understanding or disagreement, changing them through our experience, consciousness and culture. Messias Souza’s work also pays tribute to an ancestral relationship, with its educational aspect, recognizing one’s own roots and descendants.

Indeed, the title of this year’s edition of the Biennale, curated by Denilson Santana, Lucas Dilacerda, Renata Lima and Matteo Bergamini, is Educating the Landscape.

Since its inception in 2012, Bienal do Sertão has been offering new insights into one of the most fascinating and intricate areas on the planet: the Brazilian sertão.

The sixth edition features 39 entries (30 from Brazil, 9 from abroad), among more than three hundred submissions to the open call that has always been a hallmark of the event. The Biennale has provided a unique opportunity to examine the present-day sertanejo identity, built up of contaminations, shifts and parallel cultures, coexisting between the ancient and the modern. This is all mirrored in the project’s originality – a worldwide example of an itinerant event, within the same country, passing through the same biome from Brazil’s north to south and vice versa, having already visited the states of Pernambuco, Bahia, Piauí and the Federal District.

All in all, the Biennale seems to be following, in a modernized fashion, the journey recommended by Guimarães Rosa in Grande Sertão: Veredas [The Devil to Pay in the Backlands]; across his lands we find the post-landscape and a reflection on today’s sertões, as in Rafael Vilarouca’s video, as well as in artist KÂO’s painting-installation, exhibited on the CCBNB’s third floor, in conversation with Larissa Batalha’s nocturnal birds, photographed by Rafael de Almeida, whose mysterious composition is worked by fungi on 35mm film.

Yet another highlight of that first exhibition, which already has a trip to Brasília scheduled for July 2024, is the result of the micro-residency of the Intervalo-Fórum de Arte collective, which was held in just three days at Museu Paleontológico Plácido Nuvens, in Santana do Cariri, a place where one can breathe in the Earth’s geological memory.

But, just as the sertão “is the size of the world”, as Rosa again tells us, works from Paraguay, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, among others, have also been brought to Juazeiro, showing how “landscape education” is essential anywhere on the planet. As we take a final walk through the halls, we are treated to the abstract and elegant cartographies of Argentinian artist Ana Rey, and the embroidered painting by Vika Teixeira, showing us how Brazil is an invention and a territory that is far too vast to narrate a straightforward truth: the perception of a geography and its politics is connected, once again, with the human experience. This also happens with Rafael Amorim’s dois rapazes de mãos dadas, figures who appear to be watching over the show, two protectors of equality and respect.

Educating the Landscape, the sixth Bienal do Sertão, runs until October 31, 2023, at Centro Cultural Banco do Nordeste Cariri.

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