In Living Contact
28 Bienal de São Paulo
Rethinking the purpose and direction of the exhibition, the 28th Bienal – “In Living Contact” carried out a radical proposal by keeping the second floor of the pavilion completely empty, as an Open Plan – a metaphor for the conceptual crisis experienced by traditional biennial systems faced by the institutions that organize them. The noteworthy episode of that edition was the graffiti on the pavilion’s guardrails, which led to a discussion in the art milieu about urban art.
"It is there, in the territory of the supposed void, that intuition and reason find fertile ground to allow the invention's potentials to emerge, opening up multiple possibilities that can be intersected. To make a cut, suspending the voracious process of production and consumption of representations, to frame as problematic the possible exhaustion of various resources in the institution's territory. The cut here seeks to accentuate the crisis of the organization, the model and the system, rather than repress it with yet another exhibition".
"The proposal for the 28th Bienal is to suspend the mechanics of the successive Bienal events, in place since 1951, to consider the discrepancies between the exhibition's current model and the reality in which it is inserted, whether local or international. A process of analysis of its present condition could point to perspectives for a new phase in its programming in the face of the challenges of the 21st century. The objective is to place Bienal de São Paulo once again “in live contact” with its history, its city, its peers and its time. My commitment, and the project's as well, is to the institution and the valuable service that it provides to the city, the country and contemporary art."
"For twelve days, the Pavilion of the Bienal will have a full time inhabitant: artist Maurício Ianês, born in Santos, 35 years ago. Naked, without food, drink or any other belonging, he will enter the building on November 4th and remain there until the 16th, completely at the mercy of “The Kindness of Strangers”, the name of the performance dreamed up for the 28th Bienal. Every day, Ianês will choose a different part of the building to await the public to show themselves, donate something or establish any kind of relationship. He will also spend his nights in the pavilion, in order to not interrupt the performance. “I tried to think of a work shorn of absolutely all artifice, which would distance itself from the theatrical and the spectacular and in which the only thing left would be my presence and the raw relationship with the public, in the least premeditated manner possible, even though the Bienal environment already creates a representative context that mediates the relationships”.