NEW DATE FOR THE 14TH MERCOSUR BIENNIAL

The Foundation highlights the crucial role of art in times of crisis, stressing that the biennial will be held at a more propitious time to revitalize the art sector and attract visitors to the capital once again.

The theme of the next edition of the Biennial is "Estalo" (snap) and it will take place in several venues in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, in an attempt to reach a wider and more diverse public, investing in bringing art closer to both local and global audiences. The main objective of the curatorial concept of the exhibition is to understand how different movements can provoke transformations of various magnitudes, whether mediated by the body, by nature or by different means.

Raphael Fonseca, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum, will lead the Biennial's artistic team, which has Brazilian Tiago Sant'Ana and Dominican Yina Jiménez Suriel as assistant curators, along with Fernanda Medeiros as curatorial assistant.

One of the main foundations of the next Biennial will consist in the creation of a tour of exhibitions that will encompass various institutional spaces in Porto Alegre and its surrounding areas. This will involve the elaboration of visit maps that will not only give the public the opportunity to enjoy works in cultural environments, but also to understand the dynamics, movements and discourses present in the city.

One of the new features of this edition of the Biennial is the creation of a Public Programs curatorship, to be designed by curators Anna Mattos and Marina Feldens. The mediation programs, meanwhile, will be coordinated by Brazilian artist Andréa Hygino and Michele Ziegt.

ESTALO

The gesture of rubbing the thumb and middle finger to produce a rapid noise that expands in space provokes the encounter between the human body, movement, ephemerality and sonic issues. Recent studies show that the duration of this noise is approximately seven milliseconds; a blink of an eye, for comparative purposes, tends to last one hundred and fifty milliseconds.

It is a voluntary gesture that for the human experience is related to different uses and interpretations: musical composition in genres such as blues, samba, jazz and rock n' roll; a call to action; the induction and awakening in acts of hypnosis; the taming of other animals; the attempt to remember a word we have forgotten; the request for silence in a class; the way to applaud a presentation or encourage a speech in progress. In a snap of the fingers, everything can move.

In Portuguese - unlike "snap" in Spanish and "chasquido" in English - the word "estalo" has a meaning that goes beyond a direct relationship with that gesture. The term designates many situations in which a sudden movement changes the state in which different materials are found and, possibly, generates sounds of different vibrations. The word also has a layer of reading that refers to violence: an "estalo" can be a slap in the face, as well as the same word refers to violated objects - a shattered glass - or to a noise associated with violence, such as the crack of a whip.

In the 14th Mercosur Biennial, this title -Estalo- is an invitation to inhabit the movement and transformation from one state to another. A living being acts on the other through dance, sonic matter, drawing, painting, video or installation; the biennial aims to bring together artists and artworks interested in "stalos" related to human beings and more than human beings.