Based on a critical view of digitality and virtuality, biarritzzz discusses pop culture, meme pedagogies, the politics of error and improvisation, video game and internet aesthetics, with poetry and moving images.
biarritzzz (1994, Fortaleza, lives and works in Recife, Brazil) is an antidisciplinary transmedia artist who investigates intersections between languages, codes and media. She believes in magic and low resolution as important counter-narratives for living the current cosmological dispute over realities.
Based on a critical view of digitality and virtuality, biarritzzz discusses pop culture, meme pedagogies, the politics of error and improvisation, video game and internet aesthetics, with poetry and moving images.
He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Satellite platform (Pivô Art and Research), A.I.R Gallery, Centro Cultural São Paulo, The Wrong Biennale, FILE, IMS (Instituto Moreira Salles), The Shed NY, and other festivals and group exhibitions. It includes the collections of Rhizome Artbase (New Museum), KADIST Foundation, IMS, Spamm.fr, HIPOCAMPO, and MIS-SP (São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound).
Learn more about the artist's work and trajectory in the interview below.
CM: For you, how is the notion of progress associated with futurism opposed to the notion of circular and/or spiral time present in ancient black and indigenous worldviews, and how is this duality of time manifested in your work?
Futurism was undeniably a project to the detriment of non-urbanized ways of living that were not centered on the figure of machines and fuel-burning industries. Speed, later associated with state developmentalism, became the modus operandi and propaganda of nation states in the 20th century. In no way did this thinking correspond to the maintenance of non-human life, or non-urban life, or the understanding of nature beyond extractivist positivism. The peoples and their knowledge established on the brink of humanism, those not so white to be in the body of this philosophy, were never considered as science or even as humanity, and this generated schizophrenia with the Earth as we live today.
The thought of progress is embedded in the evolutionary tradition, in addition to Darwinism, social evolutionism, and scientific racism. This straight line, which only grows, or only goes forward, ignores other non-chronological ways of understanding time and the world. The indigenous peoples of Abya Yala, of Africa, and even of other Asian countries lived and live based on other relationships with time: of the earth and of the world. This cosmological war is a war between unilateralism/universalism and multiperspectivism, so we could bring a cutout. I try to approach it in my work, whether through images, discourses, video narratives, music, poetry, and performance. Talking about this problem has become inevitable a few years ago, and working with annoyances, often based on irony or even nonsense, is very close to my production.
CM: In a world dominated by images and, more recently, by artificial intelligence images, what is the importance of addressing ancestry and magic in your artistic practice?
The magic from which I speak comes from the relationship with the ancestors; a relationship mediated by traditional technologies, prior to machines, algorithms, etc. I don't know if we need, as a society, to talk about magic. What I know is that I need to say, after all, it is also my inevitable reality.
CM: The easy access to the cell phone and the dissemination of the means of production and circulation of independent videos reconfigured economic, social and cultural models by democratizing means of audiovisual production, expanding access and providing new means of producing self-image... How do you see the dissemination of the new artificial intelligence tools that we have access to today?
I see it as something to be treated with caution. Artificial intelligence today is the currency and bets of large technology companies that return little to society and that have nothing to offer but more extractivism, human and non-human. And there's a lot of unpaid human labor in them. More than is revealed.
