On February 5, 2015 (Thursday), at 8pm, Associação Cultural Videobrasil and Edições Sesc São Paulo are launching the tenth issue of Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil at Livraria da Vila (São Paulo, Brazil). At the event, Elvira Dyangani Ose, the first foreign curator ever invited to conceive a Caderno issue, will discuss the Uses of Memory with the artist Theo Eshetu, a video art pioneer. The meeting will be open to the public and hosted by Teté Martinho, the editorial coordinator for Associação Cultural Videobrasil.

The Spanish-Guinean, London-based Elvira Dyangani Ose is the curator of the upcoming edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2015), in Sweden, and former international curator at London’s Tate Modern (2011-2014). For Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil 10: Uses of Memory, she has compiled seven essays and artistic propositions by some of the foremost artists and researchers from African and diaspora countries, who have contributed with texts, interviews, photographs, video stills, illustrations and digitized documents. Their collaborations address the scenario of massive decolonization in Africa between the decades of 1950 and 1970, pondering on archives and history as the focus of art and on the latter’s connection with the building or retrieval of memory to reformulate historical representations.

“Many contemporary artists defy the claim of history’s truthfulness or completeness, and claim art as an exercise in memory construction and/or retrieval that aims to reformulate historical representation,” Dyangani Ose relates. To all of the guest collaborators on this publication, “art provides them with an alibi to claim from an individual perspective the narration of a collective memory,” the editor writes in the introductory text that lends its title to Caderno, Uses of Memory. [Learn more about Elvira Dyangani Ose and her edition of Caderno 10]

At the publication’s launch, Dyangani Ose will speak with Theo Eshetu (UK/Ethiopia), artist who lives and works in Berlin and had his work shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, at Tate Britain (London, UK), at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and at the New Mueseum (New York, USA), among others. Eshetu’s contribution to Caderno is an artistic proposition of a fragmented account, based on video footage from his trip to Ethiopia to pay tribute to his grandfather, a former member of the court of Emperor Haile Selassie (1892-1975).

Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil 10_ Uses of Memory

Editorial
Solange Farkas; Teté Martinho

Uses of Memory
Elvira Dyangani Ose

Archiving to Oblivion
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez

FESTAC ’77 A Research Project
Chimurenga

Blood. Of light and likeness
Theo Eshetu

Getty vs Ghana / Corbis vs Mozambique / Getty vs Kenya vs Corbis
Maryam Jafri

Narcissus in Uniform
The Otolith Group

Nice Time
Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa

A different direction: writing history with the craft of a work of art
Premesh Lalu interviewed by Tracy Murinik

Launch of Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil 10: Uses of Memory, featuring a conversation between curator/editor Elvira Dyangani Ose and artist Theo Eshetu, hosted by Associação Cultural Videobrasil editorial coordinator Teté Martinho

February 5 (Thursday), 8 pm
Livraria da Vila bookstore – Fradique store
Rua Fradique Coutinho, 893 – Vila Madalena,
São Paulo
Free admission