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BIBLIOTECA MÁRIO DE ANDRADE
Nov 10 | 7 pm – Blockchain Crossroads – Exu and the LGBTQIAP+ | 12 yo | Mix Talks
#queer #tech #experimental #intention #MixXR
It is sung, in the oral philosophies of the Gulf of Guinea and in the traditions of terreiros in Brazil, that two calabashes were once offered to Exú. In one of them there was the clarity of the world, order, constancy, medicine. In the other, the obscurity, the immaterial, the intangible, the chaotic, the poison. The orixá then asked for a third calabash. In it he mixed the contents of both. He shook it, stirred it, threw it up and broke it, spilling its contents.
In this allegory, Exú reveals himself to be the lord of what has no border or definition. He is what he is and what he can be, without ever ceasing to be either. He corrodes Western epistemological instances and opens up to a living rhizome of ontological relationships. He is the crossroads itself, where the paths meet and become a fractal of possibilities.
In this NFTs show by LGBTQIA+ artists, commissioned by the 30th Festival Mix Brasil, this metaphor is present. Both for the expressions of identity, gender and sexuality that permeate these creative people, and for the media frisson of a new way of storing digital files that invaded the lexicon of discussions about art and culture in recent years.
In a nutshell, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are files that can be stored in large streams of data that span countless servers around the globe known as blockchains. They guarantee that those specific collections of binary codes that make up a file will be unique and immutable. On the one hand, it allows artists to have control over the sale and distribution of their digital works. On the other hand, it presents itself as a capitalist process of transforming what is abundant by its own reproducibility into a simulacrum of scarcity and production of surplus value.
In order to tension these concepts and reveal the infinite possibilities of subjects and possible ways of inhabiting this digital space, we invite creators of different practices in the field of arts to this show: from carnival artists to olfactory artists, through digital sculptors, filmmakers and performers. Their works present transition states, bodies becoming others, shipwrecked and distorted landscapes, moving from the natural to the artificial, from the digital to the analog. Ontological cyborgs.
Thus, Exú, lord of movement, syncope, communication, commerce and refraction, becomes a curatorial concept. Codes that run through computers, fiber optic cables that cross the oceans and are bounced by satellites beyond our atmosphere. It is everywhere, without ever being anywhere. It is the one fractioned and disseminated in many, which does not cease to be one. The distortion and undoing of binarisms. The opening of infinite paths. The mouth that eats everything. At last, a Blockchain Crossroads.
Laroyê!
Felippe Moraes, October 2022
Credits
Curatorship and exhibition design: Felippe Moraes
Artists: Anarca Filmes, Anna Costa e Silva, Felippe Moraes, Gabriel Haddad, Leonardo Bora, Gabriel Junqueira, Guilhermina Augusti, João GG, Karola Braga, Matheus Montanari, Renan Marcondes, Ricardo de Càstro, Rodrigo D’Alcântara, Tales Frey, Thiago Ortiz
Art and technology advisor: Fernando Frado
Acknowledgments: Laroyê Exu, Ana Carla Soler, Matheus Foster, Rodolfo Viana
