Repetitions of Violence in the Works of Vitória Cribb and Welket Bungué (original) (raw)

The significance of artistic practices regarding violence in Mexico

The piece (fixed image or in movement) is a way of communication. This statement has different meanings: on the one hand, the piece as a collective construction with social and historical sense, on the other hand, the symbolic interactions with its visitors, as with its anchorage to an specific time by pointing out violence in Mexico, on top of its argumentative and semantic content. All these elements prompt an interpretative analysis. These contemporary audio-visual speeches lead towards an interpretation, and not a unique or unequivocal interpretation of a fact is not aimed, but, to contribute with an understanding of a certain phenomenon that can be explained through culture, history and the language in a unique and irreplaceable piece. The current iconic production in Mexico incorporates the use of digital technologies (blogs, virtual social networks, etc) and streets as ways to express and represent a speech which stands for some other displays which do not obey commercial parameters, instead they seek action and collective production to face or discuss violence in our country, since this production outstands due to its peculiar aesthetic proposal and its social commitment.

Violence in the Age of Digital Reproducibility

While public discussions about media and violence tend to be defined by the negative psychological effects attributed to exposure to mediated depictions of violence, this article argues that the mediated violence in Valeska Grise-bach's 2006 film, Longing, (Sehnsucht) instead seeks to heighten viewers' sensitivity towards violent acts in moving images. Grisebach rejects the so-called MTV aesthetic and instead employs formal and narrative devices that may be read in political terms. To illuminate the connection between film aesthetics, violence, and mass (dis)engagement with politics, this article draws upon the argument rehearsed in Walter Benjamin's oft-cited essay, " The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility " (1936). Given that we are witnessing changes in the ways that we experience and represent our reality now that are arguably as significant as the birth of the moving image itself, it is pertinent to look to early twentieth-century cultural theory in order to gain a better understanding of the significance of these transformations in a historical context. By reading the violent incidents in Longing through a Benjaminian lens, this article suggests that the film is a political act by Grisebach, as well as a key political work in the field of contemporary German-language cinema.

Digital Spectacles of Violence: Film, TV and Social Media Entanglements in 2010's Brazil

International Journal of Film and Media Arts, 2022

The study of cultural industries, in particular the complex manifestations of spectacle, has produced valuable contributions that articulate capitalism, globalization and culture. The revisitation of this legacy, especially in dealing with Latin American phenomena, is this paper’s effort. Two case studies that took place in the 2010’s, in Brazil, underpin a reflection on mediated crimes in a digitalized, but still inequal society. The first tells of a prisoner’s self-recorded video, made in response to TV Globo’s news piece about a 2017 massacre; the second examines a reenactment of a 2000 crime that happened on the bridge Rio-Niterói in 2019, and referenced not only a real hijacking, but its film representations (Bus 174 and Last Stop 174). Invoking examples of exceptionality, the article aims at delineating how certain digital spectacles of violence can be understood as direct responses to cultural texts: even though practices of socialization via the internet pose questions of accelerated efficiency (in reaching wider audiences, and updating the meaning of live events), the social and aesthetic performances involving violence retrieve long-standing traditions created by modern institutions.

Surveillance en la Frontera: the Subversive Installations of Mexican Digital Artists Raphael Lozano-Hemmer and Alfredo Salomon

2019

Political ideology is now made manifest and even palpable with a perverse articulation of digital technique, for once on its own, and without the need of any kind of narrative. Art by itself is enough. The ideologue is relegated to an unimportant location following a praxis that evades primordial dependence on the conventions of any discourse. Starting from a discussion of two important video installations by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, this article proposes how the critical use of technology in contemporary art establishes a space, in an interpretive manner. The first section of the paper deals with the notion of subversion of technological devices deriving partially from Lozano-Hemmer’s exploitation of technological praxis as a means of unmediated valorization of ideology. We analyze the metamorphosis of symbols into “fact” within the image, as a detonator of the simulacrum. The second section deals with Justicia Infinita of Alfredo Salomon, based in Puebla, Mexico and perhaps the most ...

#VaiMalandra Anitta’s music video in digital networks: political clashes and prejudices in Brazil (chapter of KISMIF book, vol.4 - 2019) - Videoclipe #VaiMalandra (Anitta) nas redes sociais digitais: confrontos políticos e preconceitos no Brasil (capítulo do livro KISMIF, vol.4 - 2019)

Keep it Simple, Make it Fast! An approach to underground music scenes (vol. 4), 2019

The Brazilian singer Anitta, by articulating the cultural matrices of AnglophileAmerican pop music (Soares, 2015) and the funk carioca (Pereira de Sá, 2014), has started a scenario of controversy by Spreading (Jenkins et al., 2014) of the videoclip named Vai Malandra. Anitta’s videoclip is here understood as (cyber)event (Henn, 2014) in the context of digital networks and it is also configured as an initiatory of semiosis (Peirce, 2002) that can be materialized in order to understand different complexities. Using the methodology called Sense Construction Analysis in Digital Networks (Henn et al., 2017), we mapped eight constellations of senses inaugurated by the Spreading of the video in specific contexts: Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. We have focused our efforts in two constellations that we called political confrontations and prejudices, capable of signaling in which way this videoclip brings discussions about sexuality and gender (LOURO, 2003) - including the confrontation between different feminist perspectives - aesthetic-body patterns, latinicities, and also conservatives and prejudiced perceptions about production, signaling some constructions/imaginaries of whiteness (Miskolci, 2015). In such circumstances, we understand that Pop Music inaugurates semiotic territorialities (Henn, 2017) in which different semiosis emerge, engender and confront each other, signaling how cultural differences are symbolically threatened in digital culture and the ways in which political content of Pop can be expanded. Keywords: Pop music, funk carioca, digital networks, gender, Anitta.

Review: Implicated Viewers: Looking at Violence through Contemporary Latin American Art

“BASTA!” at John Jay College’s Anya and Shiva Art Gallery, revisits the relationship between violence and contemporary art in Latin America. Curators Claudia Calirman and Isabella Villanueva present works by 14 artists from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Latin American artists have always exposed social struggles of their countries, but “BASTA!” focuses on the conflict between representation and reality — inherent in the use of violence as a theme for art. “How to represent violence without aestheticizing it to the level of the banal?” asks Calirman.

Autoconstruction 2.0: Social Media Contestations of Racialized Violence in Complexo do Alemão

Antipode, 2017

Activists and journalists in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro are using social media to intervene in the violence that shapes their communities. In this article I draw on critical urban and digital media theory to understand how militarized policing, the spatialization of race, and discourses of criminalization influence favela populations. I examine how these discursive and material violences are motivating residents to autoconstruct new digital communities. Through digital autoconstruction, journalists and activists are using social media technologies to safely direct mobility, to witness police violence, and to unsettle socio‐spatial imaginaries of endemic crime. As such, they are deploying digital practices to disrupt material, epistemological, and discursive mechanisms of social control. These actions show that digital technologies are always‐already embodied and take shape through material histories, such as those of racialized state violence. Journalists and activists in Co...