Study group

Convivendo com a Arte: Conhecendo Artistas - Ateliê Fidalga

Getting to Know Artists

by Bruno Mendonça

The Living with Art project is a programme developed and promoted by Banco Santander with the intention of increasing the institution’s relationship with the field of contemporary art.

Over recent years Banco Santander in Brazil has taken a place as a sponsor for showings, exhibitions ans cultural events.

In the city of São Paulo its most recent actions around this interest for the field of contemporary art have taken place in the Bank’s main premises, where a gallery has received exhibitions by Brazilian artists, besides other cultural activities, all under the overall supervision of Elly de Vries, who is responsible for the Santander art collection, which is curated by Rejane Cintrão.

In 2011 the Ateliê Fidalga, a contemporary art research and production group coordinated by the artists Sandra Cinto and Albano Afonso was invited to a special edition of the Living with Art project at the Banco Santander. Under the overall title Getting to Know Artists, the project undertaken in partnership with Ateliê Fidalga aimed at revealing and presenting the work of 41 young artists.

The invitation to the Ateliê Fidalga made by the coordinators and curator of the project was a great challenge, with the 41 artists having to intervene on practically all of the floors in the Bank, thus implying moving the space of the gallery present in the head offices of the bank to other places, then promoting greater contact with the Bank’s 6,000 staff members.

The invitation took place after both visited the Ateliê Fidalga no Paço exhibition in 2010, where the artists participating in the group occupied practically all of the exhibition space of the São Paulo Palace of the Arts, commemorating the institution’s fortieth anniversary.

The experimentalism, freedom, easy-going attitude, lack of hierarchy, freshness and the proliferation of languages present in the group was what led the curator to propose this collaboration.

This is indeed in line with the most recent projects carried out by Rejane Cintrão, who has been a major force in the production and curating of exhibitions in several different spaces, such as the Bnaco Santander itself and the Edmundo Vasconcelos Hospital Complex, where since 2010 she has headed an interesting exhibition showing, almost always with site specific proposals or installations.

For the Ateliê Fidalga the project is interesting because it also grants continuity to a series of events that the group’s artists have participated in and organized, the majority of which are experimental propositions always in search of new exhibition formats.

The most interesting aspect of the project were the issues that emerged throughout the process, like, for example, how to intervene in this corporative space, how to relate the work of art with this context and with the surroundings and what is its public, among other matters.

These questionings led to interesting reactions. Some artists occupied the space subverssively, in more tactical forms, thus creating a tension with the space; others created subtle, almost invisible and silent interventions. Others produced poetic proposals with the intention of bringing a more playful and oneiric repertoire within the institution space.

The artists promoted situations of pausing, reflection, contemplation and interaction, either through words, symbols and images, or through actions carried out within the institution space itself.

They brought a different time rhythm into a frantic work routine that takes place within the corporative space of the Bank, immersed in its numbers, calculations, targets and plans.

The project indeed showed that relativization of what an exhibition space can be, and Getting to Know Artists functioned as a laboratory, a process, in which the challenge of coming out of one’s comfort zone became a potential for these artists, revealing new possibilities, strategies and relations, and for the public it was a new place for experiences and knowledge.

Text extracted from the publication Conhecendo Artistas / Ateliê Fidalga. Santiago de Compostela: Dardo, 2012