Page 6 - as margens dos mares

Life and Art

In 1985, the Sociedade Cultural Arte Brasil emerged on the Brazilian art scene with
the aim of producing multicultural events and interlinking artistic creators and their
languages, especially in the areas of music and the visual arts. In a short time, the
initiative achieved its first results: Brazil Projects 1988, held in New York, connected
João Gilberto and Hélio Oiticica, Caetano Veloso and Glauber Rocha, alongside a
constellation of artists, to make Brazilian contemporary art shine in an important
center of connections in the art circuit.
Since then the concept has been brought to other locations and venues, assimilating
new ideas while associating the natural environment with digital media, producing
exhibitions and shows in Tokyo, São Paulo, and Los Angeles. Its destiny was headed
toward other margins, the margins of the seas. Now it is aiming to unite the margins
of the Atlantic, using the arts as a common link. The Atlantic constitutes a metaphor
for the approximation of cultures, especially cultures that have developed within the
environment of the Portuguese language. The meaning of a cultural project with a
diverse character such as this one, which transits between music and the visual
arts, among the sensibilities of each artist and the vicissitudes of each language,
among the distinct characteristics of Portuguese-speaking countries, lies at a precise
point: the construction of a space of transnational, transcultural dialogue.
This is the power of culture, the potential of the artistic discourse: the possibility that we
may abstract the nearly infinite repetitions that mold our modern world, the unavoidable
routine of sociability, in order to discover the small differences, the subtle gaps that
shed light on the perception of the whole. The timbre of the voice in a song or the
arrangement of scenic elements in an installation operates as vectors that crisscross
the artistic territories. The aim is to reveal how differences can coexist, which is the true
goal of culture and life itself.
To this end, there is nothing better than Sesc Pinheiros for hosting a project like this,
a place of dialogue and shared existence, which is outstanding in the vibrant and
complex scenario of São Paulo. As Margens dos Mares reinvigorates its foundations
and points to new encounters and interactions.

Carmen Elisa Santos Ritenour
Sociedade Cultural Arte Brasil

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