Snap
Rubbing the thumb and middle finger to produce a quick noise that expands in space brings together the human body, movement, transience, and sonic matters.
Recent studies demonstrate that this noise lasts approximately seven milliseconds; for comparative purposes, the blink of an eye tends to last one hundred and fifty milliseconds. It is a voluntary gesture that for the human experience is related to different uses and interpretations: musical composition in genres such as blues, samba, jazz, and rock n' roll; a call to action; inducing and awakening in acts of hypnosis; the domestication of other animals; the attempt to recall a word we have forgotten; a request for silence in a classroom; a way to applaud a performance or encourage an ongoing speech discreetly. In a snap of a finger, everything can move.
In Portuguese – unlike the words "chasquido" in Spanish and "snap" in English - the word "estalo" has a meaning that goes beyond a direct relationship with that gesture. The term designates many situations in which a sudden movement changes the ongoing state of different materials and, possibly, generates sounds of different vibrations. The movement of tectonic plates resulting in an earthquake, the sensation of stepping on the fallen branch of a tree, and the clinking of a glass full of ice when we pour a liquid inside it: all these actions generate "estalos". Some have a macro proportion, capable of altering and even destroying an entire city; others are in the field of microhistory and bodily pleasures that sometimes go unnoticed. In Portuguese, the word will also have a layer of reading that refers to violence: an "estalo" can be a slap in the face, and the same word refers to violated objects – a shattered glass – or a noise associated with violence, like the crack of a whip.
At the 14th Mercosul Biennial, this title – "Estalo" – is an invitation to inhabit the movement and the transformation from one state to another. A living being acts on the other through dance, sonic matters, drawing, painting, video, or installation; we want to gather artists and works of art interested in "estalos" related to human beings and more than humans. If some of the research at the biennale is explosive due to its agitated, abrupt and iconophilic social context, other artists create visualities that, even though they seem quieter, just because they exist, can be seen as an "estalo". Let's not forget there are the grandiloquent crackles and the almost imperceptible ones – from the germination of a seed to the vibration of trap music beats; this project deals with metamorphosis.
What happens when one existence unites with others and, starting from a crowd, dances in a dark, artificially lit room or under the sunlight of a city like Porto Alegre? Which bodies are historically seen as subaltern and, in contemporary times, move boldly and confidently in the public space? How do the planet and its cycles, so affected by drastic ecological changes, generate movements that affect human bodies and other species with whom we are in daily contact? In what ways can being alive be seen as an act of resistance?
The sweat that one day runs through a body due to fear becomes a sweat that results from pleasure, warmth, courage, and affirmative propositions – in general terms, that is the rhythm we want to set in this edition of the Mercosul Biennial.
