Poster by Gabriel Menotti

Abstract

Media piracy play a big role in the configuration of the cultural scene of emergent countries such as Brazil, being one of the most intense points of contact between the local creative communities and global markets. Their effects are inevitably felt in national cultural institutions such as contemporary art museums and galleries on three different levels: a) in the work of artists that use these unauthorized circuits as a source of material or theme; b) as an unofficial curating resource that is available to institutional employees; and c) by the way they educate the large public in how to relate to symbolic production.

In this paper, we aim to analyze how these tensions are negotiated and what effect they have on different settings of the Brazilian contemporary art scene. As our matrix of investigation, we will do a case study on Cine Falcatrua (‘Cine Hoax’), a pirate film society that appeared in Brazil in 2003 and since then has been having a broad actuation in the areas of cinema, new media and contemporary art, both curating and participating of exhibitions.

Cine Falcatrua has a grassroots activity that borders legality, which mainly consists of downloading movies from the Internet and screening them publicly and for free, as well as teaching workshops that promote such techniques to anyone interested. Thus, the film society articulates different levels of contamination between pirate communities and art institutions, exposing the complex negotiations of authority and value between both settings. In our investigation, we will be particularly interested in the CortaCurtas film festival, which the group organized as part of some collective art exhibitions it took part in 2006.

The idea was that CortaCurtas would be a festival with no restrictions or pre-selection: every work sent in response to the call would be included in the programme. However, there was a catch: in the festival regulations, it was specified that the participating works would be exhibited “according to the will of the projectionist.” In practice, this literally allowed the projectionist to do whatever she wanted during the screenings, even interrupt movies before they were finished or remix them entirely. These things actually happened, and some filmmakers were not very happy about it. However, there wasn’t much they could do: by submitting their works to the festival, they had complied with its regulations, even if they had not paid proper attention to them beforehand.

Therefore, there are two ways to quality CortaCurtas: first, positively, as a sort of collaborative remix piece, in which all participating works were combined and activated to produce new audiovisual forms. However, the festival is simultaneously a sort of control structure through which Cine Falcatrua seized authority over other people’s works, by establishing a perverse protocol of participation. Through this double nature, the CortaCurtas festival demonstrated that there isn’t an a priori poetic dimension on piracy, neither a moral one on legality.

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Author

Name: Gabriel Menotti Gonring
URL: http://www.bogotissimo.com/b2kn
Affiliation: Goldsmiths College, University of London
Country: Brazil
Bio statement: Gabriel Menotti (Brazil, 1983) is an independent critic and curator involved with different forms of cinema, contemporary art and grassroots media. He has already organized pirate movie screenings, remix film festivals, videogame championships, porn screenplay workshops, installations with super8 film projectors, generative art exhibitions and academic seminars. He holds a master in Communication and Semiotics by the Catholic University of São Paulo, and his thesis (about movie theatres and VJing spaces) has received the Itaú Cultural Cybernetics Arts award. Currently, he is a PhD candidate on the Media & Communications department of Goldsmiths College. His curatorial projects and artworks are an inherent part of his research activity, and have already been presented in different venues around the world. Among the most recent events in which Menotti has participated are the Artivistic festival (Canada), Medialab Prado’s Interactivos?! (Spain), the 16th International Symposium of Electronic Arts (Germany), the 29th São Paulo Art Biennial (Brazil) and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid (France).