Like in pole vaulting, this exhibition makes an arch connecting the energy that mobilized the outbreak of Brazilian Modernism – in the 1920s and 1930s – with various contemporary manifestations concentrated in these early years of the 2020s. Part of the activities that mark the centenary of the 1922 Modern Art Week, it celebrates those three days in February without the treatment of an untouchable founding myth. Through the juxtaposition and contrast of landscapes and bodies in the continuum of life, the proposition here is to make a modest comment, but one that opens up to the profusion of authorship and to urgent questions and revisions found in the sharp edges of contemporary artistic production.
Between distances and approximations, breaks and continuities, it brings together impulses interested in exercising, with freedom, the synthesis of our nature – of what surrounds, contains and composes us. In the crack of time, connections, confrontations and contrasts reveal themselves and gain prominence through the way universal human issues were elaborated in the effervescence of that period and as they are under the heat of now.
The title "Every Other Week" creates an ambiguous play on words: if on one hand it prints the term of what has been forged into one of the greatest cultural icons of Brazilian imaginary, on the other, balancing activation and denial, it also reverts the word to its most prosaic sense: of an ordinary temporal passage, a collection of days, a transitional cut in our daily life. Therefore, it invokes a movement with intrinsic oppositions or dichotomies: occurrence and interruption, memory and oblivion, past and current, 1922 and 2022.
By adopting and rejecting this paradigmatic framework, it points to dispersion through time, reinforcing the understanding of things as an open process, as a current flow. This exercise gains other conceptual and physical meanings as the show takes place in a house that was once home to a family and their domestic life, and that is aesthetically part of the Modern spectrum. Its architecture, however, does not fail to bring its own characteristics, which stand out in the midst of a better known São Paulo modernism.
Faced with disputed pasts, present and futures, this exhibition proposes intense dialogues – sometimes direct, sometimes unusual –, aspiring to contribute to the critical re-elaborations of the world from before and from today, mobilized by social dynamics and aesthetic programs that propose ruptures with what no longer concerns us and, above all, are committed to devising diverse new ways of living.