SAO PAULO, BRAZIL.- The 27th Bienal de São Paulo just opened for the general public and goes until December 17. This is point of maximum expression of a project that has been taking place the entire year. Overcoming the short reach of na exhibition that lasts a little over two months, the 27ª BSP now shows to the public the contemporary artistic production discussed and analyzed in seminars since January 2006. Artists from several cities in the world spent from one to three months in Brazil preparing new works. Opening now also is the Fortnight of Films, with 39 films evoking the concept ‘How to Live Together’, central theme of the exhibition.

This Bienal will have fewer artists and more works representative of each one, which will allow artists to be better contextualized. For the first time in the history of the Fundação Bienal, presided by Manoel Francisco Pires da Costa, the curatorial project was elected in a democratic process through an international board. The traditional national representations were discarded this time and an international team of curators traveled the world in search of artists that best represented the ideals and conflicts of contemporary life.

The chief curator Lisette Lagnado, along with co-curators Adriano Pedrosa, Cristina Freire, José Roca and Rosa Martinez and guest curator Jochen Volz worked to put together a more innovative Bienal, more connected to the current conditions of contemporary artistic practice.

“In this way, leaving aside the ‘national representations’, something that has accompanied the Bienal de São Paulo since its foundation, becomes something even more urgent. Thanks to an experimental platform, the Bienal intends to add the value of a cultural congress, stimulating participation, understanding, above all, that defining creative work transcends the walls of the museum”, explains Lisette Lagnado.

Inspired on seminars by Roland Barthes, ministered at the Collège de France in 1976 and 1977, the central theme of this Bienal, ‘How to Live Together’, proposes a reflection on life in shared spaces, about the juxtaposing of different rhythms in the same physical space. The curators of the Bienal looked for artists that had as a central concern in their work the matter of limits, boundaries and the understanding of the differences inherent to everyday life.

“At the base of all living-together, there is a conglomerate of shared feelings in constant recreation of daily life,” says the co-curator Cristina Freire. Living together is not only in the works shown in the Pavilhão, but also in the actions that take place around the 27ª Bienal de São Paulo. Even within the city, some artists will place their works on the streets: the Greek Zafos Xagoraris, for example, will have an acoustic installation at the Avenida Rio Branco, while the Colombian Maria Tereza Hincapié invites thousands for a march-performance. Besides all this, buses will depart from the Pavilhão toward the south side of the city, where the public will be able to visit the Jardim Miriam Arte Clube (JAMAC), invited by the Bienal.

Another conceptual axis of this Bienal is Hélio Oiticica’s (1937-1980) “Environmental Program”. In this collection of practical and theoretical texts, the artist brings the spectator to the inside of his work and puts art among things contemplated every day.

This Bienal does not show pieces by Oiticica, but attempts to value his inventive theory. In this way, the 27ª Bienal lies conceptually on the crossroads of two of Hélio Oiticica’s lines of thought: the sense of ‘construction’, that is at the base of neoconcrete experimentation, and a ‘farewell to aesthetics’. In the exhibition, these two lines translate into “Constructive Projects” and “Programs for Life”.

In “Constructive Projects”, art and architecture (real and imaginary) are discussed as well as the role they play in the creation of new forms of behavior, what makes a physical space a proper place for living together. The works speak of practices of reconstruction: what are the discourses that reveal the violence of political regimes? How to recognize and study marks left behind by cultural manifestations?

In “Programs for Life”, the Bienal recognizes the work of the artist Marcel Broodthaers and returns to his reflections on the fetishism of an artist’s signature, the circulation of works of art: the inclusion of non-artists as capital in the creative process, the immaterial work: affection and values at the base of a new constructivism. The discussion on Acre: the question of borders and territories, the attempts to install a system of collective values and examples of subsistence and production.

“The 27ª Bienal de São Paulo tries to go beyond an historical revision of the work of Broodthaers and discusses key matters in his oeuvre, like fiction, artistic support, anti-theory, language and semantics, critiques toward the institution, non-art and the fake, the role of the artist and that of the curator, among others. It will also touch on its historical relevance in the production of contemporary art,” explains the guest curator Jochen Volz.

With elections in Brazil, the recent conflict in the Middle East, revolutions in Thailand and Hungary and an assessment of the state of things five years after Sept. 11, the year of 2006 poignantly places the question ‘How to Live Together’ on everyone’s agenda. Because of the war in Lebanon, an artist will no longer show his work in the Pavilhão and another artist had to rebuild his work days before the opening for not being able to ship it from bloccaded Beirut.

“‘Choosing together’ was the exercise of the curators and, with that, the exhibition got rid of any trace of aesthetic homogeneity, while different vibrations, coming from the personality of each curator, took hold of the space. This is a gain: putting together a Bienal with unpredictable artists living together.