This dis­ser­ta­tion pro­ject aims to shed light on the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of pre­sent­ing, archiv­ing, and the­o­riz­ing moving image art in the Global South. One par­a­dig­matic ex­am­ple of recent de­vel­op­ments in this field is the Con­tem­po­rary Art Bi­en­nial Sesc_Video­brasil, or­ga­nized by the cul­tural as­so­ci­a­tion Video­brasil in São Paulo, Brazil. What started in 1983 as a na­tional fes­ti­val show­ing mostly VHS und U-Matic video­tapes grad­u­ally trans­formed into its cur­rent format of an in­ter­na­tional art bi­en­nial that is open to works pro­duced in all pos­si­ble media. Over the course of this de­vel­op­ment, Video­brasil also pri­or­i­tized part­ner­ships with other play­ers from the “South” in what could be seen as a “par­al­lel cir­cuit” to the hege­monic art world es­tab­lished in west­ern Europe and the USA.

In order to fully grasp and an­a­lyze the speci­fici­ties of Video­brasil and its part­ners, I intend to expand the ex­ist­ing debate around the new con­fig­u­ra­tions of film in the con­text of con­tem­po­rary art using post­colo­nial an­a­lyt­i­cal frame­works. Dif­fer­ent ap­proaches, like the de­colo­nial shift or the lo­cal­iza­tion of hybrid cul­tures, will be help­ful to un­der­stand the aes­thetic, social, and po­lit­i­cal ne­go­ti­a­tions at stake in deal­ing with moving image art around the globe today.

Laura Teix­eira is a cu­ra­tor based in Berlin, Ger­many. She is cur­rently work­ing on her dis­ser­ta­tion as part of the DFG Graduiertenkol­leg “Con­fig­u­ra­tions of Film” at the Goethe Uni­ver­sity Frank­furt and di­rects the Días de Cine – Latin Amer­i­can Film Fes­ti­val. She was as­sis­tant cu­ra­tor at the Museum MMK für Mod­erne Kunst and film cu­ra­tor at the DFF Deutsches Filmin­sti­tut & Film­mu­seum, where she or­ga­nized the Lec­ture&Film series to­gether with Prof. Vinzenz Hedi­ger from 2017 to 2020. She earned her Bach­e­lor’s degree in Film Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­dade Fed­eral de São Carlos (UFSCar) in her home coun­try Brazil, before com­plet­ing a Master’s degree in Médi­a­tion Cul­turelle at the Uni­ver­sité de Liège, Bel­gium, and a second M.A. in Cu­ra­to­r­ial Stud­ies at the Städelschule and Goethe Uni­ver­sity in Frank­furt. In the winter se­mes­ter 2023-24 she had a teach­ing as­sign­ment at the Jo­hannes Guten­berg Uni­ver­sity Mainz on the topic “De­vour­ing Brazil­ian Film His­to­ries.”

teix­eira[at]tfm.​uni-​frankfurt.​de