Video Room: Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca

MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand and the Ministry of Tourism present, from August 26th to November 13th, 2022, in the 2nd basement floor of the museum, Video Room: Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, which marks the national premiere of Fala da Terra (2022). Curated by Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator at MASP, the video presents the work of Coletivo Banzeiros, a theater group composed of members of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST, in Portuguese) who live and work between the rural and urban areas of Marabá and Parauapebas, in the southeast of Pará. The work is part of the artists’ solo exhibition at the New Museum, in New York, since June 30th.

Working together for more than a decade, Bárbara Wagner (Brasília, Brazil, 1980) and Benjamin de Burca (Munich, Germany, 1975) have been producing films and video installations in dialogue with other sound and performance artists. The duo has developed a research method based on documentary research and observation, constructing the direction, the script, the costumes, and the soundtrack in collaboration with the protagonists of each project.

Fala da Terra seeks to understand the processes of construction of culture and collective identity in rural Brazil, where questions concerning origin, survival, and productivity revolve around the land. In reference to the radical propositions of playwrights Augusto Boal (1931-2009) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), the spectators are involved in a process of awareness. In this new work, the duo of artists reveals their commitment to the struggle for change.

For curator Guilherme Giufrida, the short film ‘establishes the importance of cooperation and collectivity between farmers and actors, in the field or in the dressing room. The enemies are represented by archetypes: the shepherd, the governor, the hitmen, the airplane, and the statue in the department store. In this allegory of social types, the drama of the current Brazilian political dispute is established, as if we could see it all staged there’.