Thinking as Giving Rhythm – Oblique Strategies on programming

In 1975, Brian Eno found himself a few days and several thousand dollars into a studio with nothing to rely on.

It wasn’t that there were no ideas, but perhaps too many (by that time, he was already well-known as one the most innovative experimental musicians and producers of his time). Unsure of what to do with his pre-booked recording hours, Eno started giving himself instructions following a recently acquired habit: a year earlier, he and the artist Peter Schmidt developed a set of “pieces of advice” that would form a deck of cards called “Oblique Strategies.” Part Fluxus exercise, part I Ching, the cards conveyed what its creators named “worthwhile dilemmas” meant to point an “oblique” way out of creative blockage or situations in which one finds themselves in psychological dead-ends. The cards, or rather Eno’s methodology, is foremost a way of circumventing ingrained habits of thought and productivity using tangential thinking.

In 2023, we open another chapter in Pivô’s programming in which everything and nothing will change. Before start telling you what it practically means, I will first pull out one of the Oblique Strategies cards from the deck:

“Don’t break the silence.”

Well, it seems that telling the plans is not the way to go. But, in fact, this card highlights some essential aspects of the art we are fostering and exhibiting this year: it is fond of secrets and won’t explain anything, but it will certainly arouse and convey thought-provoking situations. I will take another card to see where it leads this text:

“Take a break”

Taking a break is exactly what we’re doing. Taking a break from the compulsion of production and lingering towards more durable experiences and exchanges. What does it mean? We are not sure and we like that feeling. Notwithstanding the gained freedom, doing less is hard. As the first card suggested, let’s take a silent moment and focus on the how rather than the what. At this point, our only certainty is that we are investigatingconvivial practices and methodologies so as potential tools for conveying different rhythms. If would ask us to sum our plans up in a hashtag, that would be rhythm. Changing pace as a way to reconsider ways of spending quality time together and create better conditions for ideas to flourish in all their complexity. Resorting to Eno’s cards sounded like a good starting point when thinking about what happens if we reconsider ways to attune instead of apprehend. As with any good oracle, we need an uneven number. I will take the third card then:

“ Repetition is a form of change” 

Changing everything and nothing at all. Changing the pace but not the ethos. We plan to do what we’ve been doing for the last ten years but in a slightly different and more collective way. I now share directorship of the institution with Carolina Camara and Jaqueline Santigo, that bring in their extensive work experience and creative energy to shape this new chapter. We also rely on the talent of Ana Roman our in-house curator and Jessica Gonçalves managing the institutional affairs of the project along with many other collaborators, to find our own oblique strategies to move forward. Pivô’s inaugural show was called “Next time I’d have done It all differently”, and this stands as a motto. The kind of institution and program we managed to run in the slippery and highly creative terrain of the Brazilian culture scene is one that always gave careful consideration to our ethical position and examined how that translates into our output, in other words, acknowledging our programmatical blind-spots and working towards embracing an ever more diverse audience has been a daily practice.

To this end, it seems necessary that in 2023 Pivô shows its growing commitment to creating spaces of learning. According to the Mexican thinker Manuel Callahan, who defines himself as an insurgent learner and convivial researcher, many of the most dynamic and provocative political mobilizations, e.g. Zapatistas, have put “insurgent learning” and “convivial research” at the center of their political process. Specifically, this has meant incorporating spaces of learning next to performing and debating spaces and making learning the articulation of the future in the present. In this sense, our program will be more “auto-generative” and won’t follow a specific grid or theme.  Through juxtaposing varied genres and perspectives, we seek to encourage visitors to themselves participate in thinking together about the urgent problems of our times through critical and artistic lenses. This year we welcome curator Monica Hoff as the coordinator of our research residency program, Pivô Research, with the challenge to bring it closer to its potential as an educational and exchange platform for the many different agents involved in the arts ecosystem as well as a generator of public programming open to anyone who wishes to join our activities.

We will offer no conclusion but an open space into which you need to jump in to experience. The content conveyed announces potential sequels, further developments, or new roads to travel. We won’t be looking back on the already paved ground all the time nor seeking the finished labor of reasoning. Everything that will occupy our physical and digital spaces in 2023 does not follow logically but prismatically slide around each other and what came before, always remaining open to new inputs or changes.

Maybe before sharing what we already know will happen this year I will pull another card, or two, to make it uneven again:

Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list

Courage!

I added the content of the second card to the end of my list. And with this, I pass this text on to the mentioned members of our team, who can pull out their own cards from the deck so we can write this new chapter together.

Fernanda Brenner

—

“Define an area as safe and use it as an anchor”

It is hard to continue a text already in progress. The card I took from Eno’s deck suggests I find, right here, a safe space for navigating. My option is to follow the methodology of the text: to understand the cards as propositions and to answer them.

Safety, a priori, is not the starting point of the 2023 exhibition program. We do not have a guiding theme for the year and are interested in the oblique relations between the programs.

We begin the year with the celebration of 10 years of Bolsa Zum, inaugurating a partnership with the Instituto Moreira Salles. Many artists included in the exhibition, curated by Thyago Nogueira, Danielle Queiroz and Angelo Manjabosco, were invited to propose installation projects for the works presented by the Bolsa. The exhibition questions what is understood as photography and proposes reflections on the status of the image in contemporaneity.

We will have two solo shows in the second semester: Mariana Castillo Deball and Pol Taburet. Mariana has a kaleidoscopic approach to her practice, mediating between science, archaeology, and visual arts and exploring how these fields describe the world. For her first institutional solo show at Pivô, she will create an edition of TO-DAY, a project that consists of a newspaper and a sort of stage, which hosts a fictional character that exists during the 24 hours of the same day, coinciding with the opening of the show, over the years. In Pivô, the character will exist on September 2, marked by the fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro in 2018. Could the safe space, to which the letter I took at the beginning of this text refers, refer to the gaps found by institutions that allow them to continue existing despite the policy of erasing the memory installed in the country?

Parallel to Mariana’s show, Pol Taburet holds his first institutional show in Brazil. The artist declares that the subjects that inhabit his works speak of life and death, of the passage from one state to another. There is no stability or security in front of Taburet’s contorted figures. At Pivô, the artist will present works developed from an artist residency held in Salvador (BA) during the year. He, who already combines, in an iconoclastic way, references that go from his Caribbean origin to traditions and syncretic beliefs related to voodoo and contemporary culture in general, is invited to an immersion in the Afro-Brazilian culture. We do not know what anchors may emerge from this invitation to dislocate between diasporas.

The 2023 program is a proposition for deviation. There are no previous relationships, only a constant invitation to remake our anchors.

Ana Roman

“Get your neck massaged”

When opening Eno’s “deck” I did not realize that his oracle was organized in the format of written messages. At first, I thought I had made a mistake or missed something important. Perhaps it was because the message did not meet my expectations. It was too mundane, an everyday instruction. Just in case, I took another one. To my surprise, it was repeated: “Get your neck massaged”. As lightning never strikes twice in the same place, I interpreted it as a joke and began to find it more and more interesting. I then set off on a reading that was as labyrinthine as it was investigative, holistic and at the same time pragmatic, which now makes a lot of sense. Here is the power of oracles: to turn over without guarantee and in a non-linear way what we take for granted, what we consider safe.

The neck is the part that connects the head to the rest of the body, or the point of union between what we have learned to identify as the space of reason, on the one hand, and the continent reserved for actions, sensations and feelings arising from our life experiences, on the other. The neck would be, therefore, a bridge between them. Metaphorically, a part that authorizes and, at the same time, has the power to dissolve a certain binary understanding of the world – that the head is beyond the body; that the body does not think; that they are things if not different, then separate. The neck, therefore, as the support of tensions and, also, as the one that allows fluidity; as the first place that stiffens when something does not flow. Like an oracle of our well-being. 

To massage it, to do it with one’s own hands, would mean, then, self-care. To inhabit the knot in order to loose it from within, allowing the same energy to circulate in another way. The same, but different. The difference in the same. To think with the chuyma, perhaps the Aymara people would tell us. With the superior entrails – the heart, lungs, liver. To change the rhythm and the movement in order to clear the pathways. To revise oneself from within, to imagine oneself to be different, to reinvent oneself in one’s own form of flow, opening channels to be able to (co)exist differently. Not necessarily remaking the bridge, but the way of crossing it and thus the bridge. It sounds like a song, but it could also be a good omen for an institutional revision. 

This is how this letter came to me, as an irrevocable call to look at itself, slowly and with affection, in the case of the Pivô, understanding itself institutionally as a collective body, non-binary, complex and with diverse desires, having life as the engine of the institution and not its opposite. 

This is also how Pivô Research 2023 is being thought and managed, with many hands, conversations and debates, as a residency program that bets on a more transdisciplinary and porous format, having the diversity of thought and languages, the coexistence, interchange, investigation and collective learning as proposition and methodology. In 2023, Pivô Research is open to the participation of curators, researchers, educators, critics, writers, managers, publishers, artists and other art agents; it broadens the residency modalities and proposes a public program formed by a set of activities that includes classes with guests, conversations with agents in the field, debates, workshops, reading processes from specific actions, open sharing moments, besides the permanent curatorial follow-up to the residents. Therefore, it keeps doing the same, but in a different way, emphasizing the diversity of thoughts and life experiences and the power of the encounter, believing in the counter-pedagogical possibility of the creation and learning processes. 

The changes seem subtle, and they are. But they are equally structural. Like a neck massage.

If there is anything else to say it is: get your neck massaged! Get your neck message!

Mônica Hoff