Repairing a lost decade: reassembling the São Paulo Biennials of the 1970s
Dr Isobel Whitelegg University of Leicester International Fellowship
MAIO 2025
The 1969 international boycott of São Paulo’s prominent bi-annual art exhibition brought widespread attention to the oppression enforced by Brazil’s 1964–85 military regime. This landmark artist-led protest led to the prolonged withdrawal of a swathe of participating nations and is now an essential reference for studies of Brazilian art. But what happened at the São Paulo Biennial itself during a decade long boycott? Contrary to international expectations, its 1970s editions were populated by numerous site-speci c, performative, participatory works. Proposed by groups from diverse Brazilian regions, these addressed concerns that are now more relevant than ever – including accelerated urban development, widening social division, ecological degradation and the destruction of Indigenous territories. In her groundbreaking project, Isobel Whitelegg repairs gaps in the archive and explores the overlooked question of what happened at the São Paulo Biennial during the decade-long boycott document traditional media and individual creators. Most of the groups also exceed habitual art world frames of reference: many were formed solely to participate in the Biennial and included not only artists but also anthropologists, scientists and teachers. However, these same live, interdisciplinary and excentric qualities grant each collective project the capacity to o er a nuanced and decentred perspective on the shifting contexts navigated by artists, institutions and others at speci c moments during a complex and highly changeable period. Joining the boycott was not a clear-cut decision for artists living and working in Brazil, where taking part was viewed as a potential strategy for actively expressing dissent. The possibility of critical participation increased in the early seventies, when the Biennial introduced open submission systems and encouraged collective research oriented proposals for works to be realised in situ within each exhibition. These works, however, were realised during a decade marked by periods of surveillance, violence and censorship, and episodes of institutional instability. Their reception was limited by a post-boycott decline in international contact, and their collective, ephemeral nature tested an archival system built to I aim to catalyse new research on a ‘lost decade’ of Biennial history by repairing and reactivating the memory of collective works and reassembling the contexts in which they were produced and made public. This generative approach is possible thanks to a partnership with the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo’s excellent archive and research centre. As well as mapping and bringing together traces and clues across its holdings, I will locate and create new resources, which the Arquivo Bienal will incorporate and make available to future users, and work with Brazilian scholars to co-author new interdisciplinary narratives, articulating these works’ contemporary relevance within and beyond art-centred disciplines
link:https://www.flipsnack.com/leverhulmetrust/leverhulme-trust-may-2025-newsletter/full-view.html?page=15