The diversity that emerges from encounters
February 2025. The 15th edition of Cine Esquema Novo – Brazilian Audiovisual Art (CEN) in Porto Alegre invites us to celebrate encounters. An event like CEN offers several of these moments of confluence. Films meet cinemas and exhibition spaces. Artists meet audiences and other artists. The public meet the cultural spaces. The city meet the liveliness and vitality offered by all these small and huge encounters. It is worth remembering that less than a year ago, a large part of Porto Alegre and its cultural spaces were underwater due to the most extreme flood in the history of Rio Grande do Sul. This event makes these moments of audiovisual art collective enjoyment even more meaningful.
Looking at the body of works that make up this year’s Brazil Competitive Exhibition, one can see there is an intention and need to expand connections between artists and audiences with a diverse, complex, and contemporary Brazil. In this search, once again, Cine Esquema Novo – Brazilian Audiovisual Art fulfills the role it sets out to play in every edition: to exercise curatorial freedom and present a selection of works that dialogue in a very particular way with the visual arts and cinema — in singular ways that, without concessions, address themes that inevitably lead us to reflect.
CEN expresses this freedom with diverse voices and themes presenting visions of nature, changes in the urban fabric and their impact on society, identity issues, new and old families, and other contemporary issues. Guided by the unique attention of each artist, these apparently simple propositions take us into the unknown while welcoming and captivating us, highlighting how unique everyday life can be.
Based on the most diverse formats of production and exhibition, reflected in film, the appropriation of images, expanded cinema, video installation, and cinema, the proposals traverse places, desires, solitudes, subtleties, screams, and silences, assimilating and dissolving established structures, marking a group of authors who find their strength in images, its relationship with spaces and their audiences, maintaining a dialogue with their own time.
This grand intended celebration will be carried out based on the imagined relationship of the 49 works (all produced between 2022 and 2025) that make up this exhibition, among themselves and with the audience, with the artists, with the festival team and with the other exhibitions and activities that make up the program. And this celebration will be eternalized through reflections, exchanges, debates, conjunctions, collaborations, and anything else that may arise from this confluence.
We invite everyone who feels inspired to participate in this meeting. May this edition again be fertile ground for developing Brazilian audiovisual art.
Dirnei Prates, Kamyla Belli, Jaqueline Beltrame, Ramiro Azevedo – Curadores Mostra Competitiva Brasil
Check out the Artist Notebooks below:
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