Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca
Estás vendo coisas / You are seeing things
2016
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Estás vendo coisas (You are seeing things), 2016. Film still.
Originally commissioned for the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial, the film Estás vendo coisas / You are seeing things by Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca depicts the subculture of Brega music, a fusion of American Hip Hop, Brazilian techno and Caribbean reggaeton that emerged in North Eastern Brazil over the last decade. Part anthropological documentary and part musical the film speaks about the realities of Brazil with its enormous social and economic tensions.
Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca investigate how inherited aesthetic judgements differ across social classes in developing economies. Their collaborative practice operates between documentary and art, making use of familiar narrative forms in order to ask fundamental questions related to the actual social and political value of art, who it is made for and why. Creating series of photographs, videos, collage and installations they collect accepted forms of visual cultural production and bring to an equal level of presentation diverse and contradictory elements of reality in order to destabilize embedded hierarchies, evincing questions of taste, tradition, race, class, belonging and status not immediately visible.