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Luis Camnitzer:    Letter from Porto Alegre ( II )
With an investment of six million dollars and the presentation of more than 900 works by almost 300 artists in eleven enormous premises, the First Mercosur Biennial arrives on the scene amid a burst of fanfare. The city of Porto Alegre, which has embarked upon an impressive plan to rehabilitate buildings, was already in the process of dedicating some of the buildings to culture. Enterprises interested in Mercosur helped with the renovation of enormous depots and port warehouses, providing an estimate total of 24,000 square metres. The Mercosur Biennial included several exhibition spaces rivalling those of an international museum, which deserve to remain on a permanent basis rather than just being fitted out for a couple of months every two years. The Ulbra Space, an old department store, has an ideal architecture for a museum, and was impeccably restored for the occasion. The old gas factory (Gasómetro), another significant locale, was also used for the Biennial. But it is not clear whether Porto Alegre, with a population of around 2 million inhabitants, can become a cultural center of sufficient importance to occupy so many square metres of culture on a continuous basis.
Espaço Ulbra
Ulbra Space
Indeed, the Biennial project itself was so ambitious that the opening date had to be postponed. Ironically for a project aimed at abolishing trade frontiers, customs problems delayed the exhibits from Argentina, Chile and Venezuela. On October 2nd, the date scheduled for the full inauguration, there was a formal ceremony and the opening of two shows (Xul Solar, to whom the Biennial was dedicated, and an exhibition of Latin American works from Brazilian collections). The other inaugurations were spread out over the following week, causing frustration for many visitors who had to leave early. This is also the reason why this article is limited to observations of a more general nature.

The Mercosur Biennial is a product of the strange combination of contradictory factors which, due to a special situation here, seem to be functioning to the benefit of art. Porto Alegre is the only city ruled by the Workers' Party (now in its third term). It is the capital of Rio Grande, an affluent state (I do not know if the comments were in earnest or in jest, but I heard someone speaking about a secession), governed by another much more conservative party which maintains tense relations with the city's administration. The municipal administrative building was decorated with large flags denouncing the state policy towards municipal employees and illustrating the mutual disagreements. The geographical position of Porto Alegre, which is relatively close to Uruguay and Argentina, coupled with a possible desire to compete with São Paulo and Curitiba (both host cities of the other Brazilian biennials), probably helped establish a precarious truce.

The business initiative which in fact launched the project also influenced the spirit of collaboration. The meta-commercial objective (it was not art which was on sale here but all the rest produced by the countries from which the art comes) meant that the neo-liberalist policy could tolerate leftist positions. The Biennial was dedicated (in addition to Xul Solar, as noted above) to the art critic and theorist Mário Pedrosa, who was co-founder of the Workers' Party, and was organized into aspects which reflected the art of resistance characterizing the decades of the l960s and l970s. There was thus a mixture of politicized erudition and academic rigor within a government political agenda which sought to establish pacts with a business profit-oriented enterprise.

Usina do Gasômetro
Usina do Gasômetro
The business sector had two good reasons for launching the project: a law which allows 75 per cent of funds invested in the promotion of culture to be deducted from taxes; and a need to support and consolidate the image of the member countries of Mercosur. In statements published in the economic supplement of Zero Hora [ 1 ], Justo Werlang, a businessman, collector and president of the Biennial, stressed the mutual advantages of this arrangement: The government is taking advantage of the efficiency of the corporations and the latter in turn are benefiting from being able to associate their trade marks with the quality of the art. Art is not a matter of combining a picture with a sofa in your sitting room, but requires intelligence and cultural synthesis. Cultural integration goes hand in hand with the expansion of the market.
Justo Werlang
Justo Werlang
These remarks describe the philosophy of the North American corporations. We are hearing here the voice of Philip Morris or Mobil Oil, which in the United States are already playing the role normally carried out in other countries by a Ministry of Culture. In this sense, the words of Werlang can seem to represent a certain kind of mercenary spirit. But they also have a different tone. In the regional market context, an expansion of the market means resistance against the North American economic hegemony, and symbolizes a kind of regionalist anti-imperialist capitalism, one of the underlying ideological elements of Mercosur. This is a commercial-ideological phenomenon, which is disconcerting because it is new. It is both surprising and logical, therefore, that Frederico Morais, the general curator of the Biennial, should begin the theoretical justification of the event in the spirit of Marta Traba, by citing Henry Kissinger's insult that nothing important can ever come from the South, where history was never made [ 2 ]. Morais said: The first and main task of this Mercosur Visual Arts Biennial will be... to initiate the urgent task of rewriting the history of art from a Latin American standpoint or, at least, a standpoint which is not exclusively Euro-North American. The reality of this urgency was made clear a few days later with Clinton's visit to Brazil. His team of advisers requested that the entire country, with its l60 million inhabitants, should adopt Washington time, by turning their clocks back one hour, to enable Clinton to fit an extra hour into his agenda [ 3 ].
Frederico Morais
Frederico Morais
Accustomed as we are to the ideological bipolarity of the past, from which both Morais, as the project's theorist, and myself, as reader of his text, are emerging, such cohabitation between the left and neoliberalism is quite unusual. The integration of such ideas with the mercantile project places us before a choice between possible market expansions. It is accepted that such expansion is both proper and inevitable and that this particular expansion of the market is better than the other because it is mine. It does not matter if I benefit personally in economic terms, just as it does not matter in terms of my own physical well-being whether my football team scores more goals than the other. What seems to matter is the satisfaction which I gain from the symbolic attribution - symbolic, since it is not a matter of ownership - made to my market or my football team. We are thus being led to abandon ideological analysis in favor of a commercial chauvinism or, more exactly, to allow trade to exploit our base and primitive chauvinistic instincts. Of course we will choose regional trade expansion as a means of defence against economic globalization. In the final analysis, globalization threatens our sense of identity, whereas regionalism seems to affirm it. It is precisely this schematic vieew of things which allows so many ideological contradictions to co-exist. And Coca Cola, realizing that none of this can really affect it, was one of the enterprises which sponsored the Biennial. From February 1st l996, the company abolished the separation between its national and international activities and assumed its identity as a global corporation. According to its general manager, the international and national labels which used to provide an adequate description of the company's trading activities are no longer applicable [ 4 ].

The continental union of Latin America had until now been a utopia which went beyond the geographical frontiers and the nationalist concepts imposed by Europe in the nineteenth century. While nationalism had orginally been fostered to bring people together within the same identity, its function slowly deteriorated until it became an instrument of exclusion. It was the deteriorated version which took root in Latin America, and the frontiers drawn by the empire remained as a divine and unquestionable imposition, sealing the colonial fate of our countries. So far, Latin Americanism has been the antidote to chauvinism.

 
Partial trade regionalism is threatening to destroy this antidote. During the recent visit by President Clinton to Latin America, the North American press commented on the Brazilian opposition to Clinton's globalist trade policy, to be explained by the fact that Brazil wants to establish itself as the leader of Mercosur so as to enable it to compete with the United States. Earlier, Argentina had already evoked its own leadership. In the magazine Scientific American, the Argentinian Government published an advertisement promoting its country, which it said offered an ideal and varied climate, a European cultural atmosphere, a country which hoped to act as a supplier of engineers, researchers and highly skilled labour to staff the companies and institutes that would establish the strategic associations needed to generate knowledge and products for Mercosur as a whole [ 5 ].
Máximo Souza
Máximo Souza

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Notes
1. Porto Alegre, 28 September.
2. Meeting of foreign ministers of the continent in Viña del Mar, l969, cited by Morais in »Projeto Curaduria«.
3. The New York Times, l5 October l997. It was also interesting that the Associated Press reported that during Clinton's stop over in Venezuela that President Caldera praised him as the president of the most important country of the world and said that his visit would put Caracas at the center of world attention. In contrast to the importance attached to the trip by Caldera, Terence Hunt, in an AOL News report of l2 October l997, said that for Clinton, the trip offered a welcome escape from problems in Washington about the financial irregularities in the Democrat election campaign and the embarrassing questions about his alleged acts of sexual harassment. During his visit to Buenos Aires on the same trip, the balcony of the Casa Rosada presidential palace, from where Clinton addressed the Argentinians, was described as the place from which Madonna sang her Evita song.
4. The New York Times, l3 January l996, p.35.
5. April l995.
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