The critic and curator Fernando Cocchiarale reviews O Pão Nosso de cada dia [Our Daily Bread], the series by Anna Bella Geiger. In his opinion, the artist’s other more characteristic works, such as her maps, express the artist’s concept of localization, art’s place in the scheme of things, and the disparities between the cultures of the periphery and the center. When those relationships cannot be simplified, the artist resorts to clichés and languages such as video with which to capture the conflict between discussions about the cultural reality and the lack of resources and limitations of the mass culture and its myths.

The Polish-Brazilian visual artist Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933) used a wide range of different media in her work. She first made a name for herself in art circles in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s as a draftswoman and printmaker. In the 1970s she explored a variety of languages (video, photography, drawing, printmaking, texts, photocopies), and set a precedent with her radical opposition to the art system. During that same period she became an adjunct teacher at the MAM-Rio (Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro) and, as a result of that academic experience, created the Circumambulatio event. She subsequently showed her work at the MAM-Rio’s Sala Experimental, and became a contributor to Malasartes magazine. She was among the group of artists in Rio de Janeiro who were researching new visual technologies during that critical decade of the 1970s, including Ivens Machado.

An essential document for understanding the environment in which video emerged as an artistic medium in Brazil in the 1970s is the essay by Walter Zanini “Vídeo-arte: uma poética aberta” [see doc. no. 1110892]. The author focuses on I Encontro de Vídeo Arte, the exhibition at the MIS (Museu da Imagem e do Som) in São Paulo, December 13-20, 1978. This was the first major event in Brazil to introduce a variety of experimental works that used technical media to produce audiovisual images.