Apoie FUTUROS

Designed to foster connections, networking and career opportunities, and create solidarity between participants, the program offers capacity building sessions that address digital skills, discursive activities that highlight artistic practice and social issues, while providing showcasing opportunities that transcend the north-south geographic axis.

The Amplify Program arrived in Brazil last year, through a partnership with Oi Futuro. During late 2021 and early 2022, the Program’s activities were carried out and presented by three of the most important digital and sound arts festivals: Novas Frequências, Amazônia Mapping and Multiplicidade. In this unprecedented format, Oi Futuro brings back its partnership with Amplify bringing two converging proposals at the Cultural Center. In the first of them, the Brazilian artists Bella and Keila Sankofa and the Argentinean Nina Corti (also known as Qoa) will work on an artistic residency that is open to the public. This creative process will culminate on the 27th of July, in an unprecedented audiovisual installation made from the collection of electronic and telecommunications equipment at Oi Futuro.

According to Chico Dub, artistic director at Oi Futuro and also responsible for curating the exhibition, “artistic residencies are usually developed in spaces outside the exhibition environment, such as ateliers and studios. Here, we bring the development of the work to the center of the spotlight, in some way spectacularizing and, why not, problematizing this trend that is spreading among art and culture institutions around the world. Added to the resignification of part of the collection of Oi Futuro, this theme opens up extremely promising paths of artistic development, promising and, without any doubt, reflections on the paths of art and contemporary narratives around communicability”.

In addition to the residency/installation, an exhibition will be displayed with 15 video works produced during the Amplify program in 2021 and 2022 produced by 15 duos of artists from Brazil, Argentina, Canada and the United Kingdom. The exhibition of these works opens as a “teaser” on July 13th. Two weeks later it reopens in an installation format with scenography signed by the art director Breno Pineschi.

“As these works were developed by festivals during the pandemic, what you see in most cases are audiovisual presentations recorded in studio; works that sought a kind of simulacrum of the real to bring some kind of breath to the public in a situation of social isolation”, completes Chico Dub.

For Victor D’Almeida, executive manager at Oi Futuro, “it is unusual for a Cultural Center to assume an open residency process in its galleries, revealing to the public each stage of the artists’ creation, in addition to bringing a panorama with 15 works by artists from four Amplify participating countries. This courageous move by the participants summarizes the reasons why Oi Futuro, alongside the British Council, carried out the Brazilian edition of Amplify. With such occupation, we continue to expand the spaces of exchange, production and visibility for more and more creators in the digital arts”.

Launched in 2018, AMPLIFY Digital Arts Initiative (Amplify D.A.I) is a‌ ‌transcontinental‌ ‌circuit‌ ‌of‌ ‌festivals,‌ ‌events‌ ‌and‌ ‌institutions‌ . The Program is a joint initiative of the British Council in partnership with MUTEK Montréal, MUTEK Buenos Aires, Somerset House Studios, Artlab and Oi Futuro. The program is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, INAMU and Fundación Williams.