6th Mercosur Biennial: The Third Bank of the River
Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro
In João Guimarães Rosa’s 1962 story “The Third Bank of the River,” a man decides, suddenly and
inexplicably, to live on a boat in the middle of the river on whose banks he had previously lived an
apparently normal life with his family. The boat, also inexplicably, remains stationary in this location. After
a certain amount of time, his family comes to accept his silent presence, and he thus constitutes a third
bank to this river, changing its cultural ecology forever through his stubborn presence.
This metaphor of a third bank resonates in many levels with a deeply human and contemporary need to
move beyond the binary oppositions that structure our lives. After a 20 th century filled with zero-sum
games between left and right, formal and social, local and global, right and wrong, old and new, or any
number of similar mutually-destructive constructions, the third bank opens the possibility for an
independent perspective, an in-between space from which both alternatives can be seen, judged, and
considered. The third bank is thus a radically independent space, a space free of dogma or imposition, a
place of observation. The third bank also brings together the previous antagonists into a single field of
discussion. When Heidegger discussed the image of a bridge, he could be speaking of the third bank:
“The bridge […] does not just connect banks that were already there. The banks emerge as banks only
as the bridge crosses the stream […] It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood.
The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.”1 In a mental landscape, the bridge is the
third position that brings together the two opposed ideologies, allowing a critical distance from both, and a
possibility to see them both as part of the same system.
How does this metaphor of the Third Bank apply to the 6 th Mercosur Biennial?2 In order to answer this
question we first need to analyze the history and challenges faced by the Biennial in its ten years of
existence.3 The Mercosur Biennial emerged in 1996 as a regional alternative to the São Paulo Biennial,
an attempt by business and artistic leaders in the city of Porto Alegre to establish their city as a cultural
pole. In a laudable strike against regional chauvinism, they decided to take the southern cone of South
America as their cultural area, taking the name of the recently-establish trading block, Mercosur, as their
frame of reference. While this term was not without its problems, considering the failure of Mercosur to
create effective regional integration, and the invisibility of this term outside South America, it did set an
Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (1952), in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper
Colophon, 1975), p.152.
2
I use the term ‘metaphor’ rather than ‘theme’ as I see the third bank as a location from which to observe rather than
a theme to be illustrated.
3
See Gaudêncio Fidelis, Uma História Concisa da Bienal do Mercosul (Porto Alegre: Fundação Bienal do Mercosul,
2005).
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area for action that was both regional and international.
The curator of the 1st Mercosur Biennial,
Frederico Morais, took the challenge to organize and structure an alternative and non-Eurocentric history
of Latin American art, describing ideological vectors into which art from different Latin American countries
were placed.4 Subsequent biennials adopted a more traditional approach, appointing curators from each
country of the Mercosur block, plus Chile, and one other invited country. Over time, the inevitable effect of
this structure was a predominance of Brazilian artists and paradigms and the repeated selection of the
same curators and artists, particularly from the smaller countries. The relative lack of knowledge and
contact among Latin American countries make it particularly difficult to develop an integrated curatorial
discourse for a project on this scale. Over the years, the Mercosur Biennial has created a unique space in
Latin America to bring together artists from different nations and contexts, with the result that Porto Alegre
today has probably had more exposure to Latin American art from more countries than any other city in
Latin America. The challenge is how to find a structure that does not homogenize different cultural
expressions into one block, and respects the particularities and differences contained within the continent.
The challenges of the 6th Biennial were posed on three fronts: the need for a new curatorial/geographic
model, the need to further develop its relationship to its audience, and a structural reform in the
administration and management of the project to guarantee its future. For this first issue of geographic
range, the first decision taken by the biennial leadership was to hire a non-Brazilian chief curator, and to
give this curator the freedom to propose a new model. While the leaders of the biennial were keen to
expand the geographic range of the biennial and further internationalize it, the context for this decision
was the saturation of international biennials all over the world over the last decade, and the relative
similarity among them. The pre-existing regional structure of the biennial had simultaneously limited its
range and protected it from becoming another stop on the international contemporary art circuit. This
question therefore implicitly contained the issue of who the biennial should serve, a local or international
audience? By truly serving a local audience, could the biennial establish a new model or paradigm that
would thus also distinguish it in the international arena?
This geographic question inevitably involved a reformation of the curatorial structure. If the two available
choices appeared to be closed, national representation on one hand or global consensus on the other, the
metaphor of the third bank of the river provided a new way to think about this issue. What if there was an
intermediate model? What if we could find a model to discuss cultural geography rather than political
geography? What if the artist rather than the national curator or the diplomat were allowed to draw the
map? The challenge would be to find a model that was still rooted in the Mercosur region, but that was
4
This approach appeared years later in the exhibition Heterotopías, curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor
Olea at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. A revised version was presented at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2004
under the title Inverted Utopias. To my knowledge, no acknowledgement was made of this previous application of a
model of vectors or constellations within Latin American art, a symptom of the invisibility of Latin American
initiatives within the ever-‘discovering’ US curatorial structure.
not limited by it. The solution was to discuss a biennial from rather than of Mercosur (una bienal desde, a
partir del Mercosur). This way the model could sidestep some limitations of the previous model while still
maintaining a legitimate and dynamic connection to the place of enunciation, a region with precious few
mechanisms for regional cultural collaboration. The structure of the 6th biennial reflects this concern, from
the Conversas project, in which artists from the Mercosur countries invite other artists based on affinity
rather than geography, to the Zona Franca project, which privileges the vision of four curators by allowing
them to bring projects to Porto Alegre, to Três Fronteiras, in which international artists are brought to the
triple border region between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay to reflect on the complexity of the
international relations among the Mercosur countries. Clearly, for this project to work, the curators had to
be freed from their traditional role of representing their countries, and be given the freedom to work on
each project without limiting the geographical range of their choices.
While this model of a Biennial in a third space between the local and the regional would seem to open
new horizons for the exhibition, the question still remains of how to connect to a predominantly local
audience rather than an assumed audience of international art world insiders. For this sixth edition of the
biennial, the figure of pedagogical curator was created to ensure the integration of these concerns into the
structure of the biennial from the outset. The artist and educator Luis Camnitzer was appointed for this
position and developed an extensive pedagogical program. The program is based on two fundamental
principles: on the one hand it considers the visitor as a potential creator already charged with content
rather than an empty vessel to be filled with information, and the second principle is that artworks are
channels of communication to be understood actively rather than objects to be consumed passively. The
pedagogical program is based on a model of conversation to construct meaning. In this sense, it also
attempts to create a third bank between the intentions expressed in the artwork and the content brought to
the work by the viewer. This ‘third bank’, dependent on both the work and the viewer, is where meaning
and content are generated.
The pedagogical program was developed through initial feedback sessions with teachers, students and
mediators who had participated in previous editions of the biennial. It is worth noting that since its origins
the Mercosur Biennial had placed a very strong focus on education and outreach, that makes it unique
among international biennials. In this sense, the pedagogical program could be built on an already strong
infrastructure. The innovation of this pedagogical program developed by Camnitzer was in the philosophy
adopted, and also in the anticipation of processes. Where education had traditionally been one of the last
programs to be developed, now it was the first. As schools were one of the primary audiences for the
biennial, with 240,000 visits planned on the free bus program, developing materials for teachers became a
priority. In March 2007, the start of the school year, packets were distributed to every state, municipal and
private school in Rio Grande do Sul with pedagogical exercises based on twenty artworks that would be in
the Biennial exhibition in September. These exercises were designed to encourage critical thinking, and
could be enacted in any classroom with very few resources. By introducing some of the ideas behind the
artworks, the intention was that the visit to the exhibition in September could be the culmination, rather
than the start, of an educational process.
The biennial exhibition itself will also contain various mechanisms to allow visitors to better gain access to
the ideas behind the artworks. Some twenty artists were invited to participate in a program in which they
agree to a certain level of engagement and interaction with the visitors of the biennial. These artists will
provide a short statement of intention relating to their artwork. These statements will be placed on a
‘pedagogical station’ near the work, a kiosk that will centralize information about the artist and artwork.
Visitors will then be invited to provide their own thoughts about the artwork that will then be placed on the
station alongside the artist’s intention. The aim here is to create mechanisms for feedback and also shift
the responsibility for interpretation onto the visitor.
Once again, the interest is in deactivating the
‘like/don’t like’ judgment that is the most common way of looking at art, in a favor of a more critical position
in which the artwork is seen as an operation to be understood rather than a product to be consumed.
In the exhibition, the role of the mediator is central. The mediators are 200 college students, the majority
of them have worked on previous biennials. For the 6th biennial, the training of these mediators was
changed, placing less emphasis on art history, and more on techniques to deal with the audience and
respond to their questions. Taking concepts from Paulo Freire’s pedagogical philosophy, the mediators’
role is to construct meaning with the visitor, rather than transfer information from one to the other. The
mediators will also visit school classrooms as part of their training, in order to better understand the dayto-day reality of the teachers and students who make up the majority of visitors to the exhibition. All of
these educational strategies are an integral part of the biennial. While any large-scale project is full of
risks and difficulties, this edition of the biennial does try to move the emphasis away from the authorial
voice of the curatorial framework toward the intimate conversation that can occur among artworks,
between an artwork and a visitor, and ultimately between that visitor and his or her environment.