Join us for a lecture by Patrícia Mourão de Andrade, Postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Arts of the State University of Campinas, Brazil, and Visiting Scholar in the Film and Media Cultures Program at the Graduate Center at CUNY.
This presentation on Brazilian visual artist Lygia Pape examines her film work during the harshest years of the country’s dictatorship, situating it within the political and cultural debates of the period—especially those related to experimentalism and counterculture. After establishing herself as a leading figure of Neoconcretism and amid the intensification of the dictatorship, Pape’s practice entered a phase of radical experimentation. Working in low-budget, amateur formats such as Super 8 and 16 mm, she embraced film as the main vehicle for what Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa called the “experimental exercise of freedom.” Moving beyond the usual interpretations that foreground Neoconcretism in Pape’s art, this talk proposes her engagement with film culture as a key framework for understanding the broader significance of her work during these decades.
