Regina Silveira by Claudia Saldanha, 2024

The emergence of photography in the 19th century and the evolution of subsequent technologies that support the photosensitive recording of images have changed the way we make and perceive art. These techniques, as Walter Benjamin well understood, have made it possible to incorporate both time and space into later works, either by crystallizing the moment or by recording movement. With the new means of producing and reproducing images, manual and artisanal skills have become less prominent.

In 1968, South Korean artist Nam June Paik first used portable video equipment to capture images from inside a taxi, allowing artists to use less professional and specific visual recording equipment. Most of the work produced by the first generation of video artists was concerned with recording the performative gesture – the confrontation between the camera and the body. As the American critic Rosalind Krauss suggests, “the artist’s body is placed between two machines – the camera and the monitor – to produce an instantaneous image, like a Narcissus looking into a mirror”.1

The intense production of art films in the 1960s, as well as the experiments with the medium of video opened up a new field of activity. Regina Silveira, Anna Bella Geiger, Ivens Machado, Letícia Parente and others experimented with the new magnetic medium using equipment brought from the United States by Jom Tob Azulay and Walter Zanini, then director of the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo.

Fernando Cocchiarale reveals in a relevant account that some videos by Sonia Andrade and Anna Bella Geiger, as well as Versus, by Ivens Machado, which were part of the first video art exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 1975, took only three days to make. “Video art didn’t seduce us because of its international emergence or its technological temptation. While we didn’t know how to operate its devices, we knew perfectly well how to explore them critically and expand the field of our poetic experimentation”2

Then came the advent of new image capture and editing technology, which provided immense flexibility in terms of the cost and time previously spent on editing and sound. Artists had better working conditions and no longer had to record performances in real time, in a single shot and with a fixed camera. The resulting harmony between image and movement expanded the scope and language of contemporary Brazilian art.
The filmmaking experiments with super-8 and 16mm were incorporated into the process of investigation and discovery, as Arlindo Machado aptly analyzes:The minimum was also the maximum. Since the power of the work could not lie in the sophistication of the expressive or technological resources, all creative effort was concentrated on the performance of the body that offered itself to the camera. The arrival of new video equipment meant not only autonomy from the means of image production and reproduction, but above all an exercise in freedom of language and expression.3

For Regina Silveira, being a multimedia artist in the Brazilian art scene of the 1970s provided a distance from traditional media and emphasized processes. In her text Meios e Ideias (2010), the artist suggests that: The imagery of this production, both national and international, devoured the world of printed media, appropriated images of all kinds, competed with communication and opened itself up to the greatest hybridization with other areas of knowledge… On the table were the art/life binomial and the questioning of the limits of art… By taking on a critical discourse, the artist sought to embody the entire circuit.

Having started her career as a painter in Porto Alegre, Regina Silveira believes that studying with Iberê Camargo set her on a path of transformation marked by oscillations between figurative art and abstraction. At the same time, she studied wood-cutting with Francisco Stockinger and lithography with Marcello Grassmann. Printmaking remained a major, underlying language, now repurposed for various media.

Later, through a scholarship, she attended a course in Art History at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in Madrid, part of which was taught at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Her European period, extended after the course, gave Regina Silveira the opportunity to meet artists with a constructive matrix, some of whom were working on the first manifestations of computer art, where others were closer to the Fluxus group. It was during this time that she moved away from representation and began a series of geometric works, either on paper or made from industrial materials, in which color and form are prominent. These works were made partly in Brazil and partly in Puerto Rico, where she traveled with the Spanish artist Julio Plaza. Both Silveira and Plaza had been invited to teach at the Mayaguez campus of the University of Puerto Rico, where they stayed for four years. The Labyrinths albums, with their spaces organized in perspective and in a new order driven by illusion, as well as her first experiments with appropriated photographic images, are from her first moments in Puerto Rico.

During her frequent trips to New York, she came into contact with conceptual artists working and living there, and in the early 1970s she participated with some of these and other artists from different latitudes in a mail art exhibition on the Mayaguez campus, which was undoubtedly a pioneer in the network of exchange of small-format works.

After 1973, Regina Silveira settled in São Paulo, where she taught at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP) and at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo (USP). In her classes, she mixed industrial graphic media with traditional printmaking, breaking paradigms and incorporating photography and photomechanics into her work.

In her early videos – Objetoculto (1976), Campo e artifício (1977), Videologia (1978), A arte de desenhar (1980) and Morfas (1981) – gesture drives the scene in short actions. Made under precarious and vulnerable conditions, like virtually all the videos made during this period, they register an ephemeral event. In Objetoculto, fragments of an incomprehensible narrative can be seen through a crack in a television set. In Campo e artifício, the artist’s hand explores an area where the action is supposed to take place. In Artifício, a layer of adhesive tape cut into strips and covered with adhesive letters is removed until word and concept disappear. In Videologia, a gun emerges after a gesture of cleaning and inking an offset matrix. In A arte de desenhar, hands perform “rude” gestures reminiscent of an academic drawing class. In Morfas, a very close-up camera captures details of everyday objects in a sequence of enigmatic perspectives, rendering the scene highly expressive.

From 1988 on, Regina Silveira began her site-specific installation works, created as graphic patterns or shadows that were projected or grafted onto different architectures and environments.

In the 2000s, the artist started making videos again, integrating them into works such as Lunar, from 2003, her first video installation, and Mil e um dias (2007/2011). It was also at this time that her interest in urban space emerged, expressed through the use of animations projected on city walls, shifting the action to large gables and facades, with dynamic, nocturnal projections. With these same characteristics, she creates Superhero (Night and Day) in 1997, Transit in 2001, Surveillance and Cartoon in 2015.

According to Regina Silveira, the last videos of this phase gave rise to subsequent technical partnerships that have become part of her career, which makes particular use of technological means, developed by an “artist who is not a specialist in any medium, but who is willing to make use of any know-how and any procedure that suits her projects”.4

It is Arlindo Machado, once again, who reminds us that the emergence of video radically altered the fate of the technical images produced over the following decades. Video became the most radical of these images, producing a definitely contemporary iconography. “The radical experience of fragmentation and hybridity was a response to the attempts at historical totalization and synthesis by previous generations obsessed with the utopian project of building a national identity and a project for the country”.5

Regina Silveira’s work reflects her search for this hybridity, using non-traditional means to produce art. In this way, she unveils a fascinating research whose apparent simplicity covers a multifaceted repertoire of historical references. Using resources from sophisticated technologies, and moving through various languages and procedures – from drawing to video, from engraving to installation, from objects to light and shadow projections – Regina Silveira’s work invites us to reflect deeply on art and graphic thinking.

Claudia Saldanha

With a master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Pratt Institute, New York, and a doctorate’s degree in Visual Arts from UERJ (State University of Rio de Janeiro), Claudia Saldanha is an Assistant Professor of Art History at UERJ and Director of Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro.

With experience in managing cultural institutions and organizing exhibitions, seminars and art teaching programs, she worked as the curator of the following exhibitions: Paulo Roberto Leal – Espaços Articulados (Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, 2015); Paulo Werneck – Muralista Brasileiro (Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, 2008; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2011; Caixa Cultural de Brasília, 2011; Museum of Modern Art of Recife, 2014; Museu de Arte da Pampulha, 2014); Da Matéria Nasce a Forma – Paulo Roberto Leal (Museumof Contemporary Art of Niterói, 2007); Abrigo Poético – Diálogos com Lygia Clark (Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói, 2006); Márcia X.,(Weisser Elephant Gallery, Berlin, 2006); and of projects such as Atelier FINEP, at Paço Imperial, and the 1st Mostra Rio Arte Contemporânea at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro.

1 KRAUSS, Rosalind. The originality of the avant garde and other modernist myths. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986.
2 SECRETARIA DE ESTADO DE CULTURA DO RIO DE JANEIRO. Portfolio – Revista da Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage.
3 MACHADO, Arlindo. A arte do vídeo. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988.
4 NAVAS, Adolfo Montejo. Regina Silveira. Milão: Charta Books, 2010. 5 MACHADO, ArlindA arte do vídeo. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988.

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