Flying Under the Radar: A Transcultural Exchange between
Rio de Janeiro and San Francisco, April 2016
Flying Under the Radar will be a five-day interdisciplinary festival of the arts featuring approximately thirty musicians, artists and writers working in an array of media, currently living in either Metropolitan Rio de Janeiro or the San Francisco Bay Area. It will take place in April 2016.
San Francisco and Rio are logical partners with many similarities, physical as well as cultural. Each exists in an extraordinary natural setting, possesses a unique cultural identity, has an important presence in worldwide trade, and boasts a wealth of highly regarded artistic and educational institutions. Of all the common characteristics Rio and San Francisco share, the most salient is the ongoing tradition of accepting outsiders into their midst. From their founding, waves of immigrants from within and without national borders have arrived in these metropolises and their surrounding areas seeking opportunity, and many have found places for themselves in the fabric of urban society. The multicultural, multiethnic populations rising out of hundreds of years of immigration have been instrumental in transforming both of these port cities into crucibles of social change.
In epochs past and present, societies open to outside influences have become sources of widespread innovation; the dynamic nature of opportunity that marks these sorts of societies has always attracted large numbers of individuals involved in the domain of the arts. Throughout their histories Rio and San Francisco have produced, with regularity, extraordinary works of literature and art. Many of the authors of these works are well established but most artists, including those whose work commands much local respect and admiration, remain largely unknown. Quality contributes to renown, but it is rarely the sole factor in determining which artists attain visibility and which do not. This festival will introduce locally valued contributors in specific locales to each other and to the world at large.
For most artists it is the observation of local issues and phenomena that stirs passion. Today there are countless artists whose concerns about local themes inspire them to create highly significant work. Many themes peculiar to immediate communities would resonate across national and international borders if a forum existed in which local artists could present them to advantage, not only to the public but also to each other. It is the undervalued artists in these two metropolitan regions, whose local voices speak of larger social and personal issues, who will be the focus of Flying Under the Radar, a bilingual festival not only of arts but also of artists. Fostering communication among global arts in this way will illuminate commonality and help reduce the negative effects of nationalism and the so-called North/South divide. The bringing together of this diverse community of artists from Brazil and the United States can be a model for communication between established and emerging economies. In order to raise the stature and visibility of this festival, and provide mentoring for participating artists and authors, we have begun reaching out to organizations and individuals prominent in the fields of arts and education in Rio and San Francisco.
The concept for Flying Under the Radar (Voando Sob o Radar, in Portuguese) was an outgrowth of the second FLUPP (Literary Festival of the Peripheries), held last November in Vigário Geral, a large favela in the north zone of Rio de Janeiro. FLUPP was the culmination of seven months of workshops and events featuring early-career writers from the many favela (slum) communities of Rio. The success of the first FLUPP, which took place in 2012 in the recently “pacified” Morro dos Prazeres, turned a daring idea into a visionary one. The success of the second
has placed FLUPP firmly on the calendar of important cultural events in Rio de Janeiro.
It was not coincidental that FLUPP was held in Vigário Geral in 2013; the festival marked the twentieth anniversary of the worst massacre in the history of Rio’s favelas, when elements of the military police stormed the community and murdered 21 of its residents. As often happens, tragic events give birth to positive change. In the case of Vigário Geral, the change has been marked by a cultural renaissance. Holding an international festival in that location was a direct assault on the sort of artistic, civic, and geographical isolation suffered not only by residents of the Rio’s favelas, but by artists everywhere who deal with issues affecting their communities. The individuals who participated in the event last year came from countries as diverse as Spain and Afghanistan, Britain, and Nigeria. What they had in common was the ability to transmit, through literature and the arts, their concerns regarding important issues facing us all.
For “Flying Under the Radar/Voando sob o radar”, instead of bringing a group of well-known artists to a sequestered community, we will bring unknown artists to a region where they can connect with artists like themselves working on similar themes, and an educated but narrowly-informed public generally unaware of the vibrancy of Brazilian culture, its issues and civilization.
While at the festival in Rio I mused on the similarity of the interests and approaches of artists at FLUPP to those of the people I knew in the San Francisco Bay Area. I came to see that, the ubiquity of Internet-based information notwithstanding, it has been the lack of contact that has blocked greater cultural understanding. In particular, it struck me that Brazilian artists, separated geographically but not philosophically from their American counterparts, could be working in concert with them, rather than in parallel. The events planned for Flying Under the Radar are being designed to foster the breaching of cultural differences, language barriers, and artistic traditions through direct collaboration. The central mission of this festival is to provide a laboratory for new modes of cross-cultural cooperation through the arts.
Participating artists, half from Rio de Janeiro and half from the San Francisco Bay Area, will not bring physical work to the festival, only themselves and their talent. A month to six weeks prior to the event, the artists will be introduced via the Internet. Each Brazilian artist will be paired with an American counterpart who works in a different medium: a videographer might be paired with a sculptor, a painter with a performer, a musician with a poet. Artists will begin working online as soon as they are introduced, and will continue their collaboration in person when they meet in San Francisco five days ahead of the festival. Translators will be provided where needed.
The festival proper will last five days. On days one and two, participating artists will present their work in electronic form to supporters, planners and curators. On the third day the festival will open to the general public, who will have the opportunity to accompany the ongoing processes of the fifteen artistic collaborations. Musicians and performers will conduct open rehearsals during the day and performances at night; painters and sculptors will work in shifts in galleries. In this way, a dynamic set of performances and creative processes will be presented throughout the festival. The evening of the final day will be devoted to a general exhibition, with a closing celebration to follow.
The central idea of Flying Under the Radar is to create conditions under which disparate groups, working in collaboration, will have the opportunity to create new works and forge new paths; to use propinquity to accentuate the vibrancy and commonality already in play. Working with organizational and artistic collaborators in Rio and San Francisco, the festival aims to overcome divisions fueled by global power imbalances and to promote cross-fertilization of artistic practices in the Americas.
The goals of this festival are:
•To introduce to each other, and to the public, lesser or virtually unknown but highly talented artists engaged in the vigorous exploration of local issues through a range of artistic media
•To break down stereotypes and to promote the transgression of cultural boundaries through a global artistic festival that promotes transculturation i.e. the blending of cultural influences from multiple locations
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•To bring attention to and create public interest in the commonality that exists on a cultural level in these two great democracies, as evidenced by the work of artists and writers from Rio de Janeiro and San Francisco, two similar centers of cultural and social change where this common ground has not yet been explored.
David Linger
Festival Director
Flying Under the Radar /Voando Sob o Radar
Festival of Arts and Artists
Festival Director: David Linger
M.F.A. Mills College 2008, Artist, Writer, Former Lecturer,at University of California, Berkeley and Mills College
Associate Producer: John Zarobell
Assistant Professor of International Studies and Program Director of European Studies, University of San Francisco,
Curator, Art Historian
Advisory Committee
Garth Bixler
Artist
Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda
Author, Publisher, Professor, UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
Céu
Singer, Songwriter
Enrique Chagoya
Artist, Printmaker, Professor, Art and Art History, Stanford University
Gilberto Gil
Singer, Guitarist, Composer, former Minister of Culture of Brazil
Julio Ludemir
Co-originator of FLUPP 2012, 2013
Luiz Camillo Osorio
Curator, MAM (Museum of Modern Art Rio), Professor of Aesthetics, Department of Philosophy, PUC
(Pontifical Catholic University), Rio de Janeiro
Eran Preis
Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Programs, Department of Film and Media Arts, Temple University
Ecio Salles
CEO FLUPP 2012, 2013
Luiz Eduardo Soares
Political Scientist, Author, Anthropologist, Philosopher, Professor, UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
Richard Shaw
Artist, Professor, Department of Art Practice, University of California, Berkeley
Caetano Veloso
Composer, Singer, Writer, Activist
Hertha D. Sweet Wong
Author, Associate Professor of English, Chair, Department of Art Practice, University of California, Berkeley
