HOUSE OF XICLET by André Stutzman
Humble and friend artist

House of Xiclet is an art gallery and also a residence. The presence of one becomes the (BR)other – the gallery is different because of the house and the house is different becausq of the gallery. Morover, from the consciousness of this process, exists the perspective of the gallery-house as a work of art.

The contents of the ‘work’ is derived from three places: The gallery space (Special Room) ie: Its organization, its themes, its exhibitions, and shows, people that are involved and diverse performance; its promotion, the communication with the media and through media, with the art cycle etc. The area of the house, ie: bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, cooking utensils, the privacy of those who live there, the respect that you must have at someone’s home and also the informality, intimacy among people, convenience and leisure. The third space is that’s place identity space, where house and gallery melt together, once the boundary between them is flexible and may ravel or soften depending on circumstances. This third space increases content to the extent that there are people living within it, this allows them to understand and constitute it.

The space program includes art exhibitions, musical shows, films, events, games, parties, lectures and workshops. ALL IN AN ENVIRONMENT WHERE YOU CAN CASEIRO LEISURE CULTURAL EXPERIENCE. It’s not underground It’s Playground!

The understanding of this hybrid space is often expressed through slogans and in the promotion of the house, as well as in exhibition themes.

These themes, from a critical and ideological position disclose such content gradually. For example, the exhibition that normally occurs in January / February proposes the participating artists to think of works that use games and interactivity, and at the same time, comments on the question of the resurgence of the aura through a critique of the ‘underground’ status (quo) : the slogan of the exhibition is “IT’S NOT UNDERGROUND, IT’S PALYGROUND. The underground has become a brand, a makeup.

A playground is in turn an area with no autonomy, it depends on the exercise of performances in it, maybe occupying several spaces such as a tank of sand, a house, a yard, a sidewalk or a park but it mainly depends on the features of the activities executed there.

One important factor concerns the accessibility to the house. Enrollment fees are charged indiscriminately to anyone who wants to participate. The house works with a wide spectrum in both quantity and quality. With many artists, while a conventional gallery works with fifteen or twenty artists per year, HOUSE OF XICLET WORKS WITH FIFTEEN OR TWENTY ARTISTS PER MONTH. IN ADDITION, AS THERE IS NO SELECTION OF WORKS, THERE IS THIS QUALITATIVE VARIANT, THERE WE FIND WORKS LOCATED IN THE CURRENT CONTEXT OF PRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY ART, ALONG WITH THEIR DISCUSSIONS, AND ALSO THE PAINTINGS FROM CENTRAL PARK. There are publicists, photographers, doctors, housewives, teenagers, filmmakers, collectives, anonymous, unemployed, and all kinds of artists, finally, many different people exposing.

ACCORDINGLY, THE SPACE OF ART GALLERY WILL NOT SAY WHAT IS ART AND WHAT IS NOT. IT DOES NOT HOLD THIS POWER NOR ASSUME THAT ROLE, AND THE EXPERIENCE IS RICHER BECAUSE OF IT.

The experience arouses to the extent that the public (which is also seen as a visit) is free of an imperative relationship . This arouses propitious context for learning and understanding the work, not by its elevation status, but by its content.

The home and work, against any notion of “work” enclosed in itself. It is immaterial, a set of relationships, people, events. But it is also in favor of all the works that might arise in this space whose ultimate value is the coexistence.

The fact that there is an imperative ‘art’ through a kind of dilution of the common area of life and the heterogeneity given by the non-selection is of paramount importance in an analysis of of demystification strategies. This policy is expressed in a slogan of the house “NO-CURATOR, NO-SELECTION, NO-INTEREST, NO-TIP, NO-ENTRY, NO-SPONSOR, NO-WAY-OUT”.

The process of creation comes from the ongoing experience maintenance ,from the possibility of leisure, during lunch, drinking beer, the informality, the best ideas are born. This was the case of ‘Auto-School’ (Auto-Escola), an education sector of the house set to create courses and workshops, and a free space for artists who have submitted their projects. The ‘Auto-School’ works as self-managed sector independent of the gallery.

Xiclet commonly refers to the ‘official art’ cycle and their ‘concepts’ in programming of the exhibitions ‘It is not parallel, but vertical’ – says Xiclet herself, about dribbling creatively the danger of falling into the same trap of the ‘underground’.

The exhibition of electronic art ‘FILE’, which takes place every year in Sao Paulo, for example, was a matter used by Xiclet to create her own parody version, called X-Filet (X International Festival of Electronic Language Tutti Frutti). The poster of this exhibition is a sequence of images photocopied a raw rib-eye stake. Another example was the ‘answer’ the house of Xiclet gave to the emptiness biennal, a exhibition entitled ‘Biennial: I’m full’.

The threat to the notion of aura is contained in the denial of its use as a crutch or pedestal-like statement of overriding ‘THIS IS ART, THIS IS NOT ART’. Given the dynamics of the house, the aura completely loses its function.