VT

My commentary

I have as a document a letter sent to Walter Zanini in 1996.
I no longer remember the reason for the correspondence but, certainly, it was connected to some question I was asked.
I transcribe what I thought at the time:

_'Zanini.
_{In the seventies, when I did things with VT, what I thought, and wanted, was, above all, to "de-alienate" the medium.}
_{This was valid for all available media, from VT to mail; cinema; photography... in short, everything with which one could imagine the world or, as I liked to say at the time, the circumstance.}
_{It was a political position and, I remember, in an interview I declared: "either art or politics. This is a political statement"¹.}
_{What moved me was the need to implant, I don't know why, a will behind the "media".}

_{At no time did I think that art had to have any kind of exclusivity in relation to one medium or another, or multimedia as some of us tried to impose.}
_{As an example I can mention that I never stopped admiring painters and, at the time, I was a fan of Baravelli, as I still am in relation to the Baravelli of that period. I was, however, a little careful about mixing propositions in media in presentations so as not to let propositions in traditional media, even if experimentalist, contaminate the experimentations with media itself, which was what I was doing.}
_{I never believed that all that could be a revolution in art. I thought -and I steal think - that it was a revolution in progress, started much earlier, that had to do with freedom and not with engagement. Freedom in the very broad sense of choice by will.}
_{And the paradox that remains, partly solved by performance, partly by today's "material art" (poorly solved though) is our continued need for a "medium" interposing itself between the artist and his circumstance (real life to so to say) which, let's face it, is somewhat alienating.}
_{Gabriel Borba}
_{September 1996 '}

1. The statement was used in Receita de Arte Brasileira (Brazilian Art Recipe)