Oscar Brahim

Guest - Research Workshop on artistic practice and its social projection- Buenos Aires 2001.

Not much milk

I take profit as much as I can of
anything I can find in the street, particularly the advertising spaces, in which I can introduce an interference in the banal and superfluous communication. That somehow conditions and decides on our lives.
Sometimes the motivation is esthetical, other times ideological, sometimes it is only about the joke.
Let's start from now on, moving on from that role as a consumer-viewer, brush and paint at hand, paper, cut outs of any poster, whatever you like, invite yourself!

Oscar Brahim

We have all seen what Oscar Brahim does;

he is a taxi driver who goes like a rapid deployment brigade: he sees a sign and Oscar Brahim has an acute knowledge of the effect of advertising on cities. He hates advertising, doesn't he? That is fine, because you can see it's stimu-lating, it stimulates him, even excites him. Advertising excites him, and that hate allows him to do something: he distorts and participates in that advertising, distorting everything and he is on the look out, to see which sign gives him some stimulus. This means that
product symbols are all over the city under the form of posters, or human supports which move around with the brands of merchandise on their clothing, under the guise of adverti-sing, be it television, audio, radio or the cities them-selves, built almost in the image of great corporations. I don't know if someone has ever seen the Avenida Paulista in Sao Paulo, it's quite impressive how it acclaims itself, like the image that corporations want to give of their power. Here in Argentina -well, there's
a difference in the economies- only the Cata-linas Norte zone tries to show what power is. But the great corporations don't only do their business, they also want to impose their systems of representation, and, on top of that,
be loved. But that is another story. What Oscar Brahim does is to become involved with those product symbols which, at the same time, re-present the inte-rests of the great corporations.

Christian Ferrer, at the series of debates
"Networks, contexts, territories"
Goethe Institut, Buenos Aires, 2001

Oscar Brahim. Born in San Martín, Province of Buenos Aires in 1964. Made studies in alternative workshops (drawing, comic strips, graphic humour and other disciplines). Since 1998 makes graphic interventions in advertising space in the street and his work begins to call the attention of the press. (La Nación, Página/12 and Clarín, Revista Tipográfica and others). Exhibited Work in the underground passage of the Obelisk. In 2000 and 2001 gave seminars and conferences in the University of Buenos Aires and in the University Di Tella. On Sunday, 25th November 2001 he made a performance in the Sala de Experimentatión of the Teatro Colón.

Others participants. Research workshop on artistic practice and its social projection