Plano B opened in 2003 in the neighbourhood of Lapa, Rio de Janeiro. A vinyl shop during the day and a cultural space of sorts over the weekend, Plano B housed concerts, performances, talks, screenings, etc. by numerous artists from Brazil and abroad. Over the course of ten years it fomented an alternative music scene in Rio. The space's founder Fernando Torres was previously a 'vinyl trafficker', as he likes to call his earlier profession, scavenging rare and bizarre records in the city of Rio for collectors across Brazil during the 1980s and 90s. For Fernando, Plano B was not just a 'concert venue', but a lived installation where all corners of the shop and dynamics between the people who inhabited it were taken into consideration, a collective effort in a small space that developed irrespectively of its lack of institutional or governmental support.
For a couple of years now, Vijai Patchineelam has worked with Fernando Torres on his archive of over 300 live recorded shows that were held in the shop between 2004 and 2013, when the space closed. Their ongoing collaboration has so far resulted in a double album of these recordings as a way of communicating what Plano B was and to leave some trace of it for the current experimental music scene in Rio and beyond.
Vijai Patchineelam's artistic practice focuses on dialogue between the artist and the art institutions, as the locations of art production and distribution. Conventionally the artist comes to an art institution in a temporary role, for an exhibition, a residency, a commission. At times the artist is employed as a technician, monitor or less frequently as a curator or a board member. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai's research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists-one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions. This displacement of roles is part of a larger trajectory that he follows in his PhD research in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, 'The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution'.
This album is a Track Report.
