The Exquisite Corpse Video Project (ECVP) is a unique video collaboration among artists from all over the world, inspired by the Surrealist creation method, the “Exquisite Corpse”. Using the semi-blind, sequential method of the surrealists’ game, ECVP participants create video art in response to the final ten seconds of the previous member’s work. Each member is asked to incorporate these seconds into their piece, until everyone’s vision is threaded together into an instigating final “corpse”. Each individual artist interrogates, via different means, a number of genres, tendencies and strategies. The ECVP was initiated in 2008 by the Brazilian artist Kika Nicolela and it has had 6 volumes released. The project has had the participation of over 100 artists from more than 25 countries.

The project has been already shown in galleries, museums, cinemas and alternative spaces of Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Mexico, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK and US. Some of the main spaces that have exhibited the ECVP include the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, Central Gallery in São Paulo, Open Contemporary Art Center in Taiwan, Galerie Carla Magna in Paris, Monkeytown in New York, Visual Arts Network in Cape Town, Artists Television Access in San Francisco and Videoformes Festival in Clermont-Ferrand.

"The pulsing energy of this self-organized operation was refreshing, as freed by the plurality of possibilities set in motion through collaboration, each member manages to exit a framed identity and successfully positions the work in a continual process of becoming rather than being. Together, the ECVP members envisage and successfully comment upon a further possibility of art making".

Claudia Corrieri, excerpt, Artreview magazine (London, 2010)

"With each new volume of ECVP, the collaborators reaffirm this aspiration to dissolve geographical boundaries, betting on the promise of virtual networks to establish bridges between individuals from different parts of the world that, if not, perhaps they would not know each other. Propension in diluting limits that is reinforced by the proposal of a single continuum, a video that incorporates alterity and differences and integrates dichotomies and disjunctions. Finally, by the rules of the game, format and deadline, participants often exceed the margins of their work and their line of thinking. With each video of the series, the participants are forced to stress the borders of themselves through this dynamic and horizontal structure, a true transit zone of identities, speeches and images."

Olivia Ardui, catalogue of exhibition at Central Gallery (São Paulo), excerpt

"Facing a new artistic provocation, it is the critic’s duty to set his criteria aside in order to best comprehend the intentions of the piece. At this point, not only do I understand that the major connection between the fragments produced blindly by the ECVP artists is in the random collage of noise, music, direct sound and sound tracks – a true collision of references and preferences that make of each video an antidote for audiovisual monotony – but I also conclude that this group delineates the digital culture in which we live, a culture no longer fragmented like the post-modern one, but shattered and precarious in regards to the creation of meaning. Exquisite Corpse Video project introduces us to this new world, mimicking its intrinsic shattering and precariousness, while simultaneously generating new meanings for contemporary experience."

Juliana Monachesi, excerpt