Torneira [Faucet] (2018) is a mundane object that surges with life. This piece is from a series of faucets of outsized proportions that de Souza has been working on since the 1990s. From the mouth of the gold-plated bronze faucet flows a large drop resembling human secretion.

In the Act of… series Komatsu works the composition of his frames from the ruin of items made to control the safety of framed works. Glass and structure are broken, instituting both the image and the fixation system for the wall

Ephemeral Monuments, originally presented at the 13th Havana Biennial, is based on a series of performances carried out by professional Cuban athletes at the José Martí Sports Center (Havana). The action was orchestrated around building and sustaining ephemeral bodily constructions which explores ideas of solidarity, union and resilience. The constructions symbolize an exercise of trust and collective effort: if one of the participants fails, everything collapses. The deteriorated sports facilities in the city of Havana, Cuba, are the starting point of this visual essay in which some ideas about the modern architectural movement, sports as an ideological flag and the abandonment of public infrastructure interwoven.

The works from the Realidade Perecivél series were made with glass fiber mesh coated with concrete, painted, lacquered, varnished attached to tbrackets form the top and subsequently fixed to the wall. The artist?s actions causes the concrete layer to be broken gradually, showing the structure of the work, in this manufactoring process coexists the construction and destruction of forms and symbols.

Influenced by pre-Colombian and brutalist architecture, Argote’s work often contain messages/ words in various languages that are adopted by what the artist calls “Ternura Radical [Radical Tenderness]” an on-going strategy that relies upon using affection, emotions and humor as subversive tools to engage public audiences on political and personal levels.

In the Radiante system, the word sun is written in different languages, according to a graph that simulates the sun’s rays and that, for each quadrant,the artists assign a letter. Each module/ letteris reproduced in goldplated wood, Nar is the word for sun in Mongolian

Prismatic disjunction is part of a series of works that has as its central axis the concept of rotation of authorial architectures creating a dialogue with the architects Adolf Loos (1870-1933), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) and Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012). Tavares uses materials and finishes present in the works of these architects to create modular relationships typical of her own production.

Based on field trips and archival images of a German photographer of the XIX Century – Albert Frisch – that already manipulated his pictures from indigenous people from the Brazilian Amazon rain forest, a new combined photo manipulation is made over Frisch’s files. A false giant leaf is augmented and a drawing is made to create a ficcional scale and narrative about the forest imaginary. An exotic Colonizer’s tale pushed to the limits of imagination, just like in the old times.

This series is composed of a set of photographs that show masked figures manipulating snakes. The images are reminiscent of gay fetish practices associated with “sexual deviations”. The title of the series reproduces the first lines of Inferno, Canto 1, from The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. The epic poem narrates an allegorical journey through what is essentially the medieval concept of hell.

The Corpo Fechado series is comprised of a series of vintage whips cast in bronze and sculpted in such way that their motions appear as a frozen instant. These pieces are also part of the series of sculptural and photographic objects that relate to Corpo Fechado: The Devil’s Work. Like in the film, there is a reversal on the handling of the whip as these tools for punishment are inverted in these works, drawing near to BDSM practices where pleasure and pain converge, and where relations of power and submission are consensual.

The Incarnated Figure series features red articulated wooden shapes that resemble dolls used in human figure drawing classes. Installed through the space, the figures seem to float or dance. The morphologies of the figures – called ‘Trans-human’ by Chaia -, although referring to the human anatomy, are deformed.

“Incarnated Figure is a work that refers to the ‘Trans-human’, as it considers not only the human body, but other bodies existing in nature and mythological bodies. This work is also inspired by the body paintings of the original peoples of Brazil, made as protection against evil spirits and as a form of defense to face the enemy,” says Chaia. In this context, the choice of the red color was fundamental for her, since it concerns the awakening of vitality and the potency of the movements, being the color of fire and blood. Chaia quotes Wassily Kandinsky: “Red evokes strength, momentum, energy, decision, joy, triumph. It sounds like a fanfare where the loud, obstinate, annoying sound of the trumpet dominates”.

WE THE ENEMY (2019) is a series comprised of 41 bronze sculptures based on representations of the devil drawn from art history: historical paintings that portray Satan in hell, drawings, illustrations, and sculptures that represent evil embodied. Each figure defies normative moral standards of beauty, respectability, and behavior. Among this army of demons, there are characters who suggest sexual perversion – as typified by traditional catholic imagery.

Tania Candiani’s work often seeks to make explicit the discursive contents of artifacts and textual materials. Her work also evidences nostalgia for the obsolete. This sense of nostalgia also materializes in works she articulates around the invisible passing of time by creating awareness of such time. In Sobre el tiempo, wall pieces containing large numbers of common alarm clocks that resonate loudly, create a texture of time marking a constant presence.

Part of the Social Hieroglyphs series, the artwork connects art, architecture, engineering, and nature through the works of the English architect and gardener Joseph Paxton (1803–1865), the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) and the Brazilian landscape designer and artist Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994). The table surface shows images from the transformed Oca Building by Oscar Niemeyer: by constructing a digital maquette and using mirroring processes to alter the referent, the artist combines the gesture and sensuality of the design, presented here in a renewed way. Like a platform to be seen from above, the table houses several pristine plexiglas domes, beneath which different handmade Victoria regia water lilies are placed. Protected from external contamination, these encapsulated natural species reference Paxton and Burle Marx’s interest in tropical flora and nature’s role in constructing the modern world. The exquisitely handmade objects, created in collaboration with Brazilian artisans, are a tribute to the traditional textile work of women, which was historically undervalued as either decorative or merely utilitarian and thus undeserving of scholarly attention or public display. Bringing together high-tech industrial processes and handmade craftwork, the work challenges Adolf Loos’ idea of purity as stated in his ‘Ornament and Crime’ manifesto of 1910. By doing so, it aims to explore the relationships and inconsistencies between tropical nature, modernism, and contemporary life.

Newspapers whose denominations are somehow absolutes, such as Le Monde (The World) and El País (The Country), are covered by a blanket of lead that allows for only a glimpse of their titles, blocking any proper reading. Lead, by virtue of progressive applications of atomic energy, has become increasingly important as shielding against radiation thanks to its excellent corrosion resistance. The material is, however, extremely toxic to the human body. Komatsu’s lead blanket thus both protects us from the power of the media and contaminates us at the same time.

Fugues are polyphonic compositions, where one melody overlaps another. The fugues are structured by a main theme, the subject of the composition, with which subsequent “voices” establish variations.
In her series of paintings called Fuga (2019), Longo Bahia employs an Augmented Reality experience where one painting leads to another through the use of an app that reveals covert images.
In Fuga (terceira voz), the series portrays women that were persecuted, tortured or murdered by the military dictatorships of each of the South American countries that aligned themselves with the United States during Operation Condor (1968-1989).

Fugues are polyphonic compositions, where one melody overlaps another. The fugues are structured by a main theme, the subject of the composition, with which subsequent “voices” establish variations.
In her series of paintings called Fuga (2019), Longo Bahia employs an Augmented Reality experience where one painting leads to another through the use of an app that reveals covert images.
In Fuga (terceira voz), the series portrays women that were persecuted, tortured or murdered by the military dictatorships of each of the South American countries that aligned themselves with the United States during Operation Condor (1968-1989).

Nuptias consists of photo-paintings and collages made by Rennó based on wedding photographs. The artists alterations are made with paint, objects, cuttings and recompositions. Besides referring to the plurality of affective unions without regard to belief, race, sexual orientation or any other convention, the artist revisits various icons of the culture of visuality, in both the Occident and the Orient. The photo-paintings and their titles make reference to the ceremonial, the pop culture, recent politics, religion and social inequality.

The works from the Realidade perecível series were made with glass fiber mesh coated with concrete, painted, lacquered, varnished attached to tbrackets form the top and subsequently fixed to the wall. The artist?s actions causes the concrete layer to be broken gradually, showing the structure of the work, in this manufactoring process coexists the construction and destruction of forms and symbols.

Cadu’s practice is marked by a transdisciplinary approach. Each project emerges according to conceptual characteristics, with no pre-election of languages or techniques. In his repertoire there are performances, installations, drawings, paintings, objects, sculptures, videos and photographs, influenced by themes related to systems, repetition, games, time and circularity. His works celebrate the relationship between man and nature, rational and instinctive, chaos and rigor.

From the beginning of her career, Cinthia Marcelle was interested in various artistic processes, seeking the raw material of her work in social relations and the daily chaos that surrounds her. Her works bear a temporal character, present in the exploration of repetition and accumulation. Through her work, Marcelle organizes and confuses things, creating interventions that formally reorganize everyday objects and situations.

Oásis uses a system of hoses and filters to produce geometric drawings from the dripping of briny water over paper and iron bars. In a garden-like dynamic, in which shapes are born out of cultivation and care, the images are formed as the ore?s inner layers are gradually exposed through corrosive irrigation. Rock, crystal, fluid and vapor behave as dictated by the alchemical principles Solvet (dissolution) and Coagula (coagulation), trusting the remains left behind by the different stages of depurating matter to establish a phantom of the image.

My current work explores sound structures in a sensory way, where I feel that music and nature come together in a kind of code. … I’ve always thought of sound, volume, and rhythm breaking boundaries and barriers in search of a place, looking for ways to visualize how that sound could be ‘seen’ if traveling in a room, a body, or a garden.
Chiara Banf

Chiara Banfi’s interest lies in the confluence between nature and sound – or nature and music. From her early large scale expansive drawings that invaded and dialogued with the given architectural space forming visual soundwaves to her more recent works deploying rocks as rhythm dispersing solids, her production seeks to give corporality to bodiless findings.

“My relationship with Brazilian indigenous peoples, the guiding force of both my career as a photographer and my life, is essentially one of fondness. This sentiment, over time, has led me to divide my time as a photographer with activities in defense of those peoples’ rights to territory and survival. A demanding task that requires great perseverance.”
Claudia Andujar

Clara Ianni’s work explores the relationship between art and politics. Her practice relies on the use of different medias such as interventions, videos, installation and texts, tackling the dia-logue between performance and material culture. She is interested in exploring class and labor issues within the artistic context as well as the politics of history.

Concrete work can be read as an evocation of the legend of Exaclibur, where the sword Caledfwlch, embedded in a stone (or anvil) can only be obtained by Arthur, as a miraculous symbol of his Nobility and right to the throne of Brittany. Perhaps the shovel stuck in the concrete by Ianni suggests that true power is destined to the worker’s hands.

“My relationship with Brazilian indigenous peoples, the guiding force of both my career as a photographer and my life, is essentially one of fondness. This sentiment, over time, has led me to divide my time as a photographer with activities in defense of those peoples’ rights to territory and survival. A demanding task that requires great perseverance.”
Claudia Andujar

Mil olhos [Thousand Eyes] integrates Chaia’s set of performances made for the camcorder. The static and sequential plan reinforces the experience lived in the situation registered as the main data of the work. According to Chaia, the video is the capture of an action of “insistent, repetitive and delusional movements of the head. Therein lies the potent refusal – the ‘no’ – and the feverish state”.
_{Collaboration: João Marcos de Almeida/ cinematography: Bruno Risas/ direct sound: Juliana R./ edition: João Marcos de Almeida}

In the Radiante system, the word sun is written in different languages, according to a graph that simulates the sun’s rays and that, for each quadrant,the artists assign a letter. Each module/ letteris reproduced in goldplated wood,. Kuara is the word for sun in tupi-guarani.

Prismatic disjunction is part of a series of works that has as its central axis the concept of rotation of authorial architectures creating a dialogue with the architects Adolf Loos (1870-1933), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) and Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012). Tavares uses materials and finishes present in the works of these architects to create modular relationships typical of her own production.

The works from the Massa falida series are composed of bags of debris used in construction. Sewn together, the bags form banners or flags. Arranged side by side, they show a repetition of textual information from the original product. With ink and solvent, Komatsu erases or highlights excerpts from these original texts and draws lines and graphs, creating new meanings. The trash bag exits the lowest disposable place in construction debris hierarchy to draw attention to the historical repetitions of social disparities.

Nuptias consists of photo-paintings and collages made by Rennó based on wedding photographs. The artist’s alterations are made with paint, objects, cuttings and recompositions. Besides referring to the plurality of affective unions without regard to belief, race, sexual orientation or any other convention, the artist revisits various icons of the culture of visuality, in both the Occident and the Orient. The photo-paintings and their titles make reference to the ceremonial, the pop culture, recent politics, religion and social inequality.

Nuptias consists of photo-paintings and collages made by Rennó based on wedding photographs. The artist’s alterations are made with paint, objects, cuttings and recompositions. Besides referring to the plurality of affective unions without regard to belief, race, sexual orientation or any other convention, the artist revisits various icons of the culture of visuality, in both the Occident and the Orient. The photo-paintings and their titles make reference to the ceremonial, the pop culture, recent politics, religion and social inequality.

“Straight Lines” seeks to think of the line beyond its purely formal and geometric conceptions. The work investigates the straight line as a political construction that condenses and concretizes structures of power and domination. From the selection of straight lines from the 2017 world map, which appear mainly in the region of the former colonies, “Straight Lines” points to the artificial and imposing character of territorial divisions. The geometric and minimalist pattern of the work is built as a product of social and economic relations.

A ArtRio 2019 apresenta Sandra Hegedüs como curadora do programa SOLO, destinado a projetos expositivos com foco em importantes coleções de arte. Brasileira, Sandra vive na França desde 1990, onde desenvolveu atividades de produção audiovisual e deu início à sua coleção particular.
Para o projeto SOLO, Sandra Hegedüs selecionou artistas e suas galerias, que exibirão, em seus estandes, somente trabalhos do artista indicado.

Covers is an extention of the works on collage that Argote has been developping for several years. Digging into historical issues and imagery about the impact of “ideological wars”, this layered compositions behave as allegories about how our subjectivies are conditioned by external forces linked to a certain idea of progress and truth, that has been shaped by historical centers of power in their own conveniences and perdurability. Here the superposition of burned and cut fabrics, makes appear images and texts that confronts slogans, statements, and found fotage, creatng a texture with multiple entraces of lecture. Argote beliefs in the idea of “not-disociation”, which tends to approach big historical issues without avoiding the noise around them, the intrinsic complexity of the way look at them, and also the way they affect us in a personal level.

A figure is contemplating the space, with both feet pointing backwards and with a pleasant and, at the same time, defiant attitude. The sculpture references the notion of the people from the “Antipodes”, the people from the other side, that was common in middle age Europe. This example of mistranslation shows how, in western society, the idea of the “other” implies some kind of negativeness or bizarreness. The “Antipodos” sculpture series shows proud antipodes, they represent the notion that we are all “others”.

Covers is an extention of the works on collage that Argote has been developping for several years. Digging into historical issues and imagery about the impact of “ideological wars”, this layered compositions behave as allegories about how our subjectivies are conditioned by external forces linked to a certain idea of progress and truth, that has been shaped by historical centers of power in their own conveniences and perdurability. Here the superposition of burned and cut fabrics, makes appear images and texts that confronts slogans, statements, and found fotage, creatng a texture with multiple entraces of lecture. Argote beliefs in the idea of “not-disociation”, which tends to approach big historical issues without avoiding the noise around them, the intrinsic complexity of the way look at them, and also the way they affect us in a personal level.

The New Methods series reproduces images from fragments of copies of classical sculptures acquired by Argote in China. Over them, however, the artist inserts texts that he himself created, which reveal his sociopolitical and artistic questionings.

The New Methods series reproduces images from fragments of copies of classical sculptures acquired by Argote in China. Over them, however, the artist inserts texts that he himself created, which reveal his sociopolitical and artistic questionings.

Each sculpture from Iván Argotes Shadows series is made up of sheets of steel that overlap different laser-cut words, forming anthems through this accumulation. Phrases that could be on protest posters mingle with affective revelations, fading the line between sensitivity and rationality.

In her series of paintings called Fugue (2019), Dora Longo Bahia proposes Augmented Reality experiences where one painting leads to another through the use of an application that reveals hidden images.

Fugue (Subject) is presented as a red brush stroke that, through the “Fuga por Dora Longo Bahia” app (IOS and Android), is replaced by a video of actress Mayara Baptista screaming.

In the Mamarracho series, scribbles are drawn, digitized, magnified 1,000 times and then painted on white canvases. The black lines randomly cross the canvas, flowing onto the wall, making these works hybrid image-objects that simulate graffiti on a blank canvas.
The Mamarrachos are related to the video Retouch (2008), where, in a fictional action for the camera, we see Argote spray painting two paintings by Piet Mondrian.

A figure is contemplating the space, with both feet pointing backwards and with a pleasant and, at the same time, defiant attitude. The sculpture references the notion of the people from the “Antipodes”, the people from the other side, that was common in middle age Europe. This example of mistranslation shows how, in western society, the idea of the “other” implies some kind of negativeness or bizarreness. The “Antipodos” sculpture series shows proud antipodes, they represent the notion that we are all “others”.

For years, Colombian artist Iván Argote has been staging interventions on public monuments. In Etcétera, Argote covered a statue of Francisco de Orellana in a park in Bogotá. Orellana is a well-known Spanish conquistador and self-proclaimed discoverer of the Amazon Rainforest.

The illusion brought on by the mirrors temporarily erases this invader from view and instead reflects the natural environment in the park. It brings attention back to the land, and the land dispossession and environmental degradation caused by colonization.

Each sculpture from Iván Argotes Shadows series is made up of sheets of steel that overlap different laser-cut words, forming anthems through this accumulation. Phrases that could be on protest posters mingle with affective revelations, fading the line between sensitivity and rationality.

This series takes as a starting point the book Race and Class in Rural Brazil, produced by Columbia University in partnership with Unesco and published in 1952. The study makes use of photographs in its research methodology, presenting to the participants photographs of people of various race backgrounds, and inviting them to analize according to six attributes: wealth, beauty, intelligence, religiosity, honesty and aptitude for work. The responses are taken into account by the study, which starts to establish racial typologies, to identify recurrent racist manifestations and their criteria, as well as to search for possible structural genesis for Brazilian racism. The published study does not include the photographs used in the research process, and manifests certain fascination with the myth of Brazil as a bastion of racial democracy. The project was carried out in four cities: São Luis (MA), Imperatriz (MA), Ilheus (BA) and São Paulo, inviting people to go to the studio to take on characters and represent reactions and feelings in front of the camera. The various experiences are presented individually accompanied by lines of words taken from the 1952 book.

The New Testament provides two accounts of the genealogy of Jesus, one in the Gospel of Matthew and another in the Gospel of Luke. Matthew’s starts with Abraham, while Luke begins with Adam. Matthew’s genealogy is considerably more complex than Luke’s, besides being overtly schematic. Nicolás Robbio deals with the mythology surrounding the genealogy of Christ to develop his Genealogia de Lucas [Genealogy of Lucas], a schematic system of overlapping aluminum pieces surrounded by black lines that define their perimeters. In addition to making reference to the multi-part retables that narrate religious stories, the reflective aspect of Robbio’s work suggests a kind of mirror to the viewer, and its multiple parts then suggest a multiplicity of possible narratives and connections to our personal genealogy, somehow uniting everyone that sees themselves there in the same descent, in a unique history.

“I started “Manifestantes” one week before the first march of the “revolución diamantina” (a march that protested the rape of a young woman by four police officers in the north of Mexico City). I decided to sew the portraits as soon as I started thinking about a series of large scale sewn-paintings portraying women in different marches and protests around the globe. Privileging the moment of protest and unison – when the voice rises. Sewing for me is a kind of loud drawing. These portraits are voices.”
Tania Candiani

Eclipse of a dream is a work where the symbolic and the architectural intertwine to build a paradoxal object. The materialized form of the portrayed symbol has the peculiarity of showing both inside and outside that simultaneously, differentiated only by their finishes: one of the sides being painted white and the other remaining with its raw materiality. Placing the bricks in the form of a mesh, allows the viewer to see through both sides, playing with the idea of public and private, permission and blockage, with what can be seen and with what can be known.

Eclipse of a dream is a work where the symbolic and the architectural intertwine to build a paradoxal object. The materialized form of the portrayed symbol has the peculiarity of showing both inside and outside that simultaneously, differentiated only by their finishes: one of the sides being painted white and the other remaining with its raw materiality. Placing the bricks in the form of a mesh, allows the viewer to see through both sides, playing with the idea of public and private, permission and blockage, with what can be seen and with what can be known.

Travertino rock formation appear in the series Skena in aqua (Microlandscapes), 2018. Photographs of the rock, of the marble family, are embroidered by Tavares with metallic filaments revealing the impurities resulting from their formation process. This “contaminated” material carries in itself the memory in the form of fossils of branches, leaves and imperfections. These are embedded in the deposits of materials in more or less parallel bands created by the action of water in contact with the rock over time. Travertino contains the history of architecture in itself: it has been used for thousands of years, from Ancient Rome to the present day. It was also one of the most used stones in modernist architecture.

The Airshafts by tavares reproduce an uneasily breathing world that constantly breaks into a mirrored and fragmented perspective. The prisons of Piranesi, Carceri d’invenzione, or imaginary prisons, influenced Tavares in the development of her take on a mechanized life for the production of these works. The Carceris by Piranesi are a series of 16 engravings depicting enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and powerful machines. The rotations, suggested by Tavares, with her work and that of Piranesi culminated in the 2015 exhibition held at the Museum Lasar
Segal, in São Paulo, titled Cárceres a duas vozes (Carceres with two voices).

In the series ‘Fixos e Fluxos’ [Fixed and Flow], sets of schematically composed aluminum sheets shows satellite photos of the Atacama Desert. To each quadrant, Moscheta has attached a small copper plaque with the geographic coordinates of that space, registered by him during his journey through the region in 2012.
Moscheta’s journey through the Atacama territory becomes distanced through the view of the satellite image, stripping away the journey’s vastness and natural elements. In Moscheta’s words, “My method for constructing this work resembles that of the ancient cartographers, where the experience of the traveler came previous to the representation of the territory.
The map was only produced after the cartographer visited the place to be mapped, so the cartographer’s experience became part of the representation. In this work, the satellite’s mechanical eye finds the area I visited through coordinates. My geographical movement determined the choice of the image – a landscape never seen before by me, though there were the marks of my boots on the ground.”

By contrasting photoliths with Pantone color charts, Moscheta makes his own translations of the lush natural landscapes depicted in the Atacama. Using strategies linked to the classification and cataloging of files, Moscheta analyzes the landscape guided by chromatic relationships, leaving it to the viewer to reassign the colors to the elements.

Flyleaf is the name given in English to the guard leaves – those leaves folded in half and glued at the beginning and end of the book, to hold the interior to the hard covers. They’re usually decorated or have a different color and material from the other pages, and have the main function of protecting the interior of the book.
Flyleaf collages are formal experiments in which guard sheets from various times and origins are superimposed according to their colors. Layers of graphic and sensory memories, vestiges of books that make us fly beyond their contents.

Flyleaf is the name given in English to the guard leaves – those leaves folded in half and glued at the beginning and end of the book, to hold the interior to the hard covers. They’re usually decorated or have a different color and material from the other pages, and have the main function of protecting the interior of the book.
Flyleaf collages are formal experiments in which guard sheets from various times and origins are superimposed according to their colors. Layers of graphic and sensory memories, vestiges of books that make us fly beyond their contents.

Lisbon Blues (2018) began to be an installation composed of about thirty boxes, in nanogaleria, reflecting the marks that Lisbon shows in contemporaneity. Collected by Marilá Dardot over four months, those boxes, which remained for several years in the small windows of shops in Lisbon, and the chromatic alterations that they suffered due to prolonged sun exposure, are a reflection of the contradictions of perenniality and sustainability – inconsistency of the socioeconomic and contemporary political dynamics. Just as the monochromatic tone of the boxes reveals a fade from the colors that make up their identities, so too the recent constant changes in the typical Lisbon neighborhoods eliminate many of their sociocultural anchors and meeting points and community relations, drastically altering the sustainable urban dynamics of these neighborhoods.

Marilá Dardot’s Lisbon Blues, as the title implies with reference to the melancholy black American-origin musical style, as itself a form of resistance, works as a metaphor for spaces – and people – that, with the processes of gentrification, had to reorganize and change in their (or their) environments.

Lisbon Blues began as an installation but, through a process of selection, magazine, and printing on 15x15cm cards, being new and reorganized again, with recurrent methodologies in the artist’s work, gave rise to Lisbon Blues, tiles. In this (re)configuration in multiples, the blue and white of the squares refer to Portuguese tiles, identity elements of Lisbon. In its composition as both a sculpture-installation, the boxes create an ambivalence and a game between exhibition and camouflage, depending on the observer’s point of view, inside or outside the structure, the experiences, and the narratives of the city.

In the sculptural version Lisbon Blues (Façadism), the tile panels, consisting of the materials created in Lisbon Blues, tiles, and the boxes, on fragile plywood plates, refer to the façades of buildings in a limbo between degradation and abandonment, and reconstruction or demolition. They portray a process of standardization, creating a kind of memorial to a more diverse past than the supposedly multicultural present in which we live.

The last project configuration to date is the Lisbon Blues paint set, Lisbon Blues, signs, which arises from the appropriation of real estate plates that Marilá Dardot takes from the street and paints with offset blue paint—the same blue that survives through time in the installation and the multiples.

Despite the total human absence in the sculpture-installation and in the painting series, Lisbon Blues recontextualizes and reconfigures the objects, making them the silent protagonists – or the muted – of nostalgic places that oscillate, like the contemporary places in Lisbon, between the private and public spheres, contrasting the intimate and the alienating.

Just as the last boxes suffered a process of chromatic alteration, the last resistants who still keep their traditional and neighborhood-type stores—which (trans)formed and grew with these neighborhoods—also find themselves in a point of (trans)formation of new socioeconomic and cultural dynamics, leading to an urban (des)configuration process never before experienced by the city.

It remains to be seen—and determined—whether this process will self-regulate through a close dialogue with traditional stories and characteristics, or if it will lead to a point of no return with gentrification and a “Disneylandification” of the city, transforming the identity of the city into not everyday life, but a simulacrum of it, through nostalgic facsimile elements—a Lisbon Blues.

Luisa Santos and Ana Fabíola Maurício

Flyleaf is the name given in English to the guard leaves – those leaves folded in half and glued at the beginning and end of the book, to hold the interior to the hard covers. They’re usually decorated or have a different color and material from the other pages, and have the main function of protecting the interior of the book.
Flyleaf collages are formal experiments in which guard sheets from various times and origins are superimposed according to their colors. Layers of graphic and sensory memories, vestiges of books that make us fly beyond their contents.

Lisbon Blues (2018) began to be an installation composed of about thirty boxes, in nanogaleria, reflecting the marks that Lisbon shows in contemporaneity. Collected by Marilá Dardot over four months, those boxes, which remained for several years in the small windows of shops in Lisbon, and the chromatic alterations that they suffered due to prolonged sun exposure, are a reflection of the contradictions of perenniality and sustainability – inconsistency of the socioeconomic and contemporary political dynamics. Just as the monochromatic tone of the boxes reveals a fade from the colors that make up their identities, so too the recent constant changes in the typical Lisbon neighborhoods eliminate many of their sociocultural anchors and meeting points and community relations, drastically altering the sustainable urban dynamics of these neighborhoods.

Marilá Dardot’s Lisbon Blues, as the title implies with reference to the melancholy black American-origin musical style, as itself a form of resistance, works as a metaphor for spaces – and people – that, with the processes of gentrification, had to reorganize and change in their (or their) environments.

Lisbon Blues began as an installation but, through a process of selection, magazine, and printing on 15x15cm cards, being new and reorganized again, with recurrent methodologies in the artist’s work, gave rise to Lisbon Blues, tiles. In this (re)configuration in multiples, the blue and white of the squares refer to Portuguese tiles, identity elements of Lisbon. In its composition as both a sculpture-installation, the boxes create an ambivalence and a game between exhibition and camouflage, depending on the observer’s point of view, inside or outside the structure, the experiences, and the narratives of the city.

In the sculptural version Lisbon Blues (Façadism), the tile panels, consisting of the materials created in Lisbon Blues, tiles, and the boxes, on fragile plywood plates, refer to the façades of buildings in a limbo between degradation and abandonment, and reconstruction or demolition. They portray a process of standardization, creating a kind of memorial to a more diverse past than the supposedly multicultural present in which we live.

The last project configuration to date is the Lisbon Blues paint set, Lisbon Blues, signs, which arises from the appropriation of real estate plates that Marilá Dardot takes from the street and paints with offset blue paint—the same blue that survives through time in the installation and the multiples.

Despite the total human absence in the sculpture-installation and in the painting series, Lisbon Blues recontextualizes and reconfigures the objects, making them the silent protagonists – or the muted – of nostalgic places that oscillate, like the contemporary places in Lisbon, between the private and public spheres, contrasting the intimate and the alienating.

Just as the last boxes suffered a process of chromatic alteration, the last resistants who still keep their traditional and neighborhood-type stores—which (trans)formed and grew with these neighborhoods—also find themselves in a point of (trans)formation of new socioeconomic and cultural dynamics, leading to an urban (des)configuration process never before experienced by the city.

It remains to be seen—and determined—whether this process will self-regulate through a close dialogue with traditional stories and characteristics, or if it will lead to a point of no return with gentrification and a “Disneylandification” of the city, transforming the identity of the city into not everyday life, but a simulacrum of it, through nostalgic facsimile elements—a Lisbon Blues.

Luisa Santos and Ana Fabíola Maurício

Flyleaf is the name given in English to the guard leaves – those leaves folded in half and glued at the beginning and end of the book, to hold the interior to the hard covers. They’re usually decorated or have a different color and material from the other pages, and have the main function of protecting the interior of the book.
Flyleaf collages are formal experiments in which guard sheets from various times and origins are superimposed according to their colors. Layers of graphic and sensory memories, vestiges of books that make us fly beyond their contents.

In the series “(Un) Monument for V.Tatlin” Marcelo Cidade recreates the Monuments that Dan Flavin made in homage to Vladimir Tatlin, using overlapping fixtures structures for fluorescent lamps. While Flavin uses lamps to argue the impermanence of the materials and thus, of the systems, Cidade works around the ruin. In the recreations of Marcelo Cidade, there is no longer room for impermanence; there is only the useless waste of a utopian plan.

In the Déjà vu series, Cinthia Marcelle works with the memory of the spectator from the illusion of having already seen something, as the French expression indicates, in free translation, that which is already seen. The expression, however, besides dealing with the false impression of having already lived or seen something, also refers to the possibility of confronting us with a copy or plagiarism of something, as its variation ‘qui manque d’originalité’ (which suffers from lack of originality). Thus, Marcelle elaborated the series that is articulated in three works of three parts each.

In NightDay, Cinthia Marcelle proposes a time count from the selection of materials: fabric, paint, timber batten and shoelace. The piece consists of 12 modules with 6 layers of industrially patterned fabric with 60 black stripes on white background. The black stripes are covered gradually by white paint. The same linear measure of covered stripes is transferred to black shoelace which covers segments of battens that accumulate piece by piece over each module. The movement of Marcelle’s clock reflects the time of labor used in the manual realization of each piece in subtraction and addition operations.

The sequence of images depicts one full course of the ocean tide as it ebbs and flows, taking the subterranean columns of an abandoned club built by the sea. Each image is printed in transparent acetate and mounted between two pieces of glass. The 506 pieces are installed throughout the space in one single, meandering line on the floor, challenging the viewer’s attention.

In case a visitor touches any of the pieces – accidentally or not – the entire work will crash down, remaining on the floor until it is put back into order for the next day.

Abstract paintings hide portraits – invisible to the
naked eye – of women carrying children. Some of
them were forced to leave their countries due to
political conflicts or natural disasters, others belong
to the groups most susceptible to become victims of
violence in Brazil.

To reveal the hidden paintings, Longo Bahia has
developed an augmented reality application for
IOS and Android phones. Download the app for the
augmented reality experience through the QR Code.

Abstract paintings hide portraits – invisible to the
naked eye – of women carrying children. Some of
them were forced to leave their countries due to
political conflicts or natural disasters, others belong
to the groups most susceptible to become victims of
violence in Brazil.

To reveal the hidden paintings, Longo Bahia has
developed an augmented reality application for
IOS and Android phones. Download the app for the
augmented reality experience through the QR Code.

The surge of life drive embedded in everyday objects is a constant in Edgard de Souza’s oeuvre and becomes evident in the series of spoons the artist have been developing. The objects were meticulously sculpted from wood logs and, here, they were cast in silver. In Colher lambe colher the silver comes to life with human features and, in a pair, seem to serve each other voluptuously. The size and material of the pieces bring the objects closer to those of daily use and has the potential to envelop the viewer – who could lead them to the mouth – in their malice.

Hands opening their wallets and revealing what their owners carry in their private lives. Made in times of explicit government corruption and high political tension in the air, the video was filmed with a cell phone camera approaching people on the streets of Recife and São Paulo, and brings together images that delve into wealth, individuality, anonymity, privacy and power.

In the series 27 rue de Fleurus, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain used the Cubica [Cubic] system, developed by them, to rewrite poems from the book Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein. The artists then applied chromatic splotches to the compositions based on paintings in the art collection of Stein, whose residence was located at 27 Fleurus street, in Paris.

In the works of the series Estudos de Debussy [Studies on Debussy], Banfi covers and erases notes on musical scores by Claude Debussy, creating a new construction with the compositions, modifying the use of the composers notations.

Symbols of the same family are also seen in “Pausa de Bach” [Pause by Bach], 2016. In the installation that occupies the gallery’s main room, twelve books with different musical scores by Bach had their notations nearly completely blotted out by the artist with black ink, leaving only the symbols for pause and silence. Johann Sebastian Bach created a musical scale with a compositional logic that has been widely used until today in Western music, organized into twelve semi-tones (or notes).

Chiara Banfi’s interest lies in the confluence between nature and sound – or nature and music. From her early large scale expansive drawings that invaded and dialogued with the given architectural space forming visual soundwaves to her more recent works deploying rocks as rhythm dispersing solids, her production seeks to give corporality to bodiless findings.

The use of crystals and stones in Chiara’s work began during research into audio equipment. Investigating record players, Banfi discovered that part of the stylus that reads the groove in vinyl records consists of quartz crystal. This crystal acts as a natural equalizer, working with the stylus to uniformize the reading of music recorded on albums. Today, these quartz crystals are industrially synthesized, as they are crucial in equipment relying on rhythm and frequency. Stones, in general, have an intrinsic ability to transmit vibrations and frequencies. In Chiara’s work, they appear in various articulations

Chiara Banfi’s interest lies in the confluence between nature and sound – or nature and music. From her early large scale expansive drawings – that invaded and dialogued with the given architectural space forming visual soundwaves – to her more recent works deploying rocks as rhythm dispersing solids, her production seeks to give corporality to bodiless findings.

This piece is made from an old wooden curtain traditionally used in Buenos Aires. This type of curtain serves both to provide shade and security. Bacal cut the curtain into the shape of a Steinway piano lid. The piece is hung with the interior face of the lid facing the public. Bacal says, “I like how the piece connects sound and light. Normally, this type of curtain, when partially open, casts lines of light around the rooms of houses. You can see how they move across the floor and walls over time. Music endures, and sunlight moves. I’m thinking of time not just from a musical perspective, but also from a domestic one.”

A figure is contemplating the space, with both feet pointing backwards and with a pleasant and, at the same time, defiant attitude. The sculpture references the notion of the people from the “Antipodes”, the people from the other side, that was common in middle age Europe. This example of mistranslation shows how, in western society, the idea of the “other” implies some kind of negativeness or bizarreness. The “Antipodos” sculpture series shows proud antipodes, they represent the notion that we are all “others”.

The spelling alphabets, internationally used and recognized, originated from the two so-called world wars, in the last century. These acrophonic alphabets (in which each word represents its initial letter) are used to avoid misinterpretations and keep mistakes probabilities to the very least, every time the mutual understanding of a combination of letters seems to be crucial. It is not easy to find words that can be pronounced and decodified in different languages, and the alphabet known as Able Baker, created by US army in 1941 and then adopted by civil aviation, contained such an amount of sounds unique to the English language that another spelling alphabet, called Ana Brazil, was used in Latin America.

Currently, the most used of these codes is the international radiotelephony spelling alphabet, also known as the OTAN phonetic alphabet, which, despite its reference to the North Atlantic, is used by civil aviation companies and radio amateurs throughout the planet. Even if it departed from the recognition of a necessity to find common sounds to English, French and Spanish, the OTAN alphabet comprises a considerable number of words that allude to Anglo-Saxon culture: from Foxtrot and Golf to Whisky and Yankee. Ironically enough, Juliet and Romeo (characters condemned to a tragic finale due to miscommunication) are also included in this list.

“Alfabeto fonético”, presented here in its first applied version, is a proposition to create a new spelling alphabet, trying to use words of an international meaning and spelling, even if their pronunciation is adapted to the phonetics of each different language and the customary sounds of each country. Some of the selected words, deriving from Greek or Latin, were initially mythological or scientific concepts and ended up being used in daily basis (such as Atlas or Flora); some others are so specific to a certain culture or geography that tend to be used every time a reference to their connotation is needed or desired elsewhere (such as Harem or Ninja); and some seem to have become transnational due to the necessity of them being recognized by foreigners anywhere (such as Camping or Taxi).

The video created by Robbio in 2011, resorts to images of iron gratings used in houses and buildings to weave a commentary about the impossibility of permanence or the reconciling of opposites.


Untitled (cupula) is part of a series of images of domes of buildings done by Robbio, where the figure is interrupted by the absence of the ridge. With this procedure, Robbio distances the figure from its original representation, pointing to an exit at the top, as an escape valve for the ancestral symbology tied to domes.

In the series of photographs Caleidoscópicas (2018), Dias & Riedweg rephotographed Hovland’s frames of layouts for magazines from the computer screen during the editing of the videos that integrates CameraContact. As in Arquivo romance, the artists use a kaleidoscope between the camera and Hovland’s images. In both works, the camera is guided by the movement of the kaleidoscope, making the focus change from one mirror to the other and consequently from one part to another of the final image. In addition, the technique does not allow real-time monitoring of the camera’s recording, much the same as with analog cameras which only allowed viewing of the photos after the film was developed. The attempt to fragment the image into one with more than one possible focus in the new structure reveals a recurrent narrative of plural voices in Dias & Riedweg’s works.

Image created from the superposition of two different moments of day / night mapping in the terrestrial globe. The title refers to the time that sunlight takes to reach Earth.

The work of Lia Chaia moves through different languages such as photography, video, performance, installation and urban interventions. Among the issues of her concern are the perceptions and experiences of everyday life, as the permanent tension between culture and nature, part of a process of reflection on the way nature has been appropriated by the standards of urban culture. Chaia is also interested in thinking and understanding how the body reacts to stimuli and breaks of the contemporary world.

The Tiras of Lia Chaia deal with circulation in a hybrid, natural and urban environment at the same time. The Tiras function as a camouflage device to disguise the body in the nature.

Chaia Masks, made of red wood, suede and sequins, are like figureheads with many eyes and act as protective objects. Chaia says that masks refer to Arab culture and, in particular, to the proverb “may my eyes protect you (ya aini)”. “The eyes multiply to favor the vigil,” says Chaia, who has worked with the proverb in drawings and performances before.

In Transfusão [Transfusion], Chaia uses PVC pipes and cords of different tones of red to refer not only to a circuit of human veins, but also to architecture as something both alive and propositive.

In Edgard de Souza’s embroidery, we can observe the artist’s body at work, moving in a simultaneous movement of implosion and explosion, dissolution and evasion. The only figuration among the embroideries are cloud figures, in a comment on the search for images in gestural abstraction, which is similar to the game of looking for images in clouds.

The surge of life drive embedded in everyday objects is a constant in Edgard de Souza’s oeuvre and becomes evident in the series of sculpted wooden spoons the artist presents in the exhibition. These apparently trivial objects, now endowed with impulses and desires, were meticulously sculpted from rare wood logs of mahogany and jacaranda from Bahia. In Colher lambe colher / Spoon licks spoon the wood comes to life through human features, and as a couple, the two spoons serve each other voluptuously. In Colher de pau – cara de pau (pinoquio) / Wooden Spoon – stick face (pinocchio) the utensil becomes as malicious as the character of Carlo Collodi – the lying spoon has its nose stretched out. Colher de pau – cara de pau / Wooden spoon – stick face is cheeky and sticks its tongue to the observer.

Torneira [Faucet] (2018) is a mundane object that surges with life. This piece is from a series of faucets of outsized proportions that de Souza has been working on since the 1990s. From the mouth of the gold-plated bronze faucet flows a large drop resembling human secretion.

Edgard takes his “imprecise” scribbles – as seen in his recent solo show – and inverts them into a combined construction using cotton thread on linen surfaces. In the current show, the “action drawing” is taken in a different way by creating friction between the spontaneous and the planned construction. The embroideries can be as erratic as scribbles – or punctual – as if they formed infections on the fabric. In both cases, they have in common the evidencing of the volume constructed from accumulation of material forming protuberances and thus breaking the bidimensional.

The surge of life drive embedded in everyday objects is a constant in Edgard de Souza’s oeuvre and becomes evident in the series of spoons the artist have been developing. The objects were meticulously sculpted from wood logs and, here, they were cast in silver. In Colher lambe colher the silver comes to life with human features and, in a pair, seem to serve each other voluptuously. The size and material of the pieces bring the objects closer to those of daily use and has the potential to envelop the viewer – who could lead them to the mouth – in their malice.

In Edgard de Souza’s embroidery, we can observe the artist’s body at work, moving in a simultaneous movement of implosion and explosion, dissolution and evasion. The only figuration among the embroideries are cloud figures, in a comment on the search for images in gestural abstraction, which is similar to the game of looking for images in clouds.

“If to photograph is to take possession of the thing in itself, to appropriate me of photographs is to double take possession of the thing, that is: of the thing itself, and of the copy of the thing. It should be considered as a ‘double claiming’. The whirlwind – a phenomenon that appears and disappear in seconds and, obviously, difficult to photograph – has a great symbolic load in the hinterland of Minas Gerais (a large inland state in southeastern Brazil): it is perceived as a kind of materialization of the demon. Starting from this allegorical principle, photographing a whirlpool is like shooting the devil itself and it is up to us, creators and spectators, to be part of this pact. In 2008 I wanted to know the region of the hinterland of Minas Gerais that inspired my illustrious compatriot João Guimarães Rosa and to photograph whirlwind over there. The trip did not take place; so I embarked on a great research, among photographers – friends, strangers, noted – looking for those who would have accomplished the feat and who could share with me and the world, not only the documentation of the natural and ephemeral phenomenon, but the sensation of photographing it. How? Through their own account of that moment, so magical that it might even approach the very magic of ‘Grande Sertão Veredas’ [‘The Devil to Pay in the Backlands’, a 1956 novel by Guimarães Rosa]. The testimony of the other is an activating agent: to share stories is to bring the photographer closer to literature. The wilderness of the novel turned into the romance in the wilderness. What is closer to the devil than the delirium of fever or passion? During the search for images, I heard more stories about past and lost whirlwinds than stories about photographed whirlwinds. Even though nothing substantial has changed in the landscape, there is a presence there, fleeting, like a sudden warmth, a perfume or chords of a song. Even if an image does not remain as a testimony, through the recounting, through the narrative, remains the reminiscence, the hurt, the scar. What remains of a fever, except the remembrance that it has come and gone?”
Rosângela Rennó, 2008

The book depicts an action where two woodworkers transform two single beds into a double bed.

On a desk, a pile of books that addresses political and economic ideologies, reacts to the approaching observer.The books revolve around the same axis, preventing the reading of their content.

Chaia proposes a screen-printed red rubber object that takes the shape – and size – of a human gut divided into scales like a ruler.

In NightDay, Cinthia Marcelle proposes a time count from the selection of materials: fabric, paint, timber batten and shoelace. The piece consists of 12 modules with 6 layers of industrially patterned fabric with 60 black stripes on white background. The black stripes are covered gradually by white paint. The same linear measure of covered stripes is transferred to black shoelace which covers segments of battens that accumulate piece by piece over each module. The movement of Marcelle’s clock reflects the time of labor used in the manual realization of each piece in subtraction and addition operations.

Cadu’s “Clotho” (2015) was developed during an artist’s residence in Nowy Sacz, Poland, in 2015.
In the action, two pieces of crochet in the shape of giant cylinders with the equal height of each of the performers, is interconnected by several meters of red thread and positioned on opposite sides of the action space. The thread that connects one structure to the other is in constant motion as, in order to construct one piece, it’s necessary to gradually undo the opposite piece. That is, for the maintenance of cycles, each performer needs to subtract part of the twin structure of the other, and at the same time give up part of theirs in a cyclical process of usurpation and supply. According to Cadu, “Clotho, one of the three Moiras, manipulator of the Wheel of Fortune and holder of the fate of mortals and gods, baptized the work.”

Cadu’s “Clotho” (2015) was developed during an artist’s residence in Nowy Sacz, Poland, in 2015.
In the action, two pieces of crochet in the shape of giant cylinders with the equal height of each of the performers, is interconnected by several meters of red thread and positioned on opposite sides of the action space. The thread that connects one structure to the other is in constant motion as, in order to construct one piece, it’s necessary to gradually undo the opposite piece. That is, for the maintenance of cycles, each performer needs to subtract part of the twin structure of the other, and at the same time give up part of theirs in a cyclical process of usurpation and supply. According to Cadu, “Clotho, one of the three Moiras, manipulator of the Wheel of Fortune and holder of the fate of mortals and gods, baptized the work.”

Cadu’s “Clotho” (2015) was developed during an artist’s residence in Nowy Sacz, Poland, in 2015.
In the action, two pieces of crochet in the shape of giant cylinders with the equal height of each of the performers, is interconnected by several meters of red thread and positioned on opposite sides of the action space. The thread that connects one structure to the other is in constant motion as, in order to construct one piece, it’s necessary to gradually undo the opposite piece. That is, for the maintenance of cycles, each performer needs to subtract part of the twin structure of the other, and at the same time give up part of theirs in a cyclical process of usurpation and supply. According to Cadu, “Clotho, one of the three Moiras, manipulator of the Wheel of Fortune and holder of the fate of mortals and gods, baptized the work.”

Cadu’s “Clotho” (2015) was developed during an artist’s residence in Nowy Sacz, Poland, in 2015.
In the action, two pieces of crochet in the shape of giant cylinders with the equal height of each of the performers, is interconnected by several meters of red thread and positioned on opposite sides of the action space. The thread that connects one structure to the other is in constant motion as, in order to construct one piece, it’s necessary to gradually undo the opposite piece. That is, for the maintenance of cycles, each performer needs to subtract part of the twin structure of the other, and at the same time give up part of theirs in a cyclical process of usurpation and supply. According to Cadu, “Clotho, one of the three Moiras, manipulator of the Wheel of Fortune and holder of the fate of mortals and gods, baptized the work.”

Cadu’s “Clotho” (2015) was developed during an artist’s residence in Nowy Sacz, Poland, in 2015.
In the action, two pieces of crochet in the shape of giant cylinders with the equal height of each of the performers, is interconnected by several meters of red thread and positioned on opposite sides of the action space. The thread that connects one structure to the other is in constant motion as, in order to construct one piece, it’s necessary to gradually undo the opposite piece. That is, for the maintenance of cycles, each performer needs to subtract part of the twin structure of the other, and at the same time give up part of theirs in a cyclical process of usurpation and supply. According to Cadu, “Clotho, one of the three Moiras, manipulator of the Wheel of Fortune and holder of the fate of mortals and gods, baptized the work.”

“[…] André Komatsu makes his personal interpretation of urban signaling devices by producing something between sign and billboard, two metal plates that together form an X, empty by the words RIGHT and LEFT. The shuffling of two directions, at once spatial and political, signals the confusion of Brazilian political life. […]”
Excerpt from Experimentando espaços 2, by Agnaldo Farias

“[…] André Komatsu makes his personal interpretation of urban signaling devices by producing something between sign and billboard, two metal plates that together form an X, empty by the words RIGHT and LEFT. The shuffling of two directions, at once spatial and political, signals the confusion of Brazilian political life. […]”
Excerpt from Experimentando espaços 2, by Agnaldo Farias

“[…] André Komatsu makes his personal interpretation of urban signaling devices by producing something between sign and billboard, two metal plates that together form an X, empty by the words RIGHT and LEFT. The shuffling of two directions, at once spatial and political, signals the confusion of Brazilian political life. […]”
Excerpt from Experimentando espaços 2, by Agnaldo Farias

The works in this series examine different man-made interventions on Earth and their scales. These pieces were carried out from an immersion by Moscheta in the Atacama Desert, where the artist encountered tracks made by ancestral peoples. They are drawings that the artist see in the construction of these paths or in the manipulation of stone forms or in the construction of Apachetas – small piles of stones organized in a conical form as offerings made by the indigenous peoples of the Andes to Pachamama or to other entities.

The series ‘A Line in the Arctic’ was developed at the residencie ‘The High Arctic’, in Spitsbergen, Norway. A colored line made with adhesive tape was made on the frozen ground, trying to follow the exact parallel and meridian lines towards north, south, east and west. As the GPS signal is inefficient at such high altitudes, bringing up doubts about the precision of the action, the work ponders men?s failed attempts to measure and grid the world in certain parameters based on drawing strategies, which most of times seems displaced from the real characteristics of the landscape, as men tries to frame the natural world.

In the series ‘Fixos e Fluxos’ [Fixed and Flow], sets of schematically composed aluminum sheets shows satellite photos of the Atacama Desert. To each quadrant, Moscheta has attached a small copper plaque with the geographic coordinates of that space, registered by him during his journey through the region in 2012.
Moscheta’s journey through the Atacama territory becomes distanced through the view of the satellite image, stripping away the journey’s vastness and natural elements. In Moscheta’s words, “My method for constructing this work resembles that of the ancient cartographers, where the experience of the traveler came previous to the representation of the territory.
The map was only produced after the cartographer visited the place to be mapped, so the cartographer’s experience became part of the representation. In this work, the satellite’s mechanical eye finds the area I visited through coordinates. My geographical movement determined the choice of the image – a landscape never seen before by me, though there were the marks of my boots on the ground.”

In her new work, Penachos (2019), Tania Candiani works around the Danza de los Quetzales in an installation composed of video, objects, and live activation. The dance of the Quetzales is one of the few ceremonial dances that has survived the evangelization crusade in Mesoamerica, and it is still performed in the Nahua-Totonaca region located between the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz. Although nowadays it is often performed for public appreciation, the ecclesiastical prohibition did not manage to deprive it of its ritual character. The dancers honor the sun and ask for divine favors such as good weather, abundant harvest, and health, as the purpose of the dance is to benefit agricultural labor.

The core of the dance is composed of greetings to the four winds, protecting the farmers from the elements in all directions. It is a solemn, organized dance evolving around parallel and crossing lines of movements of zapateados (a sort of tap dance), twists, and reverences. The main movement of the dance is when the dancers bow to each other, curving their bodies and their heads, which carry the “penachos,” reverencing each other and the elements. These spectacular headdresses are thought to predate the Conquest, perhaps by hundreds of years. Their large and rounded shapes represent different symbologies through their colors and patterns.

In Candiani’s piece, these symbols were suppressed through an editing process by the artist to reach the very essential gesture of respect and reverence in the bow. Just like the gesture of bowing itself, Penachos strives to reach a universal language of geometry. Through the dance, not only is the rounded shape of the headdress present, but also the triangular negative space formed by the gap occupied by the dancers’ bodies and squared shapes that come from the alignment of one or more headdresses. The piece proposes a reinterpretation of the symbolic meaning of the movements of the dance based on reverences of gratitude and hopefulness – a movement that ties in with the concept for the 2019 edition of The Armory Show’s Platform.

According to Sally Tallant, curator of this edition of Platform, which takes place parallel to the 80th anniversary of the 1939 New York World’s Fair: “The New York World’s Fairs looked to a hopeful future in the face of rising global political uncertainty. Today, we are living in dark times: borders are closing; there is a growing refugee crisis; identity, internationalism, and citizenship are in turmoil.” With this in mind, Tallant took the title “Worlds of Tomorrow” from the 1939 edition for the 2019 Platform.

Candiani’s celebration of the Danza de los Quetzales tries to recuperate the hopeful representation of a possible future where life is exalted. As the artisan that worked on the black-and-white version of Candiani’s penachos told her: “I can make them in black and white, but I have to keep at least a red line. In the penachos, red is the blood, and nothing is alive without a little blood.”

Choreographic action based on a reinterpretation of the Dance of the Quetzals, one of the few pre-Hispanic ceremonial dances that survived evangelization in Mesoamerica and is still performed in the Nahua-Totonaca region of Mexico. The piece proposes a synthesis of the dance, focusing on specific movements: the greeting to the four cardinal points and the essential gesture of gratitude underlying the reverence performed by the two dancers. Of the original colors of the plumes, only white, black and a red line remain, alluding to blood and life.
Reverencia is part of a broad project to recover and reread traditional dances of pre-Hispanic and colonial origin based on the analysis of the narrative, symbolic, sound and choreographic parts that compose them.

Correspondence to Juan Manuel Perdomo is a series based on a strategy that started as a bar game in 2007 and has been transformed into obsession. It is a growing body of beer labels folded, without cutting or mixing brands. Correspondence is an everyday attempt to make folds that allow other senses to enroll in a limited universe of known signs.

Correspondence to Juan Manuel Perdomo is a series based on a strategy that started as a bar game in 2007 and has been transformed into obsession. It is a growing body of beer labels folded, without cutting or mixing brands. Correspondence is an everyday attempt to make folds that allow other senses to enroll in a limited universe of known signs.

Correspondence to Juan Manuel Perdomo is a series based on a strategy that started as a bar game in 2007 and has been transformed into obsession. It is a growing body of beer labels folded, without cutting or mixing brands. Correspondence is an everyday attempt to make folds that allow other senses to enroll in a limited universe of known signs.

The works from the Da parte pelo todo series (From part to whole) have been developed by Cinthia Marcelle since 2014, and are made up of sets of objects with strategic paintings in white latex paint. They are ordinary objects, linked to the world of civil construction and its work processes, such as shovels, buckets, sieves, spatulas and paint trays. The paint is manually applied into the pieces, in order to create delimited zones within the objects, establishing relations between figure and background, full and empty, addition and subtraction, presence and absence, visible and hidden. They are not, however, illusionist gestures: the pieces deal with the immediate identification of their components by those who see them, avoiding the commotion and ecstasy in the confrontation with the works. The pieces are formed by didactic relations that articulate signs present in the global culture within movements that avoid a sedative or nirvanic relation with the object of art. Marcelle’s works are calculated to what is strictly necessary, elevating the emotions to critical emotions and to reflection.

The spelling alphabets, internationally used and recognized, originated from the two so-called world wars, in the last century. These acrophonic alphabets (in which each word represents its initial letter) are used to avoid misinterpretations and keep mistakes probabilities to the very least, every time the mutual understanding of a combination of letters seems to be crucial. It is not easy to find words that can be pronounced and decodified in different languages, and the alphabet known as Able Baker, created by US army in 1941 and then adopted by civil aviation, contained such an amount of sounds unique to the English language that another spelling alphabet, called Ana Brazil, was used in Latin America.

Currently, the most used of these codes is the international radiotelephony spelling alphabet, also known as the OTAN phonetic alphabet, which, despite its reference to the North Atlantic, is used by civil aviation companies and radio amateurs throughout the planet. Even if it departed from the recognition of a necessity to find common sounds to English, French and Spanish, the OTAN alphabet comprises a considerable number of words that allude to Anglo-Saxon culture: from Foxtrot and Golf to Whisky and Yankee. Ironically enough, Juliet and Romeo (characters condemned to a tragic finale due to miscommunication) are also included in this list.

“Alfabeto fonético”, presented here in its first applied version, is a proposition to create a new spelling alphabet, trying to use words of an international meaning and spelling, even if their pronunciation is adapted to the phonetics of each different language and the customary sounds of each country. Some of the selected words, deriving from Greek or Latin, were initially mythological or scientific concepts and ended up being used in daily basis (such as Atlas or Flora); some others are so specific to a certain culture or geography that tend to be used every time a reference to their connotation is needed or desired elsewhere (such as Harem or Ninja); and some seem to have become transnational due to the necessity of them being recognized by foreigners anywhere (such as Camping or Taxi).

In NightDay, Cinthia Marcelle proposes a time count from the selection of materials: fabric, paint, timber batten and shoelace. The piece consists of 12 modules with 6 layers of industrially patterned fabric with 60 black stripes on white background. The black stripes are covered gradually by white paint. The same linear measure of covered stripes is transferred to black shoelace which covers segments of battens that accumulate piece by piece over each module. The movement of Marcelle’s clock reflects the time of labor used in the manual realization of each piece in subtraction and addition operations.

Truth or Dare parts from a photograph of a triangle embedded in the earth. The shape rotates sometimes slowing down, but never stopping. The movement resembles that of the bottle form the game that titled the work, or that of an unbalanced compass. The video was built using a software, created by artist and programmer Pedro Veneroso, who animated the photo by turning it on its axis. The sound design was done by Pedro Durães. At a certain moment, a shadow is projected over the image. The shadow can be understood as that of the spectator who is included in the game, and who can choose between truth or challenge, order or disorder. After the passage of the shadow, the triangle reverses its direction of rotation, “it is a physical inversion, suggestive of the non-hierarchical mixing and movement of people and materials”, as Stephanie Straine, curator of the exhibition “The Family in Disorder: Truh or Dare,”presented by Marcelle at Modern Art Oxford (MAO), in 2018, wrote. The sound of the video surrounds the exhibition rooms and establishes the circularity of the montage: that of changing the stripes into time, the one that disrupts the drawing of a human figure and that of the novelty converged on what has already been seen.

The set of frottages from the Secession series: The Tempest, is part of a project created for an artist book by Cinthia Marcelle, published in parallel with the solo show “Dust never sleeps”, by the artist in the Secession, in Vienna, in 2014. The images were made from folded sheets of paper, the same size of the publication pages, creating a kind of book within the book.
Composed of 21 chapters, the project builds a narrative of this gesture of folding paper. It is a relation between what is and what is not present, as frottage – or tracing – depends on a tangible referent.

Hélice how the dynamics of color and shape relationships in space, including the viewer as a participant. The manual touch provides the dynamics of the work: the shape expands, and the color dematerializes and pulsates in the air.

Newspapers whose denominations are somehow absolutes, such as Le Monde (The World) and El País (The Country), are covered by a blanket of lead that allows for only a glimpse of their titles, blocking any proper reading. Lead, by virtue of progressive applications of atomic energy, has become increasingly important as shielding against radiation thanks to its excellent corrosion resistance. The material is, however, extremely toxic to the human body. Komatsu’s lead blanket thus both protects us from the power of the media and contaminates us at the same time.

These pictorial works form part of an extensive installation entitled “Gordas” (Fat Women), 2002-2005, which focuses on the female body and the environment that defines it. Sculptures, video, neon lights, recycled objects, dietary recipe-books and even medical recommendations have shaped the different versions of this exhibition. For Tania Candiani, the theme of slenderness lies at the heart of her ideas, although she departs from the opposite extreme, that of corpulence and the tortuous methods that are employed to achieve the figure that is desired. Fashion magazines, television programs, clinics specializing in reducing size, medical treatments, pills and the leading role that gymnasiums have acquired in the contemporary city environment, all define the psyche of the new female ego and the cultural conception that Candiani analyzes.

Edgard takes his “imprecise” scribbles – as seen in his recent solo show – and inverts them into a combined construction using cotton thread on linen surfaces. In the current show, the “action drawing” is taken in a different way by creating friction between the spontaneous and the planned construction. The embroideries can be as erratic as scribbles – or punctual – as if they formed infections on the fabric. In both cases, they have in common the evidencing of the volume constructed from accumulation of material forming protuberances and thus breaking the bi-dimensional.

In Tentativa de apagar o cotidiano [Attempting to erase the quotidian], artist Marcelo Cidade (1979) establishes a daily practice of painting on local newspapers. The artist seeks to erase the news and images of the periodicals, leaving in evidence geometric traces. Lines of different colors, sizes and shapes emerge, and graphics lose their original function by arranging themselves in new patterns.

The surge of life drive embedded in everyday objects is a constant in Edgard de Souza’s oeuvre and becomes evident in the series of sculpted wooden spoons the artist presents in the exhibition. These apparently trivial objects, now endowed with impulses and desires, were meticulously sculpted from rare wood logs of mahogany and jacaranda from Bahia. In Colher lambe colher / Spoon licks spoon the wood comes to life through human features, and as a couple, the two spoons serve each other voluptuously. In Colher de pau – cara de pau (pinoquio) / Wooden Spoon – stick face (pinocchio) the utensil becomes as malicious as the character of Carlo Collodi – the lying spoon has its nose stretched out. Colher de pau – cara de pau / Wooden spoon – stick face is cheeky and sticks its tongue to the observer.

These pictorial works form part of an extensive installation entitled “Gordas” (Fat Women), 2002-2005, which focuses on the female body and the environment that defines it. Sculptures, video, neon lights, recycled objects, dietary recipe-books and even medical recommendations have shaped the different versions of this exhibition. For Tania Candiani, the theme of slenderness lies at the heart of her ideas, although she departs from the opposite extreme, that of corpulence and the tortuous methods that are employed to achieve the figure that is desired. Fashion magazines, television programs, clinics specializing in reducing size, medical treatments, pills and the leading role that gymnasiums have acquired in the contemporary city environment, all define the psyche of the new female ego and the cultural conception that Candiani analyzes.

In the Mamarracho series, doodles are drawn, digitalized, enlarged 1000 times and then painted on white canvases. The black lines haphazardly cross the canvas, overflowing onto the wall, making these works hybrid image-objects.

Ríos Antiguos is a series of sound pieces about dead rivers where Candiani converts river-bed hyographic representation codes into codes for music boxes. This pieces takes the route of the rivers that crossed the territory occupied by Mexico City and that today are covered or that disappeared. There are 24 music boxes whose cylinders “translate” the hydrographic layout of each river onto musical representation. In addition, their boxes carry grooves that show the paths of the rivers same at the same time that they modify the acoustic qualities of the object.

The photos from the water spirits series are derived from the film The Fish, by Jonathas de Andrade. In the film, fishermen from a village on the northeast coast of Brazil enact a ritual of embracing the fish that they have caught. The affectionate gesture that accompanies the passage of death is a testament to a relationship between species that is imbued with strength, violence and domination.

The photos from the water spirits series are derived from the film The Fish, by Jonathas de Andrade. In the film, fishermen from a village on the northeast coast of Brazil enact a ritual of embracing the fish that they have caught. The affectionate gesture that accompanies the passage of death is a testament to a relationship between species that is imbued with strength, violence and domination.

In Tentativa de apagar o cotidiano [Attempting to erase the quotidian], artist Marcelo Cidade (1979) establishes a daily practice of painting on local newspapers. The artist seeks to erase the news and images of the periodicals, leaving in evidence geometric traces. Lines of different colors, sizes and shapes emerge, and graphics lose their original function by arranging themselves in new patterns.

Manifestantes y Obreras is a series of graphic works based on research into Soviet textiles in the 1920s and 1930s and the social role of art related to clothing and textile design, specifically the work of Varvara Stepanova, Nadezhda Lamanova and Vera Lotonina.

This type of thematic and propagandistic design included, among the most general themes, industrialization, the glorification of progress and working conditions in factories, fields and shipyards. Artistic impressions of these themes were used as unusual propaganda tools.

For this series, these representations were adapted to create graphics based on contemporary images of working-class women in demonstrations and protests.