In 2001, Carmela Gross was invited to participate in an educational project created by Sesc/Senac for television. It was a program composed of a series of visits to artist’s studios in order to reveal the routine of these spaces.
At the same time, similar projects were developed by other institutions focusing on languages such as dance and theater; moreover, these projects were also intended to bring the audience closer to the artist’s creative universe.
For Carmela, the proposal sounded like “a staging of art making”, where the artist “would appear as a false character of herself”. This perception becomes quite understandable in the case of an artist who has maintained a daily work routine in the studio since the 1960s, when her works began to be exhibited regularly.
Not satisfied with the proposal, Carmela’s counter-proposal was to create a situation in which it was possible to document a “real work” that showed her practice “in real time, covering questions, errors and successes, deviations and improvisations.”
This was how the first version of “Escuta” appeared. To create the work, Carmela and three assistants covered the entire interior of the studio with kraft paper. After three days of assembly accompanied by a video camera, the studio became an “ocher capsule, illuminated by the filtered light from the windows and skylights …; almost a landscape of deserts, mountains and imaginary mountain ranges”.
Escuta was born from Carmela’s desire to subvert an external demand, a fetishization of art making. Her body then imposes itself and, in a sort of long-term performance, takes on the attitude of revealing, through covering-up, the private universe of her studio. The challenge was to create a form of visibility that would overcome the dichotomy between the action/event and the built space.
If the initial proposal of the project was to replace the fourth wall of her studio with a camera, the artist subverts it and transforms the space into an enigma, constituted by an imbricated set of pragmatic and conceptual choices, and by the exchanges with her collaborators.
To the initial proposal of mass communication, Carmela responds with a two-way action – permanent and temporary, and which reception is always relative: listen to see, see to listen.
“Escuta III” (2020), by Carmela Gross with the collaboration of Abraão Reis, Carolina Caliento, Fabio Audi and Osmar Zampieri, is part of Galeria Vermelho’s program “aqui, daqui (here, hence)”, created for the period of social distancing.
In 2001, Carmela Gross was invited to participate in an educational project created by Sesc/Senac for television. It was a program composed of a series of visits to artist’s studios in order to reveal the routine of these spaces.
At the same time, similar projects were developed by other institutions focusing on languages such as dance and theater; moreover, these projects were also intended to bring the audience closer to the artist’s creative universe.
For Carmela, the proposal sounded like “a staging of art making”, where the artist “would appear as a false character of herself”. This perception becomes quite understandable in the case of an artist who has maintained a daily work routine in the studio since the 1960s, when her works began to be exhibited regularly.
Not satisfied with the proposal, Carmela’s counter-proposal was to create a situation in which it was possible to document a “real work” that showed her practice “in real time, covering questions, errors and successes, deviations and improvisations.”
This was how the first version of “Escuta” appeared. To create the work, Carmela and three assistants covered the entire interior of the studio with kraft paper. After three days of assembly accompanied by a video camera, the studio became an “ocher capsule, illuminated by the filtered light from the windows and skylights …; almost a landscape of deserts, mountains and imaginary mountain ranges”.
Escuta was born from Carmela’s desire to subvert an external demand, a fetishization of art making. Her body then imposes itself and, in a sort of long-term performance, takes on the attitude of revealing, through covering-up, the private universe of her studio. The challenge was to create a form of visibility that would overcome the dichotomy between the action/event and the built space.
If the initial proposal of the project was to replace the fourth wall of her studio with a camera, the artist subverts it and transforms the space into an enigma, constituted by an imbricated set of pragmatic and conceptual choices, and by the exchanges with her collaborators.
To the initial proposal of mass communication, Carmela responds with a two-way action – permanent and temporary, and which reception is always relative: listen to see, see to listen.
“Escuta III” (2020), by Carmela Gross with the collaboration of Abraão Reis, Carolina Caliento, Fabio Audi and Osmar Zampieri, is part of Galeria Vermelho’s program “aqui, daqui (here, hence)”, created for the period of social distancing.
