Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
The video Do Figurativismo ao Abstracionismo (2017), screened at the 33rd Brazilian Art Panorama at MAM-SP, stems from a research process initiated in the Biennial archives, which contain the records of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. In 2013 I began researching the letters and background of the museum’s foundation and was struck by the close connection of Nelson Rockefeller, an American politician and cultural agent, with the institution’s project and his interest in aligning Brazilian modern art with American standards. A few years later I came across the surveillance and war reports he submitted to the US President at the time. So, the video originated from the idea of creating a kind of third text, a counter-catalog of MAM’s inaugural exhibition, combining his letters on culture and art with the accounts of Brazil’s political and economic situation. The video opposes aesthetic form, politics and ideology, challenging the idea of modernization and its relation to colonization.
One of the main elements of my work, the appropriation and editing of images, videos and photos is a process that allows shifting things in time and space. With such displacement, the object, the image, the text takes on a new meaning the moment it is used. Removing something from one context and placing it in another opens up a new web of possible and unexpected relationships. It is an exercise of resignification, of imagination. By diverting a subject from its natural, normalized meaning we are able to imagine other things from that appropriation. That subverts our common sense and transforms us.
From a critical perspective, I view history as the time frame contained in things and also as a way of rethinking what happens in the present. The things around us are a series of transformations that have accumulated to make up what we see. A chair was once a wood plank, which was once a tree, which was once soil—these time frames are thus contained in things. Evoking that history allows us to think of ways of reconsidering our attitudes towards the present. How we narrate our history can be a form of power, legitimation, conditioning, but also of transformation, invention, rupture.