Ronald Duarte and Abel Duarte, Images courtesy of Pedro Victor Brandão

Once upon a time there was a very high hill. Then, an apartment building appeared on the hilltop, with a giant swimming pool pointing towards the Guanabara Bay. From the apartments’ windows, all of Rio de Janeiro can be seen, including the Corcovado, Sugar Loaf, the bridge to Niterói and beyond. The capital of the country had yet not been transferred from Rio to a distant flatland so a former dictator came in person to celebrate the opening of the new belvedere. Some years later, unplanned neighbors took over the building’s surrounding. People with no place to live started to build their own shacks. What a contrast: the slums and the building. Three bedroom apartments, four units on each level. Eleven stores, the last one is a penthouse with a 360º view. The pool became a target. Bullets shone at the façade while the “community” would walk in with their tires and attitude to have a swim. Close, leave, sell, run, since then the water is gone. This huge emptiness hangs from up above. Since then, the water comes in, from the roof, down the walls, through the pipes, and the wind blows. Last February, that community was “pacified” by the police, meaning they have collected the guns and removed the criminals. There is no funk party anymore at that court. Another void, another vacuum, and the wind blows. Real estate bubbles flying all over.

Travel inside the tram

A friend from São Paulo was so impressed to find an active and interesting art scene in Rio de Janeiro when she came for a curatorial research. She says it seems like nothing happens in town, because she never hears about what goes on here from outside. Even though Rio is the city with the most museums in Brazil, there is a huge institutional void. Lack of consistent programming and other administrative issues make most visits to museums in Rio interesting only regarding the architecture. For a city this big with so much available space, the feeling of emptiness is overwhelming. But there is a lot going on, just not easily visible for the visitor. After all, Rio de Janeiro is the home city of many great artists. And, they are not asleep. The vacuum generated by the absence of institutional support doesn’t completely suffocate alternative models of art production.

Alexandre Vogler, Image courtesy Pedro Victor Brandão

“It is easy to disparage what we cannot have.”

Apartment 1002 has finally opened its doors. They had been closed for 15 years. The new owner talked to Ronald Duarte, artist and good friend of his, about shaking the place up while he remodels and fixes the ruin 1002 has become. Ronald introduced him to Bruna Lobo, another artist who has experience in organizing shows in private apartments. Many phone calls later, and a group of people who are not a group started to spend time at the flat, experiencing the place, the neighborhood and the surroundings.

Bhagavan, Image courtesy Pedro Victor Brandão

It all started 3 weeks before the opening, short notice and no budget. It was named “O Rapozo e as Uvas” which is a mix of the building’s official name with the Aesop’s “ The Fox and the Grapes” fable. It was never meant to be an exhibition, rather a creative lab where the process would be open to public during a weekend. Some works were developed and shown while others remain unfinished. Such as the apartment, which was being transformed while we artists were there working, what was visible was always changing. The most impressive piece, though, is the view. There is this new perspective people can reach from the top of a mountain. This time of fast changes triggered by all the big international events to come requires reflection and attention. The apartment provides that space and experience.

Babalon, Image courtesy Pedro Victor Brandão

Many works dealt directly with the windows and the view, such as Alexandre Vogler’s sight test and Ronald Duarte’s laser beam reaching Christ while on Abel Duarte’s hand. Other artists worked directly with the apartment’s debris and objects. Guga Ferraz turned the freshly exposed wall insides into gold, and Baghavan transformed furniture pieces in castles of cards. Babalon was opened for everyone who wanted to grab an instrument and play along, even while keeping the bedroom doors closed. It is important not to bother next-door neighbors. They were all officially and unofficially invited, a few showed up and no one called the police. Hurray!

Guga Ferraz, Image courtesy Pedro Victor Brandão

The fairy-godmother

It all started in 2001, when a house for sale was home for the most important art show in Rio that year. Orlândia, Nova Orlandia and Grande Orlândia were organized by Márcia X and Ricardo Ventura. They led to many other shows in the same format.

Bruna Lobo, Liza Machado and Gustavo Sotero, Image courtesy Pedro Victor Brandão

Associados, in 2007, was organized by Ricardo Ventura and the art collective Opavivará at Ventura’s own house. But not only empty houses become temporary art spaces. Artists Bruna Lobo and Jonas Aisengart invited about 20 artists to add works to inhabited apartments without removing any furniture or personal items. Projeto ApArtamento took place in 2008 and 2010 and more editions are yet to come. Last year, curator Bernardo Mosqueira organized a show in his own new house before moving in…this apartment shows list could go on and on. It is important to highlight that alternative models interest both well-established and young artists. There is a common urge impelling us to take over fractions of space and time, to make things, to show, to experience, to exchange. Empty spaces tend to be filled. Vacuum surfers, here we go!

ensaio:circuito #03, 2010

It’s a sunny day in Rio de Janeiro’s neighborhood of Lapa, a linked chain of button up shirts and people weave through the city streets. They enter into a mechanics garage and circle through the space, the mechanics continue their work; the unfolding of everyday life continues. The performative art action and the work of the mechanics rub up against each other, influencing each other without collapsing their particular flows. This is the work of Amilcar Packer, potent, yet resisting brash spectacle. Through actions, images, and videos Packer plays with the structured scaffolding of our systems of knowledge and understanding of the world. With his background in philosophy, art has become a discourse of images, sounds, and actions where the chosen medium becomes a malleable method or route for a way of thinking, a way of building and deconstructing at the same time.

Rebecca Najdowski: Bom dia Amilcar! Thanks for agreeing to have this conversation about your work. I think the first time I encountered you work was at the Centro Cultural São Paulo’s exhibition celebrating its 20 years of programming. Your works that were presented kind-of buttress your practice chronologically, but for you, your practice is less linear and more cyclical, am I right?

still #57, 2006

Amilcar Packer: The fact is that somehow the answer is no, even if the direction you took is correct… putting things in linear/cyclical is keeping the dichotomy, the split in two opposites, and even though the idea of cyclical is more correct, when talking about what we call time, it seems to me that things get a little bit more complicated. For instance, there’s a beautiful text by Walter Benjamin in which he elaborates on the idea of a constellation of historical times to criticize, or to avoid, linear time and all the entailments of cause and consequence that it establishes (of course W.B.’s ideas are much more complex than that and relate to his criticism on historiography…). One of the problems of a linear conception of time is that it often creates this idea of progress/development and when you see things in retrospective they gain this aura of necessity; that things couldn’t have happened in another way. Also, the idea of linear time brings the need of a beginning, what is pretty much connected with the monotheistic ideas of time, more specifically with Christianity. As we were talking the other day, it seems interesting to look at the idea of eternal return at a “ritual” time in which it’s not about repeating what was done in a former time, it’s rather about being there for the first time. The way I conceive it: even though everything that I do is fragmented and has different and separated pieces which appear in time, it’s about only one thing that ideally could be seen as a picture, as a non-pre-existent whole, at once and the same time, but where you can always “come back”, “return”. It gets even hard to describe using words. History is unfolding into what we call present and future, but as well as to what we call past. The past is not frozen it is constantly changing…it is always open.

RN: When you mentioned an aura of necessity, or a particular unfolding of time that is rigid – and that this is perhaps something that you avoid in your work, it makes me think in small “strategies” that you use to keep open possibilities.

AP: Those “strategies” that you’ve mentioned deal with the need to develop a practice which assumes since its “beginnings” that meaning is built and rebuilt, and most of the time, we have little control over that. It’s pretty freeing in some ways since you don’t need to elaborate strict and rigid structures to avoid noise and change, what is not programmed. Even though, of course, I have very specific directions, intentions, and wills on the context I would like my practice to participate, or ideas that I would love to take part in and which fascinate me, the beautiful thing for me is to think about how what I do is and will be seen, read and used, re-appropriated and dismantled.

video #17, 2010

RN: I think this might be a good point to look at an image. Speaking of the “strategies”, in your Video #17 you deliberately left empty jackets. Can you speak to that a little bit?

AP: For Video #17 I had to count on the presence and collaboration of many friends, friends of friends, and some passer-byes. Even though I had an idea of the amount of jackets and individuals that I needed I knew I couldn’t fill everything because some of those places had to be left “empty” for those who couldn’t be there for various reasons. People that I would have loved to have there participating but that died before, people I would have loved to meet, people that I will meet or never will, and people that will meet the “work” after I die. The fact was/is that there must remain some empty place left. Place for possibilities or gaps, commas, intervals, silence… The action took place in downtown São Paulo and consisted of zippering together more than 100 jackets to form a circle, we turned around a building in both directions the same amount of times as if we were adulating the action, reversing it. It was not specifically about those people who were there or not, it dealt much more with ideas connected to the flow and movement of people in urban centers and how this displacement is determined by the split and organization of the “space” – all the hierarchies and world visions which determine social behavior. It is a collective body, a children’s game, but at the same time a powerful way to invoke and create energy – we can’t forget how important it is to get together in a circle with other people, and how many different human societies have used this in rituals and practices.

RN: Wow, ok… this leads me to two different (maybe not so different) wonderings:

This kind of fluid, social activity (and even the use of clothes/textile material) really seems to have some cords connecting to significant Brazilian artists like Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and Lygia Clark, but I’m curious as to how you see the relationship/s, if any.

I’m also super interested in how you use the urban landscape and all it’s implications in your work. There is so much on offer to work with. In much of your work you’ve used you own body in relation to architecture and space as a way to play with systems knowledge, to prod at them a bit. What’s happening here?

still #36, 1999

AP: I believe there are several connections in what I do with the artists you’ve mentioned. First because they certainly shaped the context in which I move and some of my world vision. They worked in a similar context as I do, Brazil and my practice have many connections with theirs: body as site, body as language, psychoanalysis, perception as subversion of the common state, revolution and freedom as for instance against morality and power, oppression and prejudices… But where I think we really do get close is in the sense that we believe that art is not an end in itself, in that maybe even “art” is not enough; or that art is always making art, that it is an action that has to create problems and formulate odd questions and become a strange body.

RN: So in the making you are sort-of proposing questions, ones that perhaps can’t be answered…I want to get back to how this is happening in the artworks themselves. Can we address that second question, about how you use the urban landscape and your own body?

AP: Concerning the urban space I guess it was discovery; a consequence that came from the experiences I’ve had in the previous works. The fact is that in the early works, the skin was a main concern as well as the clothes and the wall, but everything was taken more as surfaces – biological, cultural, architectural, social, and so on – layers and skins. I was pretty much interested in how clothes and walls function as a second skin and body and how cultural, social, and historical layers become like a second nature to us and determine social relations and world visions; they shape our behavior and our perception. But then I realized that the “skins” are thick and that it is not only about a mathematical layer… actually do you know that the skin is consider the biggest organ of the human body?!!

RN: Yes I did!

AP: Anyway, those, and some other discoveries opened up the possibility to me to work with the body in another way, to play with directions and gravity, to think about how physiological, intellectual, and “formal” structures of the human body are projected in the “outside” world and shape it symbolically and materially and solidify as rigid knowledge and power structures.

RN: So, considering this notion of “skin”, what is essentially a barrier…

AP: Something, which separates one place from another and creates hierarchies, value, segregation, split, power structures, difference. But I’m more and more interested in thinking of skins as more porous, something which defies the notions of subject, individual, particular. The skin is constantly exchanging and at the end it’s more a question of density since our bodies and minds are constantly being crossed. On another hand, other barriers try to avoid exchange and control it: country borders, jails, walls, and fences are made to avoid others to enter, to communicate. But the fact is that nothing has a unique meaning and that the scenario is further more complex and that’s why it seems much more interesting to think and to address the relations established between things as well as their contexts and not isolated objects, things, or phenomena.

RN: In some works you use barriers that are maybe less porous than skin, dense ready-mades found in the urban landscape. For instance, I really love the video installation piece where on the left side there is a panning video of glass barriers between what seems to be residential areas and public space, the right side is a video of you, or your arm, dragging a metal rod against metal fencing that seems to be in the same type of area as the other video. There is a flow that seems like this is vast space that can go on forever, this was made in São Paulo, right? Is its location important? How?

AP: The work you are mentioning is a video installation composed of two works that also function separately. Together they become “Field of dominance”. Both are ongoing videos that I have been working on for the last two years and are meant to be a collage of the same actions recorded in several cities that I visited, in video for the fences and in photographs for the glass walls. So till now you have fences from Berlin, Paris, São Paulo, Buenos Aires and so on. Each city that I’ll visit will be added to the prior video. The idea is to create an endless fence, which doesn’t consider any physical border and which in that sense refers to the idea of fence implanted in our minds. Also, the video records an action where sometimes I am inside and sometimes outside (of what is protected) which means that the landscape behind the bars sometimes is composed by houses, buildings, gardens, and other times by the street; both sides of different fences are alternated. The “glass walls”, Transparency/Opacity, is also an ongoing project which started at the end of 2009 after I realized that the walls and fences of some buildings in São Paulo were being substituted by glass and behind this fashion, that spread as a virus, I couldn’t stop seeing a perverse phenomena of transforming space into image; creating desire, fetish. As a material, the glass is considered more fancy and less aggressive than bricks and cement, or metal fences with spikes. But if one takes time to consider and reflects on the situation, it is really a complex and perverse phenomena of in-materializing the systems of power and control, of split and segregation. Formally, it’s also an endless panorama of glass walls; so far, I’ve only worked in São Paulo, but as you know, I just came back from Rio de Janeiro with a vast material to add. Actually, Rio is facing the same phenomena and as far as I know, several other cities are suffering from the same. In fact, the processes of control and surveillance, segregation and power, are global and the same strategies are being used everywhere, transnational borders…we must know that the main danger is not what we see, rather, it’s what we don’t but which is always there, a forcefield.

RN: How did you come to make the choice of placing the separate videos together?

AP: Well both seem to be part of a same urban phenomena connected with the industry of fear and the paranoia with protection and surveillance that most of the cities face nowadays. Both videos are pretty connected and form what I’ve called “field of dominance” which are relations that materialize and settle power structures, segregation, and submission and are strongly connected with ideas of private property and rights over things and space. Each video flows to a different direction – the fences from right to left and the glass walls from left to right – the videos are placed next to each other in a way to point to the space in-between them. They are developed as collages of places and cities and point of views; endless panoramic borders which place us at the center of a panopticon.

Hifen #2, 2008

RN: To take a bit of a different direction… I’m super intrigued by elements of you practice that don’t result in an “art object”. Perhaps there is a more obvious connection here to your background in philosophy, but it really seems to be important to what we were talking about before, of art (the art object) not being the end in and of itself. Your preparing for a residency in Turin, what are you going to do there.

AP: As a matter of fact, I don’t really have a formal background in visual arts, which doesn’t mean that I haven’t and don’t still study art. But as I told you the other day, for me from philosophy to art, it was just a slide. I thought I could think/do the same but in another way, for instance including the body, objects, architecture, images and sound as part of language and discourse. In recent years I’ve been asked to participate in conferences and seminars or to “present” my practice and I have been taking those opportunities to elaborate and explore another format that is a blend of talk/performance/conversation/walk and so on. A development of what I do but in a more direct way in the sense that I establish a concrete dialogue with specific persons in front of me. This has interested me for many reasons. For instance the possibility to establish a determined time/space; a situation in which the conversation and exchange is the means and the end. It is really something pretty new for me, but very exciting – a whole new field to experiment with me, for me, with other people and for other people… It doesn’t create physical objects, which I like as a principle, and it is based in conversation, which brings me back to many structures of knowledge and ways of sharing. It matters that it is art in the sense that it might help to open this kind of practice – even if there is nothing new in what I am doing and I am not looking to do something new as an avant-garde way of thinking – I intend and expect to collaborate with narration. I was recently granted to go to PAV (Parco Arte Vivente) in Turin, Italy, as part of the ResO’ residency program. The main project that I will develop there is a walking talk based in the peripatetic practice of open air lectures, with ideas connected with how historically in the western world there was/is a split between body and mind and how this shaped not only architecture, but more specifically, the formal structure of the theater spaces in stage and public, and how it came to the cinema and the art institutions, galleries, and museums. How this became the architectural and institutional frame in which the actors/artist are supposed to do something meanwhile the public observes and judges; this also connects with ideas of private property and use of the space since it seems that one of the reasons which made Aristotle walk while teaching/talking was the fact that he was not a citizen from Athens so he couldn’t posses land.

360º, 2006

RN: I think what you said about “intending to collaborate with narration” is really beautiful. If feels very in line with what I think about you work, which is making space for possibilities. Although a lot of what we have discussed is pretty heavy, I can’t just graze over the fact that a lot of your work has humor in it and knowing you as a person, you’re pretty light-hearted. Are you satisfied with the balance between sometimes-heavy subject matter and playfulness in what you output?

AP: I guess so and I think its necessary. When you talk about possibilities you open fields but nothing really assures which will become reality and I believe humor might help to deal with the unexpected. I am a big fan of irony I see it as one of the faces of intelligence (but have my doubts with cynicism and also sarcasm). For me irony makes you part of the situation, it puts you in a kind of drama or “pathos”, it creates sympathy, and makes us laugh about our own misery. For me it’s obviously a way of seeing life, a way to approach very “heavy” matters and also not to take things too personal or too serious…

RN: Yes, we all have to sometimes remind ourselves not to take things so seriously; it can often feel like a bit of a paradox….

AP: and it is… that’s exactly the point; we are the place where paradox and contradiction can co-exist.

Amilcar Packer, born in Chile, lives and works in São Paulo. His work has been extensively exhibited internationally at S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Bienal de las Américas, Museum of Art, Denver, Colorado, “2^nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art” Thessaloniki, Greece, 2aTrienal Poligráfica de San Juan, San Juan, Porto Rico, “Third Guangzhou Triennial: Farewell to Post-Colonialism” Time Museum/Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China, “On reason and emotion” – Biennale of Sydney 2004, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania, Ivan – Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderna, Valencia, Spain, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Secs Pinheiros, São Paulo,  Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, among others with solo shows at Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil, São Paulo, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Museu de Arte de Brasília, Brasília, and Centro Cultural São Paulo.

Pedro Motta, arquipélago 2 , 2010 and Rodrigo Borges, Estratégia da aranha, 2008/2010

Like most countries, much of Brazilian art seems to be located in and produced by artists living in the largest urban centers, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Geometria Impura, a traveling show from Belo Horizonte aims to shorten the distance from satellites to center. Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro is the latest exhibition stop, which was inaugurated in Belo Horizonte and previously exhibited in Recife and Salvador. The exhibition is tied together with frayed threads referencing the Brazilian Constructivist history, which appears to have a stronghold in Belo Horizonte where the exhibition artists are based. Looking to a modernist movement that sought to present universal ideas through geometrical abstraction, it is the poetic fissures, contaminations, and deviations to the abstraction of the works that drags the modern into a contemporary space.

Rodrigo Borges, Estratégia da aranha, 2008-2010

Some highlights of the exhibition include Rodrigo Borges’ Estratégia da aranha (Strategy of the spider), which makes use of common and industrial materials (a legacy of the constructivists) – cardboard boxes and colored adhesive tape create a vivid and rough geometric explosion into the architectural space of the gallery.

Pedro Motta, arquipélago 2, 2010

Pedro Motta’s arquipélago 2 (archipelago 2), a series of photographs of man-made “islands” are, perhaps, the most “impure” artworks in the show. A typology of found, industrially created sculptures recall the photographic work of Hilla and Bernd Becher. These humorous monuments to practicality and human progress acted upon the Brazilian countryside are a significant departure from geometric abstraction.

Renato Madureira, untitled, 2010

The works of Renato Madureira are a material investigation of ruptures. Black paint drips down the white gallery wall, it’s origin is a fissure in the wall itself. Sculpturally, Madureira confuses the sensations of rigidness and flexibility as metal sheets clamped together allow the force of gravity to to act as both a means and a material in the piece.

Francisco Magalhães, Da série "Um homen olhando a paisagem", 1999/2001, Júnia Penna, Compartimento, 2006 Renato Madureira, untitled, 2010

Júnia Penna’s compartimento (compartment) reaches back to the Penetrables of Hélio Oiticica, an homage to the artist who’s significance for Brazilian art resulted in the creation of art center which houses this current exhibition. In contrast to Oiticica’s use of materials that reference the informal and make-shift qualities of favela (slum) architecture, Penna’s penetrable structure is produced from formalized, industrial materials of MDF, formica, and glass. Here, the raw and vernacular are replaced with the rigid and prefab. As Oiticica’s own work evolved from clean geometric investigations to a more performative and participatory practice, compartimento seems to by cycling back. Although this appears to occupy a space that has more affinity with the constructivist ties to European geometric purity, it may actually be a mirror to the encroaching social and architectural development. In this context, Oiticica’s PN 2 reminds us with its inscription “A Pureza e um Mito” (Purity is a Myth), to question the very definition of purity.

Geometria Impura runs from December 11th through February 27th at Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro.

Verão (Summer), 2007. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

The calling card of artist Rodrigo Matheus is double-sided: a enchantment of the everyday on one side, the reverse, a wry disillusionment. My first encounter with the work of Matheus was not his own artwork, but a curatorial project for the gallery Mendes-Wood in São Paulo. He brought together pieces that engaged perception and representation; there were works that played with optics and material, works that looked at the gallery structure, and a minimalist aesthetic that seemed to be strategy for incorporating the maximum amount of pieces to build up to a grand moment without overwhelming the exhibition space. This interest in representation and perception carries through in his own art. Matheus has often utilized the apparatuses of corporations, the mechanism of identity development and also everyday equipment and furnishings, to examine representation and perception, most often that of nature and art.

Criptonita (Kryptonite), 2008. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

In his solo show Handle with Care at Galeria Fortes Vilaça in São Paulo, which runs through December 18th, Matheus expands and complicates his assimilation of the corporate institution by utilizing the accoutrements of art circulation within the gallery system. Here, the notion of a box, an apparatus used for both containment and circulation, is used as both raw subject matter and as a vessel to house videos. In a work reminiscent of Walead Beshty’s FedEx kraft and copper boxes, Caixa Pirâmide (Pyramid Box) are wood boxes that will bare the marks of their passage, the accumulation of stamps and labels reminding the viewer of the often invisible circuit operating behind artworks. Also exhibited among boxes is the video piece Patenon (Parthenon). 24 hours of Google Earth images of the Greek ruin are distilled into a 30 second loop creating a video that sits somewhere between postcard picture and video surveillance.

Handle With Care, 2010. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

Hollywood, a concurrent solo show in Rio de Janeiro at Silvia Cintra + Box 4 will be up until December 11. Again, time and passages are looked at, but here through the imaging of the landscape of Rio de Janeiro. Delicately idyllic painting of the tropical environment partially cover concrete, neo-classical, decorative forms. Hollywood, as the title suggests, takes on the construction of representation, specifically an imagined colonial iconography.

Travel Expenses, 2008. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

Matheus’s work is most successful when it embodies a topography of accessible, every-day technology that upends the construction of landscape – when the viewer, despite a framework of familiar technology and artificiality, still discovers a sense of wonderment. Representations of nature are often pushed through the sieve of technology to produce simulacra, but Matheus’s artworks are also a distillation of grand sensations into the human scale, carrying with them the legacy of Brazilian sensorial exploration. The use of industrially designed objects like humidifiers, fans, and spotlights to contain, organize, and model natural phenomena is a micro-scale experiment in forces, both natural and corporate. Work Station, 2008, is an installation environment that relishes in and transforms the everyday office. Computer monitors exhibit silent, uninhabited nature imagery from video games while artificial stone speakers play actual nature sounds. The non-functionality of the work station which runs parallel to an invented natural system asks the question: how do we apprehend the world?

Work Station, 2008. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.