Tiradentes, 1980. Lives in Rio de Janeiro
On April 1st, 2016, during his residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, in Berlin, Matheus Rocha Pitta installed a calendar in a shop window overlooking a busy street in Kreuzberg. He divided the large mural into a 365-square grid, one for each day of the year. In each of these spaces he glued an image depicting the various street demonstrations that have been taking place all over the world in recent times, including Brazil. All of these pictures were newspaper cutouts, and the date given for them was always the same: April 1st, the famous April Fool’s Day, or, in that case, the moment the work was inaugurated—that urgent, persistent today. A second version of April Fool’s Day featuring pictures from the Brazilian press in 2017 was produced for the Triennial.
Back in the 1970s, Cildo Meirelles experimented with newspapers, coins and merchandise as “ideological circuits”, in which he harnessed not only the content, but also the logic of domination intended by the moneymen and power brokers behind the press and the market. Over the course of his career, Rocha Pitta has reflected on those same circuits and proposed critical uses for them. Through symbolic gestures—such as buying kilos of the rubble generated by the gentrification of downtown Rio de Janeiro, or inviting people to a banquet in a museum that dispensed with all the service-ware (tables, cutlery)—the artist aims to draw the public’s attention to the codes, values and power projects often implicit to the mechanisms of exchange.
[U.C.]
Obras
O ano da mentira, 2017
jornal e papel japonês