Sorocaba, 2017

Gordura Trans [Trans Fat] is a provisional collective created by Miro Spinelli which pursues an ongoing performative project of the same name.

The Gordura Trans project is a research platform that proposes performance series exploring the relationship between the overweight body and a host of fatty materials in order to investigate the subjectification processes of these bodies and how they are seen.

In addition to Miro, the collective includes the performers Jota Mombaça, Jup do Bairro and Lucas Moraes and the photographer Francisco Costa.

Berlin, 1978. Lives between Berlin and Leipzig

In November 1995, the BBC broadcast an interview which the journalist Martin Bashir conducted with the most photographed woman on the planet at the time, the lady about whom the world couldn’t know enough. About an hour into their conversation, she revealed what she hoped for the future, her husband and the monarchy. It was the last-ever interview with Diana Frances Spencer, the Princess of Wales.

“I felt compelled to perform. Well, when I say perform, I was compelled to go out and do my engagements and not let people down and support them and love them.” Thirteen years later, the artist Yvon Chabrowski appropriated those lines from the interview and reenacted them in an aseptic environment featuring only a tripod, a chair and the character, played by the actress Jana Horst, in casual dress.

Throughout her career, Chabrowski has challenged the image by placing notions of the legitimacy, truth and possibilities of representations in check, especially through experiments with performance and reenactment that gauge and mediate reactions, understanding just how thoroughly a reproduced image still depends on the medium that created it. Can any experience ever be totally new? Can an image outlive its context? And, if so, there is something to be gained from that.

[U.C.]

Niterói, 1962. Lives in Rio de Janeiro

The thought matrix behind Simone Cupello’s work hinges upon juxtaposed, clashing and intersecting artistic languages. A gatherer of discarded personal images, the artist makes installations and organic forms that draw upon these archives stripped of their original function as auxiliary memory.

Sem título [Untitled] is a case in point: a stone sculpted out of compressed photos. Like nature’s own, the time-pressed remains of organic sediments, Cupello’s stones are made of material that has literally had the life squashed out of it, acquiring new form through crushed abundance. At the Triennial, the artist also presents Sem título (varais) [Untitled (washing lines)], an installation composed of hundreds of juxtaposed photos hanging from steel-wire washing lines, forming a volume that floats in the exhibition space.

[U.C.]

Niterói, 1983. Lives in Rio de Janeiro

Used wooden stools; chairs by a well-known designer; acrylic sheets; cotton shirts; Eucatex; fiberboard or scrap wood; sticky tape; plywood, all of these go into Rafael Alonso’s “canvases” or surfaces. Materials of everyday use known for their simplicity or rusticity tension the “nobility” of the museum, gallery, or art-fair wall they are destined for, profaning a certain sanctity and fetishism involved in the ways of exhibiting art.

At Frestas, Alonso presents an installation made up of forty paintings. Rendered in primary or secondary colors, black-and-white, neon, or in retro-futurist dark shades, these paintings avail of rounded forms and concentric repetitions; patterns, lines, overlappings and effects reminiscent of op-art or concrete art, as well as arabesques and gradients that look like they’ve been stenciled or left unfinished.

[U.C.]

Tiradentes, 1980. Lives in Rio de Janeiro

On April 1^st, 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 1^st, 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.]

São Paulo, 1965. Lives in Berlim

The appeal of apparently unappealing situations is a staple of Lina Kim’s work. Her artist’s eye finds something of interest in featureless places, in the subtle chink that reveals its own brand of detail. These openings, with their brittle visuality, demand the dilated, dragged-out, protracted time of a keen listening, as in this dysfunctional litany of verbs.

In her vast research on the architecture of Brasília, for example, which results in a photographic archive of empty spaces where time has all but stood still, the artist lets us see what does not, of itself, yield to the eye. The series of drawings presented at Frestas resulted from her anatomical observations of the swans that live on the canals of Berlin, Germany. In an extensive and meticulous endeavour, Lina Kim deploys strand-like lines imbued, like sheet music, with sound and—why not?—hearing. The organic forms of the birds’ bodies are conjugated with geometrical shapes spawned from concrete roots. Once set into interaction, these supposedly antagonistic forms achieve a strange constructive balance.

[U.C.]

Rio de Janeiro, 1978

“Da ideia a chama já consome / A crosta bruta que a soterra” [The flame of the idea already burns away/ the rough burying crust]. These are the third and fourth lines of the first stanza of the Portuguese version of “The International” socialist anthem. During the second edition of Frestas, these lines ring out from a post near the Santo Antônio Bus Terminal in Sorocaba. This intervention reveals the political verve that runs through the work of Rio artist Gustavo Speridião, who employs a range of mediums, including drawing, collage, painting, installation, sculpture, photography and video. His practice questions artistic craft itself on the professional circuit, seeing the labour relations in the art world as a political fact, and looks with distrust on the privileged position bestowed upon the artwork, which he considers to be all too often endowed with high speculative value.

Speridião’s painting uses a palette inherited from Russian constructivism, but which should not be taken merely as a reference to past visualities. His canvases tend to carry a freshness of paint, which, though dry, still runs. This freshness gives his works the mural feel of a just-sprayed alleyway wall or high-rise façade. The fruit of youthful élan and revolt, the artist’s civil disobedience appears in bruising form in the series Cartazes de agitação [Posters of Agitation] and Cartazes ginasiais [High-school Posters], where his lines reveal his insubordination to the history of art and to schools as institutions, the targets of his strong, edgy, protest-poster visualities.

[U.C.]

Munich, 1963. Lives in Berlin

With his formative years set against a Cold War backdrop, the photographer experienced the drastic processes of spatial, social and cultural transformation his country has undergone, all of which has honed his perception of time and historical recovery. Armed with large-format cameras, Michael Wesely began experimenting with overexposure in long-duration analogical photographic processes that enabled him to capture images that accumulate the movements, agents, passages, disputes and processes typical of the contemporary city, whether in Germany or abroad. Between 1997 and 1999, the artist documented the reconstruction of the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. In addition to depicting the square itself, the images also register what would become its defining characteristic, accentuating the ever-changing cityscape.

Familiar with Brazil’s urban reality and the local political context, at Frestas Wesely presents four photographs from a series taken on April 17, 2016, the day the Chamber of Deputies voted in favor of opening impeachment proceedings against former President Dilma Rousseff, elected in 2014 and ousted from office in August 2016. Taken digitally, but using overexposure with large-format cameras and very sharp lenses, the artist photographed street rallies at two traditional gathering spots in São Paulo: Vale do Anhangabaú, downtown, where an anti-impeachment protest took place; and Paulista Avenue, where a pro-impeachment rally was held. The photographic result symbolically captures the democratic schism and political crisis currently assailing Brazil. Among haphazard overlappings and smeared movements, the artist conveys a historical moment that will take many years to assimilate.

[D. M.]

Aracajú, 1973. Lives in Rio de Janeiro

Zé Carlos Garcia’s sculptures present themselves as uncanny shapeshifters that can recombine their members to conjure up different species of insect, or transform pieces of furniture by cloaking them in plumage. This adding-on creates hybrids that not only preserve the meanings of their constituent parts, but also generate morbid curiosities out of distortions of their natures. Garcia seems to want to evince a certain perversity in his audience, caught somewhere between revulsion and fascination, playing on their voyeurism before such mangled bodies, however fictional they may be.

At Frestas, the artist presents a sample of the art he has produced over the last eight years. In the works Cadeira [Chair] and Pássaro [Bird], for example, he explores the formal qualities of the materials and confers upon them a feathery flutter that seems to contradict their sculptural condition by bringing them to bear in all their enigmatic presence. Something similar happens in Ganimedes [Ganymede], a monumental shapeless mass draped in black feathers plonked in the middle of the exhibition space. Not exactly a mantle, not exactly a wing, the work exists in a hybrid corporeality that seems suspended in time, much like Zeus himself, who reigns supreme over the gods at the same time as he abducts the young Ganymede. The Trojan prince was tending to his father’s flocks when he was seen by Zeus. Enchanted by his beauty and spurred by an impulse somewhere between seduction and sadism, the god of gods transformed himself into an eagle and carried the youth off to Olympus to serve as his personal cup-bearer.

[O.A.]

Goiânia, 1979

Interested in the choreography of the body in mid-violence, Yara Pina explores the potency of the destructive act. In meticulously planned interventions, she destroys everything from uprooted plants to animal bones, tableware, chairs, even easels and frames. These performances normally figure as a physical attack upon the material and space, in which we see the power play between her actions and the materials’ resistance to them. However, the artist’s focus is on the damage sustained by the objects, the marks left behind by her depredations, the last remaining evidence of an annihilated presence.

Before the Triennial opened, Pina carried out a series of actions in the exhibition space, destroying a guitar, chairs, frames and other objects, which were burned, stoned or smashed off the walls. The heaped wreckage and silhouettes scorched onto the walls, also attacked with knives, were all that was left to tell the tale. As Pina started out in drawing, her present work reveals her familiarity with charcoal, improvised out of the charred remains of her objects. Surrounding the incinerated, hacked-up remnants lie all manner of improvised weapons, with rolled-up canvases, paintbrushes and bits of broken frame for handles. The presence of these sharp implements doesn’t only hint at the violence inherent to certain criminal contexts, but also fills the exhibition hall with an unease and latent dread, as if danger were imminent.

[O.A.]