EXHIBITION

Sao Paulo Biennial

Instituto de Visión, Sao Paulo, São Paulo, 09/10/2016 - 12/11/2016

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Parque Ibirapuera, Portão 3, Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo BR - 04094-000

ABOUT

"In my work, nature has been a protagonist of the first order. I have always felt attraction and empathy for its power but also been intrigued by its mysteries. General perception of nature has many times been a chaotic and menacing enormity: Powerful and destructive.

Humanity's most common response has been defensive. Eradication and submission have been core goals. Construction of massive urban areas, whose surface is not easily penetrated, not even by clean air, results in the denial of nature. Human habitat's realities are primary, rough, crude and hostile. In rebellion I propose, in a pendulum movement, a respectful dialog without impositions. A delicate, fragile, abundant presence, like a testimony, that in darkness, silent, is waiting to be activated by the wind. Through anecdote I propose to move nature again to the forefront in order to raise this question: Is the planet beyond repair?"

- Alicia Barney

Be Dammed is a constellation of projects/case studies that shine on their own, but also accumulate to conform a whole. Caycedo started working on this open/long-term research in 2012 in Colombia. She is exploring the interrelations between social repression and the planning and construction of water dams/reservoirs. Dams generally serve the primary purpose of retaining water by stopping the flow of a river. By analogy, we can think of repression as a power instance that also interrupts the flow of social and community organization. Today, the construction of these mega-infrastructures is affecting nature’s balance and populations in countries like Colombia, Brazil, China and Turkey. Historically in places like Southern California, Germany, and Spain, community displacement is intrinsic to the construction of water reservoirs.

In A Gente Rio (2016), Caycedo expands the body of work of Be Dammed by linking the communities affected by the dam of Belo Monte on the Xingu River, to the Itaipu on the Paraná river, to the populations affected by the breaking of mining waste dam Fundao in Mariana that produced the biggest environmental crime in the history of Brazil, and to the quilombo and caicaras communities of the Rio Ribeira de Iguape basin, the only river in the state of Sao Paulo that is not dammed.

Focusing on sexual and gender identities and politics, Carlos Motta investigates forms of representation of subjectivities and the construction of visual and cultural discourses that originate from them. In his work, memory and history not only correspond to the past; Motta uses them as a starting point to question the oppressive idea of normativity and to open the dialogue towards other practices and subjectivities.

Towards a Homoerotic Historiography (2013-2014) examines the role of colonization in the processes of oppressing native peoples’ sexuality. By addressing the relationships between religion, law, sin and crime, the work exposes the way in which practices and discourses of violence affected the bodies and the subjectivities in these cultures, erasing customs and behaviors at odds with the colonizing Christian morals.

In the series Untitled Self-Portrait (1998/2016), Motta explores the creation of hybrid personifications of gender and race. They are fictional characters that present the body as material subject to transformations, evincing the malleability of identity, the politics of difference, and the broadening of the horizons of representation.

For More Information

APT ARTISTS ON VIEW

Carolina Caycedo

Share this Exhibition: