A mudança

A Mudança [Moving, 2005] belongs to a group of works by Marepe that relates to the sphere of domesticity and intimacy. Among these are sculptures shaped like clothes bundles, furniture and houses. Here, however, household utensils are in transit, hauled from one place to another in the back of a truck that has been reduced in scale. Marepe is world-renowned for the inventive manner in which he appropriates objects and cultural practices from his homeland, the region known as Recôncavo Baiano in Northeast Brazil. This gesture is reminiscent of the readymades created by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). In this sculpture, the artist alludes broadly to the transitoriness of the human condition, and the economy of the conveyed objects eloquently expresses a reality in which material conditions can be tough. The truck’s license plate contains the name of the artist’s hometown, where the work was constructed by a local artisan, the date on which it was produced and an abbreviation of the artist’s artistic name, MRP, which could be seen as sort of a license code.