By Cidade Matarazzo
Cidade Matarazzo
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Walk inside of the Cidade Matarazzo with the virtual tour and live the creative invasion, exhibition titled "Made by... Feito por Brasileiros", that happened in 2014, at the old Matarazzo Hospital.
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BLOCK A
From A1 to A33.
A1 - This performance transforms corncobs into pearlcobs and inscribes the central arch within a circle of corn. The presence of the human body as part of the work lends an aspect of theatre to the installation.
A2 - According to Lygia Clark, the participants “start out aware that what they are pulling out of their mouths is just thread, but as the performance goes on, they begin to feel like they are actually pulling up their own guts”.
A3 - The artist created a ghostly soot-black forest drawn onto the walls with an empty sedan chair placed in the middle of the room, waiting to be occupied. The conjunct creates a landscape of rare intensity.
A4 - Homage to two rubber trees that are located in the entrance of the hospital: the drawing represents their energy spreading to the walls, the floor and the ceiling.
A5 - The Tree Academy of the Museum of the Invisible asked a group of artists to contribute to a Tree Manifesto, based on the awakening to trees mediated by the healer/hypnotist Pierre Capelle.
A6 - 50 drawings were exposed in the room "Tree Clinic". In "Invisible Forest, a phantom and magical forest is created. Elaborated from metal screens, skulls, rocks and other objects.
A8 - The artist’s proposition concerned a stand of a dozen or so trees on the old hospital grounds at risk of being removed by the development. To avoid felling these trees, the artist proposed having them treated and replanted in large pots.
A9 - The rays that emanate from a tree are mutable, though it resembles a fixed prism through which we see the building in myriad forms, depending on the angle.
A10 - The forest, made of charcoal, is illuminated by video images of curious floating creatures. As ghosts, the images pass by fleetingly through the exhibition's reality.
A11 - The work consists of a pyramidal stack of melons impaled with cast-brass devil’s tongue leaves painted in the sansevieria’s typical dark and light-green bands
A12 - Films: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967) Pesadelo Macabro (1968) The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968) Awakening of the Beast (1970) The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures (1977) Fogo Fátuo (1980)
A13, B22, C9, C12 e D1 - A metal sculpture packed with used newspapers as a direct reference to the splurge of irrelevant information in the contemporary world. The artist boarded up windows and doors in all five buildings of the Matarazzo Hospital complex, packing them shut with print and technological scrap generated by an increasingly info-junkie world.
A14 - "The totems are present in the memory of most men. They come from different eras and worlds." The works of Feldman are memories of the first centuries, revisited in a contemporary language.
A15 - "With the image as flashlight and text as shadow, the project brings this [of what's the invisible] investigation into physical space. It’s not an just attempt to answer a question, but to elaborate upon the unknowable.”
A16 - Images of the manifestation held in São Paulo, in 2013, in which governmental and police repressive activities are associated to care, to the clinical anaesthesia and the uncertain atmosphere, inherent to a hospital.
A17 - The idea of the work is to restore the rhythm of passing time to the empty space, not with the precision of a doctor’s wristwatch, but that inexact rhythm of waiting; the silence of passivity.
A18 - Rodrigo Bueno describes the work with a poem: "Who are these Saints? / Are we the silent patients? (...)". The saints and plants were collected at the Hospital.
A20 e E17 - Intervention of red cables and electric wires that were spread in the rooms and corridors. It recalls the vein circuit of the human body in which blood circulates, referencing the hospital..
A21 - In Fragile Future, light functions as a symbolic and emotional ingredient rather than as a tool to simply illuminate the dark. Studio Drift creates an unexpected combination of high-technology and poetic imagery.
A22 e A26 - Woodman's apartment was the space of her questionings and ghosts, where she talked about the imperceptible, about the absence and the invisible, through a game of hide-and-seek with nothing.
A23 - The materials used remind the viewer of two states of the feminine: the erotic and the maternal, as symbolised by the uterine quality of the white fold formed by hospital curtains, the fragile fruit, the waiting-room chairs and the central lighting, which breathes life into the construct.
A24 - The ideia of a body presents itself disfigured, establishing a material continuity with the decayed ambient in which it's immersed.
A25 - Work of memory, mirror-work. Daniel Senise makes the past and the future confront one another when sharing on of the rooms in the old Hospital.
A27 - A video-installation showing colourful soundsuits in motion, some at normal speed and others in hypnotic slow-motion, allowing the artist to blend the structure, decoration and movement into one visual mass
A28 - To report the industry of chicken production, the video contemplates the baroque concept of "still life", with chickens that feed themselves nonstop with the delicacies of the abundance land, Cockaigne.
A29 - The work of Vik Muniz tells the story of Agenor Andrade Filho, showcasing documents that prove its veracity, just as wells as hospital objects, furniture and the wall-written story.
A30 - Minter created Mercurial, a video-installation produced especially for the Matarazzo Hospital. Mercurial shows a pair of women’s feet, painted silver, dancing in a pool of a silvery liquid.
A31- The documentary and the six audios are a homage to the artist. Beyond that, there is also the work "Reversible Poems" - check work description for more information.
A32 - At the wall, documental scenes of the crowds that attend these “funk balls”; in the antechamber, a handmade loud speaker plays recordings from the balls or snippets of the funk songs.
A33 - The Maze is a site-specific installation in which ancient Kufic calligraphy is written out on the ground in grass strips. The slogan—The People Want the Fall of the Regime—is repeated over and over as the maze is followed.
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BLOCK B
From B1 to B25.
B1 e B3 - The artist usually creates enormous works that re-articulate physical characteristics of an specific urban or architectural environment. Still, he uses materials that have a strict relation to the place.
B2 - The artist's work deals with matters of place, structure, material, design and surface with a rigorous conceptual sensitivity. It is compromised to the minimalist subversion of everyday itens.
B4 - The video reveals an abandoned white car in a forest close to a lake. The car structure is incapable to contain the impact of the fireworks explosion.
B5 - The artist creates interventions in specific settings; he transforms places by flooding the floors with a thick veneer of oil (or blood) to create deep mirrors that permit no human intrusion. At the Matarazzo Hospital, at the foot of a magnificent marble staircase, Barclay created a silent mirror of black oil that reflected the surroundings.
B6 - This work suggests a geometry, or rather various geometries, as in the constant swirl of the spheres on this mobile, which is reconfigured to create unending compositions, always similar, but never the same.
B7 - The artist displays a large vertical photographic canvas print, in which it's hard to identify what exactly the photograph depicts
B8 - According to Marcia Xavier, “The idea of the project was to bring the shadows cast through the windows into the ground floor corridor."
B9 - Interactive art installation. A luminous cave with recycled materials was created: Cosmic Cavern #31 put together a series of plastic objects painted in neon paint.
B10, B12, B14 e B16 - The steps of whomever walks through this place generate a smoke that, when in contact with lasers, creates "walls" of light in the corridors and doors, drawing a new spatiality.
B11 - Two ambients are filmed in a timelapse. In each of the intervention rooms, the windows are painted black and you can see a big projection of another window.
B13 - In 9 necklaces of freedom, the artist refers to the history of Brazilian slaves, They used to adorn themselves with the extravagant jewels of their bosses for, in the moment of escape, leave them in the trees.
B15 - Two ambients are filmed in a timelapse. In each of the intervention rooms, the windows are painted black and you can see a big projection of another window.
B17 - Discarded materials found by the artist in the middle of the hospital's debris put together a subtle collage. The materials: broken plaster, pieces of fences, dry leaves and concrete.
B19 - Visitors participating at the performance in the kissing room from Natura.
B20 - A four-projection video-installation with Portuguese narration. The four cardinal points are personified and each is ascribed an idiosyncratic character. They engage, harass each other, argue, and interact.
B21 - The film tells the absurd story of a residential elevator that is particularly prone to operational gremlins. Given the constant floor-changes and interruptions, the elevator presents a series of surreal situations.
B24 - "The works all draw analogies with the daily reality of life in underdeveloped regions and the socio-cultural situations of occupied territories, customs and humdrum elements.”
B25 - Birdcages are transformed into nests and attached to a tree. Symbols of imprisonment and contention, here the cages are not only open and distorted, but actually become cosy passerine dwellings.
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BLOCK C
From C1 to C14.
C1 - The Warli art is the only form of record available to a people that are not acquainted with written histories. It depicts the social life of this ancestral community.
C2 - The writing of the artist on the hallway, the walls, the ceiling and the floor of the old Matarazzo Hospital interact with the work of the Warli Tribe.
C3 - A synesthetic sound and visual installation is composed of three fundamental elements, that complement themselves, creating the work: a video, objects with sound fragments and colours and the public participation.
C4 e M1 - Interventions and installations made with the public's participation. One of the works is a grafitti with stencil portraits. The other one are statement-movies of people that were somehow connected to the hospital.
C5 - The sculpture generates an effect in urban whereabouts and in the architectural context. The work offers to the public a portrait that can be used as a pause and a reflexion on the place's identity.
C7 - The work is a three-dimensional tangle of kite skeletons, forming a rhizome that orchestrates a play of binomials: inside/outside, geometric/organic.
C8 - Pieces of the abandoned building, debris and bricks create an organism. The heaps overlap themselves in architecture, propagate and try to build themselves up in the space. Everything goes from growth to petrification.
C10 - The artist created a photographic installation that evoques ephemeral moments, exploring the pathos of interpersonal relationships, of gender and desire.
C11 - Collaborating with Tomas Faria, the ballet dancer created a conceptual intervention, integrating dance, aesthetics, architecture and emotion in the intuitive occupation of the old Hospital's empty spaces.
C13 - The hedgerow is an anti-stage and anti-bunker that proposes another structure altogether, an alternative space for socialisation and collective integration. Against the audience/stage dichotomy, the hedgerow breaks with the segmentary structure that separates public and private, the particular and the collective.
C14 - Symbolically, spheres and ropes are materials that allude to organic elements, such as cells from an umbilical chord, whilst also functioning as points and lines.
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BLOCK D
From D1 to D8.
D2 - The artist has been building upon decomposition and the subtraction of expressive forms. It’s as if the only way the artist could construct a genuinely legitimate artistic object, was to go all the way back to the immateriality of sound.
D3 - By seeing the abandoned building, the artist observed a layer of dust laid by the passing of time. In an inverted gesture, she proposes to extract the dust from around the rooms, making the borders of the place evident.
D5 - Intervention of cut, painting and collage of the photographies. In them, the natural disorganization of characters' distribution reveals that they didn't pose, but were captured during their activities.
D6 - Destricted.br is the Brazilian version of Destricted, created by Neville Wakefield. The Brazilian version is the result of an invitation to produce erotic films (explicit or otherwise).
D7 - Chico and Filó are Francesco Matarazzo and Filomena Sansivieri, his wife. The Hospital's history points to a period in which the community and the institutions walked hand by hand, just as the couple did.
D8 - Currently, the disposal of rubber is an environmental problem. The work is the idea of a labour developed by man that comes back to haunt him. The installation is build from tires' carcases.
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BLOCK E
From E1 to E21.
E1 - A large construct occupies the exhibition space, set to a short-film entitled Dádiva 1 – COPOD’ÁGUAPORVIOLONCELO (Gift 1 – GLASSOFWATERFORACELLO).
E2 - Boxe posters reproductions with painted black stars. The installation suggests a meditation on the "broken" body of the building and, metaphorically speaking, about the hospitals' role as a place for healing.
E3 - The posters, engravings, paintings and photographs were probably as good as windows for the patients who would have spent days, weeks, months or years gazing upon them.
E4 - The artist created a mural of collage and painting on one of the building’s corridor walls. Abney painted a mural of abstract figures that dance and play among colourful floating images.
E5 - McGee is a pioneer in the practice of painting directly into walls, transferring the graffiti to the gallery's space.
E6 - This sculpture composed of strips of paper is the result of the recycling of debris from our society. It forms a type of amorphous, unidentifiable monster that resembles an elephant, but with which everyone can identify, play or turn it into their enemy.
E7 - The work combines sculpture and video from a horror movie script that the artist wrote and directed with the American moviemaker Guy Breslin.
E8 - The tunnel to which the artist refers is a metaphor for the situation in which he sees his native Egypt today. There is hope, but also uncertainty.
E9 - The artist installed a temporary studio in São Joaquim's market and asked for vendors to pose in front of a fabric with an object that was selling in their stalls.
E10 - The artist's reference was a recent trip to Japan and how Japanese culture makes an art of control, the core principle of bonsai.
E11 - A sound-light installation in which the artist stokes our perceptions by blending Huni Kuin paintings with harmonic poetry. The Huni Kuin, or Kaxinawa, are the largest indigenous tribe in the Amazonian state of Acre.
E12 - In this film, ants carry away pieces of paper reminiscent of the confetti strewn about during carnival in Brazil. The soundtrack, by O Grivo, relates with carnival on various levels.
E13 - Adel Abdessemed transforms everyday images into unexpected and shocking declarations. His references, in general, come from his personal, social and political views.
E14 - The work was based on research conducted at the Inhotim Institute in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais. The images were projected onto, and distorted by, mirrors of various sizes, creating assorted dimensions and images at six different points throughout the exhibition space.
E15 - The work is a part of The Botanist, in which the artist inspires himself in the history of Tahiti's Chinese community. The goal is to learn about the history of the tree and the process of natural printing.
E16 - The programming of Brazilian and international videos and films during the five weeks of exhibition was based on five projects: Eternal Rhythm, curated by Nadja Romain; Cinema Yemanjá, programming formed by the films of the 3rd biennial of Bahia, with support Maison de France; Shows Video Tal, curated by Gabriela Maciel and André Sheik; Spirit of the Forest, byAmilton Pellegrino de Mattos and Ibã Huni Kuin; Manifesto of Integral Naturalism, by Sepp Baendereck.
E18 - Gush is about the ocean's memory. It reflects ambiguous and polymorphous landscapes. "A wave of water that passed through the room and fell into the wall's surface, flying back to the sea".
E19 - The artist connected the history of this emblematic family with Brazilian history in general and her own in particular. The idea was to reveal the Matarazzo family’s influence on the construction of streets and roads.
E21 - Made entirely of cardboard, this three-dimensional installation invites us to reflect on creation and on the changes and transformations matter has undergone since that first moment. It also contemplates how we behold beauty (birth and death).
F1 - The unlikely rain that crosses the two-floor building of the old Matarazzo Hospital represents the artist's desire to wash this place destined for demolition.
F2 - The papers spread over walls, the ceiling and the floor were in continuous movement generated by the wind of several fans. The idea of transformation is equivalent to our body's movement.
F4 - "I decided to speak of the relationship between this immigrant’s livelihood, the idea of a desired place, and the preservation of foodstuffs and memory. I say memory, as the locale hasn’t been touched by anything but the wear of time for the last twenty years."
F5 - The wall refers to pop culture elements of the Northeast, especially regarding the wood engravings for cordel - poem publications that present a wood engraving in the cover.
F6 - His large-scale graffiti, incredibly detailed and vibrant, illustrates characters within a colourful patchwork that evokes the fluid manner of the modern cityscape. His references are drawn from Mexican muralism and his home country’s rich folklore.
G1 - The Maze is a site-specific installation in which ancient Kufic calligraphy is written out on the ground in grass strips. The slogan—The People Want the Fall of the Regime—is repeated over and over as the maze is followed.
G2 - The dance performance signed by Marcia Milhazes and the scenery by Beatriz Milhazes, compose a choreographic piece, Camélia.
G3 - It’s like being in a camera obscura with little spy-holes through which to see the world turned upside down. This observatory is also a space for meditation and recreation and of harmony with nature.
G4 - The work consists of two vehicles of old ambulances, parked in the hospital, that contained in their interiors several lamps recovered from the hospital's rooms.
G5 - The Valquirias are inspired in the female characters of nordic mythology. Suspended in the ceiling, the bodies of the Valquirias also fly to divine tasks, as the location guardians.
G51- Piano Dentelle # 2, put toghether the elegance of a piano and its bench with the popular tradition of protecting objects with crochet towels, generating a new dimension to tradition, with a elaborating kinetic and psychedelic effect, without losing the functionality of the object.
G6 - The artist’s installations offer up scenes open to different interpretations that dwell in the collective unconscious, or in situations related to the contemporary urban world.
M2 - The Whale was born as a means of dialogue between walls, navigating a sea of near-imperceptible cracks and breaching from an ocean of cobble. A collective letter, written inside the lines of the world’s largest mammal, as a way of encouraging conviviality through art.
IDEA: Alexandre Allard
CURATOR: Marc Pottier (EU/Brazil)
ASSISTANT CURATOR: Maguy Etlin
INVITED CURATORS: Simon Watson (USA), Baixo Ribeiro - LabCidade (Brazil), Pascal Pique (France), Gabriela Maciel & André Sheik (Brazil), Nadja Romain (UK)
GENERAL COORDINATION: Katia d'Avillez
EXECUTIVE DIRECTION: Companhia das Licenças e Base7 Projetos Culturais
PRODUCTION DIRECTION: Summit - Lauro Andrade and Dedo de Moça - Thaís Leal
TECHNICAL DIRECTION: Jean Toussaint
SPONSORS DIRECTION: Andrea Mannelli
SPONSORS MANAGEMENT: Fábio Klein
EDUCATIONAL PROJECT DIRECTION: Maria da Penha Brant
EVENTS & COMMUNICATION DIRECTION: Elise Lombrage
PRESS OFFICE: A4 Comunicação - Mai Carvalho
CURATORSHIP ASSISTANTS: Naime Endo and Vítor de Araújo da Silva
COMMUNICATION ASSISTANTS: Beatriz Barros and Otávio Garcia
HOSTING ASSISTANT: Luciana Conte
EVENT PRODUCTION: Antonio Stan Stancato, Pete Moinhos, Carol Carvalho
THANKS: Cristiane Rondon, Karla Osorio, Junior Camargo, Marcello Rossi, Caio Luiz de Cavalho, Gisele Kato, Karina Ades, Renata Moreira dos Santos Massimino, Sandro Bianco, Luiz Rodrigues, Simon Widman, Juliana Martins, Rémy Fleury, Maria Buccellati, Lalai Persson e Ivi Brasil, the International Escritorinho of Arts, Ding Musa and all the sponsors.