Sobre Queda ou Desejo de flutuação - About falling down or Floating desire

 

2014

 

acrylic, polypropylene, wood, aluminum, lead, brass, optical and electronic system

 

 

 

During the Residency I did at RedBull Station in downtown São Paulo, my studio was facing the Joelma Building, notorious for the catastrophe of the 1970s in which 191 people died as a result of a fire. Living with that living monument in one of the most sensitive regions of the city brought me real questions about the relevance of my work and what artistic directions to take from this context. 

After a month living with that context I began to find it inevitable to approach the theme of Joelma, it was very strong for me, my dreams were taken by the disaster and I couldn't think of anything else.   

In the second month of residency I started to sketch and work on the piece that was named About falling or desire to float, a sculpture that somehow thinks of the desire to throw oneself from heights fleeing from the fire as an act of hope, not despair. The leap into the void is approached in this work as much more than just delaying imminent death, but an impulse of transcendent resistance.

Somehow I know that it is only by jumping into the unknown that we have the opportunity to change our perspective, and there, in front of my window, something very powerful had happened, even though tragic, painful and sad, I identified with what had happened, I imagined myself jumping with it, jumping into the unknown.

At the end of the second month I had a tape with 191 silhouettes cut out, the tape was stretched inside a seven-meter tower where an elevator with a kind of inverted film projector was moving. Inverted because normally the film runs inside the projector, in this case the projector moved over the tape of silhouettes shooting a flash of light to each of them in its descent. The result was a kind of projection on the wall of the Station's gallery, an animation of a character falling, but looking at the sculpture we can clearly see that the silhouettes are stationary, floating in space, and the fall is just an optical illusion resulting from the downward displacement of the elevator/projector. After descending by projecting, it silently rises to repeat the cycle.