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Contemporary Art

Extraction: The Raft of The Medusa

Extraction: The Raft of The Medusa

In this film Salome Lamas (Portugal) portrays a brief moment of euphoria as the occupants on the raft spot a glimpse illusion for their drift, hoping and praying to be rescued. We can almost hear the hoarse cries in an attempt to draw attention to their desperate plight, mustering their last ounce of strength to the void. This is their last chance of survival. The film is an allegory for the state of climate and environmental emergency.

Duration : 7m
Maturity Level : all

A Sunny Day

A Sunny Day

FaouziBensaidi (Morocco) proposes a disturbing and hilarious ride in the future, which is already our present. Under the impacts of a changing climate, the world changes, it has already changed. In a distant and near future, both fantastic and absurd, men and women survive as they can. Following a man, a slender figure between Tati and Buster Keaton, we discover through scenes of his daily life how devastating the effects of climate change are on humans and nature. How do we barricade against excessive heat or cold? How will it be to go to a supermarket or a zoo filled with different animals and species? A disturbing and hilarious ride in the future, that is already our present.

Duration : 13m
Maturity Level : all

Lac

Lac

Kellou, in her forties, lives in Bol, the capital of Sahel’s province. She’s a fisher, a profession transmitted from mother to daughter. She learned it from her mother. But for a few years, Lake Tchad has been shrinking, and fish has become rare. Kellou’s job is threatened. One day, after an un- successful catch, her 12-year-old daughter Mouna gives her an idea: pick up plastic bags invading the lake and make ropes out of them to sell them on the market. By this simple gesture, Kellou gets to, in her own way, fight against plastic pollution and adapt to the new conditions brought about by climate change. A film by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Chad, 2022.

Duration : 7m
Maturity Level : all

Sweating Sweet

Sweating Sweet

Orit Raff The video Sweating Sweet shows the artist walking slowly, barefoot, on the beach, along the coastline. She is wearing a white pinafore. She takes sugar from the pocket of her pinafore that she scatters into the saltwater. The pocket with the sugar becomes an integral part of her stomach, the sugar a product of her body and her work. Of course,the attempt to turn the salty seawaterinto sweet water fit for drinking and irrigation fails. Freshwater is an extremely scarce resource in an arid country, and her attempt to “repair” the sea, to deconstruct a given situation, is a Sisyphean task doomed to failure. Every wave breaking upon the beach “corrects” the disturbance she creates. In her works, Raff sets out to change states of aggregation and subvert the laws of nature via repetitious ritualistic acts.

Duration : 10m
Maturity Level : all

Arctic Dystopia

Arctic Dystopia

Michael Najjar observes the Arctic changing, the eternal ice disappearing, and the polar regions. The early warning system of our planet is sounding the alarm. In late summer – a time when the Arctic ice reaches its annual minimum point – the area covered by ice was smaller than it had been for a thousand years. What is the future of the Arctic ice masses which store enough water to make sea levels rise by several meters if they melt? Despite its aesthetic fascination, the video work “arctic dystopia” paints a threatening picture with regard to the future transformation of the world due to the consequences of climate change and the resultant loss of Arctic ice which is so vital for ensuring a stable climate. We are dependent on the glaciers and ice sheets in the polar regions for the maintenance of our planet in its present state of equilibrium; their increasing and ever more rapid loss will drastically change our world.

Duration : 6m
Maturity Level : all

Liquid Landscape

Liquid Landscape

The artwork “Liquid Landscape” by Michael Najjar is based on spectacular, hitherto technically impossible footage shot together with an Icelandic drone pilot shortly after the eruption of the Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland in March 2021. In an 8-minute flight, the camera moved over a newly born volcanic landscape. During the flight, the landscape becomes more and more liquefied and the camera always keeps a bird’s eye view of the increasing activity beneath it until it finally reaches the eruption crater and plunges into a Dantesque inferno. On the acoustic level, a complex sound composition enlarges the increasingly dramatic happenings on the surface. The unusual immersive visuals draw viewers deeper and deeper into the landscape and let them feel the transformation process and the creative power of the Earth.

Duration : 8m
Maturity Level : all

Michael Najjar

Michael Najjar

Discover video artworks by Berlin-based artist Michael Najjar on his dedicated [Channel, ] on ikonoTV. These latest projects are focused on our planetary future in times of climate change. He addresses the far-reaching ecological, economic and cultural impact of human-induced climate change, which is leading to a redefinition of the relationship between humans and nature.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

A Water Tale

A Water Tale

An old fisherman and a young boy are driving through a landscape and, while traveling, they are talking about the importance of water. At some point, they stop to get water from a fountain, as they will face a long day working on the sea. When they get to the place, we see the monaboat, ritually preparing their fishing equipment. This is never shown, what we see are only the two characters and the boat rolling, and we can hear the sound of the water without actually seeing it. The old man and the boy then throw the fisher#s net which lands on the sand. We now see the whole scene: the two characters are standing on a boat wreck in the middle of a desert. The sound of water dramatically disappears by Francesco Jodice, Italy – 2008.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Black Breakfast

Black Breakfast

Filmmaker Zhang Ke shows us a tourist, equipped with a camera and a tour guide, arrives in a provincial town where she hopes to see a city full of cultural relics and historic sites. But, contrary to her expectation, she finds herself in an urban industrial area, with blurred and patchy road signs eroded by smoke and pollution. The tourist, by instinct, takes pictures of these city signs: stop, street, and road signs. Later, leaving the city, she waits for a bus on a highway, where an endless stream of heavy lorries carrying coal passes, and the cloud of coal dust flies over the sky in a spectacular scene. As the cloud disperses, she notes a group of workers eating breakfast in the coal dust: their faces are of the colour of coal and hardly recognizable. Sitting in the dust among them, she has to enjoy a “black breakfast”, her face as black as the locals. 2008

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Jungle Fever

Jungle Fever

This short movie by Takuma Kuikuro (Amazonia/Brazil – 2022 ) documents the struggle of the Amazonian Xingu tribes trying to save their habitat from the fires, to protect their ecosystem and the many rare species that live in the rainforest. We hear the cry of a jaguar that is the warning that a danger is approaching. The Xingu Indigenous go into a state of alert, hurrying back to the village to warn the people that something is about to happen. The forest guardians leave the village to confront the danger. It’s fire, the forest is burning, all kinds of animals are dying. The guardians run in search of water to put out the fire in the forest, and try to help the animals. Strong scenes of destruction of the home, of the Indigenous’ forest. The Indigenous are watching the forest and the animals are crying.

Duration : 9m
Maturity Level : all

Frida Baranek

Frida Baranek

Frida Baranek has a background in Architecture and Industrial Design. Since the beginning of her career, the relationship the artist has established with the materials she uses in her works has been to challenge her resistance to achieve her metamorphosis: to build with and against herself. “Unclassified”, the sculpture approaches nature as a forest of industrial debris with its strength, fragility and uncertainty. It was created in the USA for the exhibition “The Latin American Artists of the 20th Century” at MOMA in NY. The piece is made of industrial waste stainless steel, which supports and interacts with aircraft parts, leftovers from the American military industry. At the time, there was a lot of talk about the excess that existed in the American military industry. The artist asked the US State Department for permission and provided these airplane parts to be used in the work. Frida Baranek, 1961, born in Rio de Janeiro, works and lives between Rio, Brazil and Lisbon, Portugal.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Georgia Kyriakakis

Georgia Kyriakakis

In her work, Georgia seeks to explore situations of strength and fragility, balance, and instability, present in nature, politics, social relations, and the world of work. Such relationships arise from visual poetic approximations with Geography - a wide and comprehensive area of ​​knowledge that animates the artist’s creative impulse and determines the choice and variety of means and materials used in her works. Objects, materials, words, spaces, and the meticulous articulation between the elements of the work are ways of highlighting the relationships between the virtuality of the image and the concreteness of the world. "Gaza Strip" is a set of rows of rounded stones on which a red line is drawn. It can be said that the Gaza Strip is a drawing on stone. But the title, the (military?) arrangement of the stones, the circular shape of the design and the same height at which it is made on the stones, suggest an articulation. It stimulates the mark left by a red liquid (blood?) on the surface of the stone. As the title itself indicates, the work refers to the violence and the historic war waged between Palestinians and Israelis in this small region of the Middle East. Just like the memory of historical facts and the conflict itself, the red line drawn on the stone, exposed to the weather and the passage of time, gradually fades, becomes almost imperceptible, but never completely disappears. Periodically it reappears, just like the conflict that seems to never end... It reappears strong and forcefully to remind us above all that the marks of violence are always indelible. Geórgia Kyriakakis,1961, born in Ilheús, lives and works in São Paulo.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Hugo França

Hugo França

Hugo França is a self-taught artist designer, who speaks about his furniture-sculptures coming from the forest waste. He has been the first who encouraged the creation of the Usina de Arte Art project and to have organized creative and artistic workshops and environmental education with the neighboring community. Hugo França’s work is to transform trunks, roots and parts of trees that are usually rejected. With this raw material, he draws directly on the wood following the paths that were created by nature. In production, he reframes the use of the chainsaw by carving trunks and roots and giving the works a sustainable and sculptural content. It is very represented at Usina by numerous Mobiliarios 2016-2019, a series of around 30 benches in jackfruit that one can easily find around which are scattered throughout the park. Arvore geometrizada, 2016, is a different sculpture he created and installed in one of the little lakes representing the structure of a tree. Hugo França, 1954, born in Porto Algre, works and lives between São Paulo and Trancoso.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Iole de Freitas

Iole de Freitas

Iole de Freitas immediately absorbs the transformative urgency of the environment to which she reacts in her films, Photographs, performances, and sculptures. For this ex-dancer (during 25 years), all her creations are about movement, enlarging the area of the body, speaking of light and shadow, lightness and weight. “O Peso de Cada Um”, 2015 (The weight of each one): sculpture in stainless-steel sheet, was part of the MAM exhibition in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. Despite the specificities of the material, however, some sculptures have been suspended in the air (like the one which is presented today on the ground at Usina de Arte), evolving in space like an imponderable aerial dance, opposing the idea of ​​lightness and movement to their original weight with a tenuous line between the gestural and the geometric, or between expressiveness and formal precision. Between the cloudy mirroring on one side of the plate and the concrete opacity on the other, the very materiality of this steel sheet is outlined as a simultaneously rigid and fluid body, which at times absorbs and reflects the exterior, at times asserts itself as a radical obstacle to the eye. The work of Iole de Freitas implies, at the same time, line and volume, body and membrane, tension and distension, wall, and air. Her sculptures seem to want to constantly go beyond their perimeter, go further, leave their borders, and evolve towards other spaces, dialoguing with the architecture and the landscape. Today at the Usina Iole also loves the way her sculpture dialogue with the other of the collection. Iole de Freitas (1945) born in Belo Horizonte, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Jose Spaniol

Jose Spaniol

Jose Spaniol uses everyday objects, and establishes an exchange between utilitarian and poetic functions. Since the 1990s, he has explored the relationship between his works with architecture and exhibition spaces. "Tiummmmtichamm", 2018, is a flat sculpture, built in marquetry of granite and marble. On its surface we see, on the one hand, a thin layer of water flowing over the stone, on the other hand, the representations of this movement are translated by the contrast between the white of the marble and the black of the granite. As in a mirror, the work creates a bridge between real and virtual space, bringing these two dimensions together. Its flatness contradicts the idea of ​​volume linked to sculpture, which is why the whole aesthetic experience linked to the work takes place while the observer wanders around or even above the object, starting from the image of water movement and sound. José Spaniol 1960, born in São Luiz Gonzaga, RS, works and lives in São Paulo

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Juliana Notari

Juliana Notari

In her visual and theoretical research, Juliana Notari has created a body of works that face their singularities, moving between biography, the confessional, catharsis, or relational practices. With a multidisciplinary approach, she works with the most diverse languages: performance, installation, intervention, video, photography, drawing, and object. For years, the artist has been conducting research on gender and sexism. Questions regarding the presence of the female body as opposed to a society that prides itself on virility and phallocentrism have always been part of his poetics. However, in addition to issues related to the feminine and feminism, her work also encompasses issues related to certain important themes: birth and death, sexuality, the relationship between fiction and confession, trauma, relationships of complicity/testimony and encounters between animality and humanity. In his work, these themes are always crossed by the question of sexuality and death. “Diva”, 2020. vulva wound Intervention in the landscape, Reinforced concrete, resin, and pigment. It is a “prospecting-hole-sculpture” embedded in a land devastated by sugarcane monoculture and its social traumas. A deep abscess, the work reveals the historical violence on female bodies that continue to be daily injured in many – and, depending on their color or gender, in different and asymmetrical ways – just like Gaya’s body, our Mother Earth. In addition to these bodies, Diva brings to light the immeasurable colonial traumas that, against invisibility, continue to fight for reparation. While wounded, the Diva herself continues to re-enact – since she turns over open wounds – the racial inequalities on which Brazil is based. Juliana Notari,1975, born in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil where she lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Julio Villani

Julio Villani

Julio Villani was formed between São Paulo, where he grew up, and Paris, where he forged his identity as an artist. His deliberate choice for this unfolding and the constructive form he imprinted on it give his work a dynamic dimension, which is determined, paradoxically, by unity. Where others would be affected by division and dispersion, Villani finds material and reason for concentration and reunion, opening a path that strictly follows the obsession of a look that seeks to reveal the secret face of things. Thread, line, net, knot... Julio Villani’s art is inhabited by the idea of ​​bonding, counterpoint, sometimes opposition; it is built from the organization of a coming and going, of an exchange — and it is at the heart of this, in that “between-two”, that everything happens. The problem of identity, underlying his procedure, is apprehended by a whole work around memory. The recovery process adopted by the artist and the type of recycling to which he submits the objects he integrates is his way of bringing together two temporalities with the aim of constituting a new one. "Trois Échaffaudages pour un Portrait" consists of questioning who one is at an exact moment – ​​the exercise to which Julio Villani commits himself in his Scaffoldings for a portrait – his own – consists of trying to understand how the subject became the one he became. The self-referential piece, the foundation of the project – the conical shape, the two circles of different diameters connected by three rods – resembles a popular coffee strainer holder, on which the artist coupled various elements. The first construction was quickly followed by a second, to finally become a trilogy. Nothing prevents him from adding a fourth, a fifth, an nth scaffold to the set in the future. After all, the work of the self-portrait artist has no end; there is no definitive answer to the question "Who am I?" – and the search for oneself is likely to be always prolonged. Julio Villani, 1956 born in Marilia, São Paulo, lives and works between Paris and São Paulo.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Liliane Dardot

Liliane Dardot

Lilian Dardot is a Brazilian artist, graphic designer, teacher, and political activist, mostly known for her drawings in colored pencils, her works of lithography, and book illustrations. She resumes the emphasis on painting, developing research focused on plant elements of the local flora. At the same time, he works with drawing and with new exhibition spaces, creating works in situ. “Cabanos em matas de água preta”. 2019 is an installation of three glass slides with designs printed with ceramic ink. Drawings are showing people who live in Água Preta, combined with the details of the vegetation of the Atlantic Forest, an ecosystem where the ‘Cabanos’ dwelt and hid. The artist discovered signs of what occurred during the Cabana revolt from 1832 to 1836 in the Regency period where blacks escaped and freed poor whites and small landowners Indians from the villages of Jacuípe. In the Temoratas Woods, on the banks of the dark waters of the river, between the coast and the hinterland. The blades were installed in the chosen location in the Botanical Garden of Usina de Arte, in positions oriented towards the east and west of the sun. Lilian Dardot,1946, born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais where she lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Marcelo Silveira

Marcelo Silveira

Marcelo Silveira’s practice seems to question pre-established categories, by challenging and tensioning apparently consolidated definitions of sculpture, installation, popular art, crafts and collecting. His production moves from an interest in materiality. Everything can be an object of work: wood, leather, paper, metal, plastic, and glass are just some of the elements explored. However, the configuration assumed by them is also fundamental, which can be created from the formal repertoire common to those objects or by recreating familiar and common forms in unexpected materials. “Atrio”, 2016 reproduces the atrium of the Casa Grande at Usina de Arte. The project was born from the reality of a house, the ’Casa Grande’, which is the main house on the site. So, attracting a lot of curiosity on the part of people working for the property who wanted to know. Marcelo’s initial project was to really and conceptually open the house to allow visits where he thought of organizing some exhibitions. As the atrium has several entrances and independent access, he thought it possible to imagine such a visitation space. As the logistics seemed complicated, the artist then imagined faithfully redoing the atrium space in another space in the Usina park. As everything is in this atrium of the main house, this ’reproduction’ gives a greater amplification and conversation. For example, the openings function as frames for the landscape, like a collection of landscapes, a new space for contemplation. The atrium is a meeting point, with the good acoustics, today it also allows events. Marcelo Silveira (1962) born in Gravatá, Pernambuco, lives and works in Recife

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Marcio Almeida

Marcio Almeida

Marcio Almeida is a multimedia artist who began his career in the 1980s and, since then, has developed his work using various media: paintings, drawings, engravings, objects, photographs, videos, and installations, including some intended for urban interventions. His gaze and interest are focused on themes of human behavior linked to the notion of displacement, transience, and belonging. It also directs its focus to issues of geopolitics and the occupation of urban space. The work “Tropical Hermitage” is a masonry building, covered by vegetation (Heras - Ficus pumila and Parthenocissus tricuspidata), a lawn (Zoysia Japonica) in circumference and Angel’s Trumpets (Brugmansia suaveolens), a plant with hallucinogenic effects. The vegetation grows together with the others planted in the botanical garden, transforming, and integrating with the landscape, to end up being almost invisible, a ’non-place’. The concept is based on the research of the Hermits’ movements, whose isolation leads them to civil disobedience, as they cease to "exist" for the State, evading their duties and rights as citizens. Such movements can be seen as the first performative movements. Márcio Almeida, 1963, born in Recife, Pernambuco, Brasil, where he works and lives.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Matheus Rocha Pitta

Matheus Rocha Pitta

Through different projects, he sedimented interests and strategies that allow identifying, in a work that becomes denser with each new work, a critical statement about the gestures that govern common life. The artist removes gestures from their biographical background and presents them as aesthetic acts with a historical dimension. Using photographs, videos, sculptures and installations, Rocha Pitta builds his own repertoire of gestures, which are activated directly with the public at his exhibitions. “Campo da Fome” is a vegetable garden of concrete and clay. Historically, the colonization of Brazil began with the monoculture of sugar cane, in the fertile lands along the coast. Cattle raising, subsistence and family farming was pushed into the less fertile interior, the famous “sertões”, the poorest part of the country and the main source of internal migration in the 20th century. Left untouched, the sculpture performs this closure and restraint of hunger, like an amulet or altar that would prevent its propagation. Matheus Rocha Pitta,1980, born in Tiradentes/ Minas Gerais/ Brazil, lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Paulo Bruscky

Paulo Bruscky

Paulo Bruscky is one of the exponents of conceptual art in Brazil and one of the main precursors of various manifestations involving art, technology, and communication. His artistic practice, based on the idea of art as information, is marked by constant experimentation, resulting in a plural body of works, composed of visual poetry, artist books, performances, urban interventions, Super-8 films and works in new media. Bruscky’s production is also characterized by the content of social and political contestation, a result of the artist’s critical and militant stance, whose early career coincides with the rise of military governments and the consequent establishment of severe dictatorial regimes in several Latin American countries, including Brazil. "Brasil", 2017, Bulky waste skip painted flashy gold on a concrete base painted white, surrounded by cactus. It was very important for Paulo to work with the local community and this work speaks of often separated worlds, that of an audience that does not have access to culture and that of art that is often too elitist. His work speaks of the ‘buraco negro da cultura’ (Cultural black hole). He then makes fun of what a monument is by wanting to magnify a bulky dumpster by transforming it into a magnificent object which thus loses functions. The cactus planted in a circle around the main work to make it almost unreachable speaks of the difficulty of accessing the culture. Paulo Bruscky,1949, was born in Recife, where he lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Regina Silveira

Regina Silveira

Regina Silveira is a multimedia artist, engraver, painter, and teacher. With different languages, her work explores themes that go through the composition of the image, the reinvention of representation, power, and politics. One of its characteristics is reinvention. From the questioning tone of traditional painting, Regina becomes one of the references in stimulating the revitalization of art with her illusionist perspectives breaking architectural environments and with drawings and paintings that distort the original space. “Paisagem” (landscape) 2021, a labyrinth formed by 59 transparent glasses measuring approximately 100 m2 and 2.50 m high, all marked by images of shots appropriated from the printed media, as a testimony to the daily violence we experience. With drilling and simulation of shrapnel carried out by digital procedures for printing and burning the glass, the 12 models of shots are strategically distributed throughout the glass labyrinth, to avoid being duplicated. All are placed at the same height (1.40 m), an allegedly generic measure capable of guaranteeing that they were experienced as more “accurate” shots... The work was initially shown at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo in 2021, before its deployment at Usina de Arte, in early 2022. The labyrinth often appears in Regina’s work, which is a way for her to talk about sharing, to create itineraries with, since the 1970s, the idea of ​​​​representing violence. It is a political work that she has been developing since the years of the dictatorship. In ’paisagem’, she selected a collection of 12 different images of gunshot impacts that she found in the Brazilian daily press. They are distributed in such a way as to never see the same one and allow the visitor walking into the work an experience of violence. But for her, the work remains phantasmagorical and artificial, even more so in its new context in the open air in the landscape of the Usina de art. Regina Silveira (1939) born in Porto Alegre, lives and works in São Paulo.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Ronaldo Tavares

Ronaldo Tavares

Ronaldo Tavares is a welder locksmith who has worked for many years at Usina de Arte. With the first artist-curator of the Usina, José Rufino, he got into the game, and encouraged by everyone, he threw himself into the water to create his tribute to the workers of the old sugar cane factory. He thus created ’Renascer’ (reborn) which is a tree where he gathered many elements found on the spot, tools, spare parts of engines, bicycles... cables, and a large mechanical collage transformed into a metaphor for Nature. He also composed with other recovered elements the streetlamps of the arrival of the Usina. Let’s see what this Brazilian ’Facteur Cheval’ will invent to surprise us in the future. Ronaldo Tavares, 1972, born in Jundia, Alagoas, lives and works at the Usina

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all