Watch Museum Art Videos featuring Interviews with Artists

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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 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

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 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 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 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

Tulio Pinto

In the last twelve years, Túlio Pinto has developed research on sculpture and installation with industrial materials, which denote in the constitution and in the way they are presented, his intention to promote encounters of different potentialities and temperaments; of oppositions that are based on the limits of their possibilities. His work “Athar” means impact in Arabic. The family of works that bears this name presents more radical load situations suffered by the glass pieces that the artist intends to use in established systems. Athar #5 consists of three H-beams and a glass bubble. For Usina de Arte, the challenge was to install the piece over the water mirror of one of the institution’s dams, activating a new layer of perception of the work based on its duplication through its reflection in the water. The series of works entitled Nadir presents, in different systems, angled glass sheets, in an "interrupted fall" position. This pause in the falling movement is due to the interdependence generated between the glass and the system of ropes and stones. The minerals work as an anchor for the situation and a pendulum that "supports" the interrupted movement of the glass. Like Athar, Nadir #almost an island 02 was also installed over a water mirror in one of the institution’s reservoirs. In astronomy and geography, nadir is the lowest point of the celestial sphere, as seen from an observer on the planet’s surface. The Nadir is the diametrically opposite point on the celestial sphere from the Zenith, which is the point directly above the observer in the horizontal coordinate system. Nadir is the projection of the vertical alignment that is under the observer’s feet, as if "a hole" ran through the other side of the planet. Nadir, whose prefix nad has a connection with Sanskrit, would mean a channel, stream, or flow of nothingness. It would then be the channel in which the prana would circulate throughout the body to infinity. Túlio Pinto, 1974, born in Brasília, lives and works in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Vanderlei Lopes

Vanderlei Lopes’ artistic practice runs through a trajectory of experimentation with various supports that culminate in sculptures, objects or situations stamped from everyday life, transformed, and perpetuated in materials such as gunpowder, gold, ceramics, bronze or sound. The work for Usina de Arte features the model of an empty arena carved from its top. The rings on the trunk of a tree are records of its lifetime, evidence of the duration that constitutes it as a tree, a natural element. The arenas, architectural constructions made from classical Greece, made to accommodate many people in order to watch presentations of all kinds, are seminal elements built by culture. The work relates the cut to the cultural construction, to the civilizing event. The empty theater is an allusion to the social stage where events and everyday activities echo and unfold. The stairs present, both to access the work, and those represented inside the arena, are articulated between the physical experimentation to access the work and the one represented, inside the Arena. Between the passage from something experienced physically to something envisioned, through representation, virtually inside the sculpture. Vanderlei Lopes,1973, born in Terra Boa. PR. Brazil lives and works in São Paulo,

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

MAP | Bangalore

Discover MAP - Museum of Art & Photography’s [Channel,https://ikonotv.art/tv-shows/title/167] with its Museums without Borders Series together with international institutions.

Duration : 7m
Maturity Level : all

Still Waters of Delft

In View of Delft (1660–61), Johannes Vermeer captures a tranquil Dutch cityscape bathed in soft, diffused light. Clouds drift slowly above the skyline, reflected in the gently rippling canal. This slow video interpretation reveals the calm balance of architecture, sky, and water while inviting deep looking and quiet contemplation. Subtle movements allow the viewer to experience the serenity Vermeer imbued into this luminous, almost timeless vision of his hometown. This work can be seen at [The Mauritshuis,https://www.mauritshuis.nl/ontdek-collectie/kunstwerken/92-gezicht-op-delft].

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all

Alfredo Jaar, "Claro-Escuro"

“The old world is dying, the new one is slow to be born" by Alfredo Jaar is a new work entering the Usina de Arte collection and invites reflection on the dangers of civilizational transitions. “Images are not innocent”, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar often warns. Those who look at the neon phrase of his work “Claro-Escuro” (2015) under the wall of what was the largest alcohol distillery in Brazil in the 1950s are sure of this, and which since 2015, in its cultural reconversion, has made up a socioeconomic development project through art, education, and environment. In this chiaroscuro, monsters appear” establishes a permanent residence at Usina de Arte, expanding the equipment collection with large installations by international artists. Please visit the [Usina da Arte website,http://www.usinadearte.org/en] for more information.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Marina Abramovic, "Generator"

Explore Marina Abramović’s "Generator," an evocative installation that challenges us to disconnect from technology and reconnect with nature and Earth’s minerals, such as Rose Quartz. This video captures Abramović’s vision of using performance art to foster a deep, personal engagement with the environment, emphasizing the transformative power of presence and participation. Experience how "Generator" uses the energies of natural crystals to inspire unconditional love and a heightened consciousness of our relationship with the Earth.

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all

Poirier, "Fall of the Giants"

Dive into the compelling world of Anne and Patrick Poirier with their installation "Fall of the Giants" at Usina de Arte. This video offers an intimate look at how the artists use ruins and fragmented structures to symbolize the impermanence and fragility of human civilizations. Reflect on the cyclic nature of history and the lessons we can learn from the past through the visually stunning and thought-provoking elements of this artwork.

Duration : 6m
Maturity Level : all

USINA DE ARTE

Discover on ikonoTV’s Channel page Usina de Arte, a heaven place where art and nature converge in a powerful synthesis that not only beautifies but also benefits the surrounding community socially and economically. Under the insightful guidance of curator Marc Pottier, the park seamlessly integrates historical and socio-political narratives with the lush natural landscape of Mata Sul, Pernambuco. This artistic haven, fostered by the visionary leadership of Bruna Pessôa de Queiroz, serves as a cultural beacon, transforming the historical sugar mill into a vibrant space of reflection and engagement. Through such transformations, Usina de Arte exemplifies how art can act as a catalyst for community connection and economic revitalization, proving that cultural investments can lead to substantial socio-economic enhancements.

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all