La Biennale di Venezia - Brazil’s participation

The Fundaçao Bienal de São Paulo announces that Brazil’s contribution to the 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in 2017, consists on the installation “Chão de caça” [Hunting Ground] developed by the artist Cinthia Marcelle (Belo Horizonte, 1974), a new and site-specific commission curated by Jochen Volz for the Brazilian Pavilion.

On Marcelle’s installation, an inclining floor made of welded grating occupies the interior of the two connected galleries of the Brazilian Pavilion. Ordinary pebbles, like those found in the surrounding Giardini, are squeezed into the grid.  One immediately recognizes this kind of flooring, normally used in an industrial context or within public space, for example between railroad tracks or for coverage of subway venting shafts or sewerage systems. Interlaced with the grating and the pebbles, there are additional sculptural elements, a series of paintings and a video.

A number of wooden sticks are fixed into the floor structure, each balancing a painting on cloth draped over the upper tip, like a group of ghosts or a small forest of signs, torches or totems. The support of the paintings is a black-and-white striped cotton fabric, ordinary bed sheets, but each of the black stripes has been carefully erased with white paint.  Stones in various sizes are wrapped with the lace and therewith become part of the larger overall structure, giving it a sculptural volume and weight.

There is also a video: a one angle shot onto a tiled roof, which is gradually being dismantled from the inside by men, creating an opening big enough for them to climb onto the roof and take off.  In the piece, made together with filmmaker Tiago Mata Machado, the bright-coloured uniforms suggest that the men climbing the brick roof are prisoners, working on their escape or prep