Sou uma passageira. Tô em trânsito. (I’m a passenger. I’m in transit.)

Artists, residents and directors at Largo. The photo was taken at the end of the opening. We are facing a mob of flashing smart phone cameras. Standing from left to right: Consuelo, Devaney, Sarah, Ricardo, Timea, Bodo, Miguel, Julia. Sitting from left to right: Raphael, Tobi, the medicine man, Marta, Felippe, Carla, Fred, and Anthon. I'm wearing a dress/accessory that I made for the occasion. It is actually the title of my installation It reads "Sou uma passageira" in the front and "Tô em trânsito" in the back. 

Wednesday, April 29th is the exhibition at Largo das Artes. The day starts with the overwhelming smell of floor polish and the sounds of vacuum cleaners. Two cleaning ladies maneuver around artist and artworks patiently. We are turning our work spaces into a gallery. As an exhibition space, Largo is a very proper one. It used to be a commercial art gallery under Miguel Sayad, whose brilliant idea it was to reopen it as a studio/art center that houses and supports artists.
Largo's remarkable artistic director, Consuelo Bassanesi is tirelessly running around all week, finding us space, equipment and solutions for tough problems that inevitably arise. We are expecting a lot of people, as it is a double event: Ricardo Castro is presenting a solo show of his work from his 3-month long residency. Ricardo, a Paulista (person from São Paulo), won a national art award, which also presented him with the Rio residency. The four of us international resident artists are doing a group show of the work produced this month. 

Late in the night, people are hanging out around the beautiful windows.

There is a cachaça brand that sponsors our event (and serving up shots of cachaça, a distilled spirit made from sugarcane) and security, hired for the night, at the door. Guests arrive and leave in cabs, which is quite common in Rio due to he poor public safety and low taxi rates. There is a definite festive and glamorous atmosphere to the celebration. Having been to many art events in the past month, I learned that each place takes pride in being good hosts: serving up drinks and refreshments, sometimes entire dinners, carefully planning information materials (in our case, a brochure with introduction to each artists' work by curator, Carla Hermann) and being open as late as there are souls still lingering in the gallery.
On top of all this, Marta's sound installation is planned to be opened by a shaman, an indio (Brazilian indigenous people) medicine man, whom we met at the Day of the Indio celebration. 

Indio medicine man performing a ritual purification before Marta Ferracin's sound installation. The speakers hold spices and herbs collected from indigenous and colonial cultures and they vibrate and spew their contents with the imploding sounds of Rio.

Ricardo de Castro's video installation, called Hora Mágica (The Magic Hour) is full of spiritual symbolism. Mirrors bouncing the rays of the sun while performers act out some kind of mystic ritual.

I'm presenting two larger pieces. Both were made with the same technique, cutting synthetic-leather (upholstery vinyl) with X-acto knife and scissors. I haven't been doing hand-cut work since it became extremely popular in the artworld. I felt that I've run out of things to say with it when I stopped but here in Rio it makes sense again, having not much more than a few basic tools with me. 
I like the large size of these and the potential to drape them over objects, which is exactly what I'm going to try in order to finish the black piece, pictured below. Having been inspired by the gates and fences that I see everywhere, it is, in a sense, a soft barrier.

Untitled (for being still work in progress) cut upholstery vinyl. 1.5meters by 2 meters. Inspired by colonial tile patterns and wrought ironwork, both ubiquitous in Rio.   

While the pattern is extremely ornamental and tight, the actual piece has a sense of freedom and irregularity that is part of the process and evident in the detail. In order to make it, I create a drawing in photoshop—based on a collage of actual patterns that I photograph—then project the drawing and draw it directly onto the vinyl. Following the drawn lines with scissors and a knife is simple enough but can still be confusing at times: when zooming to work on a tiny detail I sometimes lose a sense of the bigger picture. I'm interested in what gets lost in this transcription process and how the form—abstracted and approximated at each step of the process—changes. 

The fallibility of translation is also part of my daily experience in Rio, struggling to get by using Portuguese. This filters a bit into the second piece, a video installation, which consists of a projection onto the large golden hand-cut Rio map and gold text wrapping around on the dark walls. Mainly, I've been thinking a lot about what makes a place, how it is inhabited, how we make sense of it as outsiders (travelers) and insiders (inhabitants). 

Entrance to the black room with my video installation entitled Sou uma passageira. Tô em trânsito. (I’m a passenger. I’m in transit.)
There is gold vinyl lettering on the wall that one catches the glimpse of word by word. The text reads: 

Uma paisagem pode ser um lugar, se explorada ou vivida. Continua a ser somente uma paisagem se for apenas observada. (A once lived-in landscape can be a place, if explored, or remain a landscape, if simply observed.) which is our collaborative yet amateur translation from Lucy Lippard's Lure of the Local. 

Inside the black room: A video of ants carrying pellets of food swarming on a sandy ground that is projected onto a golden map of Rio. https://vimeo.com/126359452 The scale difference creates a surreal feeling of looking down on another planet from space, seeing both the micro and macro world. The text on the wall circles around the space. This part reads: 

It’s a peculiar human habit to make a home in just about any environment. This is my translation of Hungarian emigrant writer, Imre Kertesz, from Europe's Oppressive Legacy.