Beto Shwafaty / Pernod Ricard Fellowship 2018
In residency in March and December 2018 and January 2019
Beto Shwafaty produces installations, videos and sculptural objects using a diverse array of methodologies, such as curatorial thinking, institutional strategies, criticism and archival research. His projects are informed by the notions of appropriation, dislocations and translation, generating works that are developed over extended periods of time. In his practice, he often focuses on the way historical episodes can leave traces on culture and be echoed in objects, spaces and sociocultural structures, which by consequence produce publicly shared meanings and behaviors. He is thus interested in subjects linked to history, sociopolitics, architecture and design, assuming these as narrative elements and evidences that may inform us on diverse aspects our present time.
Recent exhibitions include Condemned to be Modern, Barnsdall Gallery, Los Angeles; Brazil by Multiplication [35th Panorama of Brazilian Art], MAM São Paulo (2017); Contract of Risk, Luisa Strina Gallery, São Paulo; Hablemos de Reparaciones, Prometeogallery, Milano; The Phantom Matrix (Old Structures, New Glories), Situ Project, São Paulo (2016).
- An ability to both create and destroy, Installation (25sqm) comprising five elements: a wooden, bamboo and metal curtain, a video (with wooden plynth), a sculpture, a wall drawing and one framed printed image/collage.
Statement
“My project will entail the retracing of parts of Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de Andrade’s paths in Paris, being guided by the exchanged letters between them and Mario de Andrade. But, avoiding a nostalgic drive, my aim is not to relive past moments. Instead, I aim to create a hybrid and somehow surrealistic drift-methodology by which I will employ fiction and documentation to speculate on the influences suffered by the couple and the subversions generated from their experiences. In this regard, my strategy to expand this idea is to speculate over unforeseen (fictional) encounters, dialogues, collaborations and collisions, between the ‘couple’ with other actors, contexts and productions also inspired in past episodes, such as Hegel’s interest in Haitian Revolution when writing The Phenomenology of Spirit, Alain Resnais & Chris Marker’s Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953), the preparations of Josephine Baker and Le Corbusier trip to Rio de Janeiro (1929), Bracusi’s White Negress sculpture (1923), Pierre Fatumbi Verger ethnographic photo collections at Musée du Quai Branly (1940’s), Breton’s studio wall reconstruction at Pompidou and other cases which can emerge and will be mapped in exchanges with scholars and other collaborators – as part of the research process. These ‘encounters’ will be assumed as production moments to compose narrative sequences, scripts or scores. They will be elastic episodes to be articulated and rearticulated allowing a wide range of further formalizations: as exhibition, text and performance/talk, as video-essay, collection of ephemera and objects and so on… research is a long last process and works are provisional pauses where things may emerge and gain body, utterance and agency.”
- Beto Shwafaty in the Pernod Ricard studio, March 2018. Image: Mathilde Assier.
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