Choreographies of the impossible, Bienal São Paulo
View and detail of Habitar el color. Photos: Levi Fanan. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
35th Bienal de São Paulo +info
Bunga presented Habitar el color, a site-specific commissioned work that invited visitors to a sensory experience of walking on a thick layer of crackled paint and feeling the color and its ephemeral nature with their feet.
“When the subject of conversation is the scale of Carlos Bunga’s work, it will always be lively. Firstly, for an obvious reason, because the theme is common enough in the context of site-specific art and installation. But the real reason lies in the gravitational singularity of the bodies in question. For approximately two decades, Bunga has been building and destroying a work whose evanescent axes insist on messing up the notions of grandeur and measurement in space-time. The monumentality of color, for example. To go beyond painting and canvas, color will need a skin and a poetics of explosion-expansion through the sensory continuum. Thus it is possible Habitar el color, a work that spreads a huge area of paint on the floor and invites the public to take off their shoes and walk into it, to see the color with their feet, to feel the skin on their own skin. If color was once eternal in the paintings of the great masters, in this work it is as splendidly able to rot as our flesh.”
– Igor de Albuquerque
This edition centered around the question: “how are the impossibilities of our daily lives reflected in artistic production?”. According to the curators, “The choreographies of the impossible help us to understand that all of us find strategies every day that challenge the impossible, and it is these strategies and tools for making the impossible possible that we will find in the artists’ works.”
“The participants in this Bienal challenge the impossible in its most varied and incalculable forms. They live in impossible contexts, develop strategies of circumvention, cross limits, and escape from the impossibilities of the world in which they live. They deal with total violence, the impossibility of life in full freedom, inequalities, and their artistic expressions are transformed by the very impossibilities of our time. It is an invitation to move among artists who transcend the idea of a progressive, linear, western time. Impossibility is the guiding thread and the main criterion that guides the selection of these participants.”
PROCESS
A timelapse showing the development of the site-specific and its evolution in time.
André Leitão, member of the Education Team at Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, comments on the public's possible interactions with Bunga's installation.
Videos: João Gabriel Hidalgo. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
Curators: Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes and Manuel Borja-Villel
2023. São Paulo, Brazil.
