Unstable Portrait Coletor, São Paulo, Brazil2014
06-2014. Unstable Portrait (instalation’s fragment).(Demolition and video).
06-2014. Unstable Portrait (instalation’s fragment).

06-2014. Unstable Portrait (Instalation’s fragment).



 As a way to discuss the creation of an identity model within the field of art itself, more specifically architecture, I also presented one of my recent works in October 2014—an action carried out in the Coletor space in São Paulo, made possible by the Ações e Situações em Site-Specific program, coordinated by Bruno Mendonça and Rafaela Jemmene. The event took place in a modernist house in the Jardins neighborhood of São Paulo, soon to be demolished. The space hosted a series of works, artistic productions that in some way promoted discussions about that space or about the concept of space more broadly.

By understanding modern architecture as an attempt to construct a romanticized portrait of Brazil, I appropriated a scene from the film L’Homme de Rio by Philippe de Broca (1965), in which a kind of 007, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, flees through a still-under-construction Brasília, full of scaffolding, wooden slats, and bricks that confuse the viewer, making the city also appear as rubble from something that once was. The confusion of references—such as the fact that a 007 evokes Pop Art, while at the same time maintaining a cult tone due to the French direction and the choice of pastel colors in the film—ends up generating an image like a portrait contaminated by opposing references.


Belmondo’s body is a pursued body within this strange landscape, and his character exists as a body in flight through the scene. The reason for his escape no longer matters; he becomes the very escape itself, the act of fleeing in a setting that lies somewhere between construction and complete destruction.

In the projection of this scene across different spaces of the house, at different times, and with the sound of the character’s footsteps also playing at different exhibition times, a strange noise was created, which referred back to the very escape from the attempt to close a portrait as something rigid, fixed, inert. The screening of the scene was followed by a joint discussion between myself and Professor Rodrigo Queiroz, an urbanist and professor at FAU, about the romanticization of Brazil's image, provoking the mediation of the visitors to the space. 

The understanding of this mediation as an important part of the work—stimulating the conversation of those present—aimed to clarify that an artistic movement is not just an aesthetic construction, but also an aesthetic reverberation, a "noise" with social consequences. It becomes a powerful amplifier of the situation of the house itself, installed as a promise of ruin. My intention was to create relationships between the subjectivity of the individual as a target of a social system affected by capitalist logic, and the subjectivity of the place as something also targeted, as it is configured as a form of constructing a concept that will sustain an administrative and governmental order of bodies.