HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Marepe

Embutidinho (Small Embedded), 2001
Marepe
Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil

Marepe

Marepe b.1970 (Brazil)
lives and works in Santo Antônio De Jesus, Brazil

launch interview with Marepe

The work of Marepe (Marcos Reis Peixoto) resides in a conceptual border zone between the utilitarian and the poetic, where everyday objects from his environment in Bahia are transformed through artistic intervention. Living and working in this northeastern region of Brazil, an area economically less robust than the metropolitan centers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Marepe infuses his work with the area's culturally specific hybrid of African and European traditions. A sculptor by training, Marepe invokes in his methodology both the influence of Marcel Duchamp's readymade and the challenges to the barriers between art and life launched by the Brazilian Neo-concretists of the 1950s and 1960s. In Marepe's case, however, the transformative gesture of the Duchampian readymade takes on a social and poetic significance that calls into question the institutional status of the art object while simultaneously investing everyday objects with an almost spiritual power.

In keeping with this agenda, Marepe often humorously refers to his sculptures as necessaires, or necessities, rather than readymades, in order to emphasize their social origins. He brings forward the intimate connections of these objects to the subsistence economy of rural Brazil rather than to centers of industrialized production. The materials that he appropriates for these works include such items as commercially available ceramic water filters (a mainstay of life in rural Brazil), wash basins, street salesmen's suitcases, and trouxa (bundled packages) that are used as lunch boxes or to carry laundry. In Marepe's hands, these everyday objects undergo a transformation. In Cabeça Acústica (Acoustic Head) (1995), for example, the artist brings together two wash basins connected with hinges and a cooking pan to create a meditative isolation chamber for amplifying singing (an aspect of Brazilian cultural identity that is particularly strong in Bahia). In Os Filtros (1999), Marepe takes a common brand of ceramic water filters and elongates them so that they begin to seem strange. While this work addresses the lack of potable water in the Brazilian countryside, it also becomes a poetic metaphor for purification and personal cleansing as spectators drink the filtered water. Drawing on the legacy of an earlier generation of Brazilian artists, including Lygia Clark, Marepe emphasizes that he does not consider his works complete until they are used and acted upon by the public.

Marepe has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil (2002), and Galeria Acbeu, Salvador, Brazil (1995). His work has also been included in a number of group exhibitions, including the XXV Bienal de São Paulo (2002); The Thread Unraveled at Museo del Barrio, New York, New York (2001); and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2000).

--Douglas Fogle

CabeÃ§a AcÃºstica (Acoustic Head)
Marepe

1995
aluminum basins, hinges, rubber
47-1/4 x 39-3/8 x 13-3/4 in.
120 x 100 x 34.9 cm
Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil

In Cabeça Acústica, Marepe brings together two washbasins connected with hinges and a cooking pan to create a meditative isolation chamber for amplifying singing (an aspect of Brazilian cultural identity that is particularly strong in Bahia). In Marepe's hands, everyday, commercially available objects undergo a transformation. If their original function is lost, they are given a new one in a reconfiguration that highlights the potential power of the everyday to create poetic images and meaning. In keeping with the Neo-Concretist agenda, Marepe invites visitors to try on the acoustic head.

Trouxa (Bundle)
Marepe

1995
fabric, leather, foam
23-5/8 x 15-3/4 x 11-13/16 in.
60 x 40 x 30 cm
Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil

Trouxa are bundled packages that are used as lunch boxes or to carry laundry. Presented as abstract sculptures, their formal qualities seems to contradict their original function. Recasting everyday objects as works of art, Marepe departs from the readymade tradition. In this case, the transformative gesture of the Duchampian readymade takes on a social and poetic significance that calls into question the institutional status of the art object while simultaneously investing everyday objects with an almost spiritual power.

Trouxa (Bundle)
Marepe

1995
fabric, leather, foam
10-1/4 x 10-1/4 x 5-1/8 in.
26 x 26 x 13 cm
Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil

Trouxa are bundled packages that are used as lunch boxes or to carry laundry. Presented as abstract sculptures, their formal qualities seems to contradict their original function. Recasting everyday objects as works of art, Marepe departs from the readymade tradition. In this case, the transformative gesture of the Duchampian readymade takes on a social and poetic significance that calls into question the institutional status of the art object while simultaneously investing everyday objects with an almost spiritual power.

Trouxa IV (Bundle IV)
Marepe

1995
fabric, leather, foam
23-5/8 x 23-5/8 x 21-5/8 in.
60 x 60 x 54.9 cm
Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil

Trouxa are bundled packages that are used as lunch boxes or to carry laundry. Presented as abstract sculptures, their formal qualities seems to contradict their original function. Recasting everyday objects as works of art, Marepe departs from the readymade tradition. In this case, the transformative gesture of the Duchampian readymade takes on a social and poetic significance that calls into question the institutional status of the art object while simultaneously investing everyday objects with an almost spiritual power.

Banca de Veneno (Poison Stand)
Marepe

1996
wood, rats, cockroaches, packets of (fake) poison
51-3/16 x 31-7/8 x 20-1/16 in.
130 x 81 x 51 cm
Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil

For Banca de Veneno and Banca de Bojouterias, Marepe brings the street to the museum. His re-creation of vendors' stands offers a glimpse into Brazil's rural economy. By placing the viewer in direct contact with objects on display and practices considered exotic in the Western world, the artist invites us to share his everyday reality and, more fundamentally, to reflect on the economic disparities between countries. Away from the centers of industrialized production, Marepe casts a world in which pesticides and jewelry coexist as items for sale in a world driven by subsistence economy.

Banca de Bojouterias (Jewelry Stand)
Marepe

1996/1998
wood, jewelry
73-5/8 x 28-1/2 x 29-1/2 in.
187 x 74.9 x 74.9 cm
Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil

For Banca de Veneno and Banca de Bojouterias, Marepe brings the street to the museum. His re-creation of vendors' stands offers a glimpse into Brazil's rural economy. By placing the viewer in direct contact with objects on display and practices considered exotic in the Western world, the artist invites us to share his everyday reality and, more fundamentally, to reflect on the economic disparities between countries. Away from the centers of industrialized production, Marepe casts a world in which pesticides and jewelry coexist as items for sale in a world driven by subsistence economy.

Embutidinho (Small Embedded)
Marepe

2001
wood, hinges
27-9/16 x 27-9/16 x 27-9/16 in.
70 x 70 x 70 cm
Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil

A cross between an architectural model and a dollhouse, Embutidinho is a small-scale rendition of a habitation Marepe conceived of as part of a social housing project. Embedded within a larger shell that can conceal or disclose the interior of the house (thanks to a simple yet sophisticated system of windows, doors, and other less standard openings), this work has the look and feel of utopian architecture. Some of its wood panels, connected with hinges, can be transformed into built-in domestic facilities and appliances such as a wardrobe, ironing board, closet,or dining-room table. As utilitarian and practical as a low-cost, lo-fi house could be, Embutidinho is a social sculpture whose actual construction could meet basic housing needs without relinquishing the aesthetic, social,and economical parameters of the specific context for which it is created.

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

Embracing the same sort of tension are works by Turkey's Gülsün Karamustafa and India's Sheela Gowda. In her installation Mystic Transport (1992; p. 205), Karamustafa gives poetic form to the issue of deterritorialization that is so much a part of our imagination when thinking about urbanization and late capitalist development in many of the locations selected for this project. Mystic Transport presents twenty colorful oriental blankets stored in twenty wheeled buckets. On one level we identify with the blanket as the smallest common denominator of nomadic populations. Karamustafa's strength in this particular work is in keeping the emotional association of the blanket with a body at a distance. The installation suggests that the audience/protagonist can manipulate and reconfigure the location of each bucket/blanket/body as he or she sees fit. This estrangement effect--wherein the audience is the center, the decision maker--raises questions about the responsibility of the viewer and the nature of his or her engagement. The seductive quality of the work does not sacrifice the content, and in fact it reinforces a concern for avoiding being overly anthropological.

Sheela Gowda adopts a comparable, though not identical, pattern in her work And Tell Him of My Pain (1998/2001; p. 193). To create this labor-intensive piece, she passes an unbroken 700-foot-long thread through a sewing needle and doubles it in the middle. She then repeats this action with another eighty-nine needles, coats the threads with Kum Kum,[26] and glues them together to make a 350-foot-long thin rope. Like a drawing in three-dimensional space, the long cord is installed in the architecture of the white cube, looping up and down the walls, across the floor, marking the physical environment. In many ways, this piece, and the work of Ranjani Shettar (pp. 233-235), can be read according to the sculptural language described in When Attitudes Become Form and by Krauss in her essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" as belonging to a modernist aesthetic of abstraction and dematerialization of space. But such a reading of the work would trap it in a mold cast by Euro-American language and its hegemonic, nominative strategies. Gowda works with traditional materials and traditional skills identified with female labor. In doing so, she produces a work that not only comments on a specific Indian cultural situation but also implies a critical stance toward art history, aesthetics, and the perception and production of artworks.

The complexity of practices, in whatever media, associated with the notion of thirdness stems from the fact that these artists locate themselves on the periphery of dominant aesthetic models and distribution networks, but do not embrace a Manichean opposition to the question of form. They do not seek to reinvent language from scratch but instead choose to twist it, distort it, translate it. These practices lie in the narrow gap that Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn identified when highlighting the distinction between making political art and making art politically. Robin Rhode's work, merging hip-hop culture, fashion, sports, and other aspects of the every-day (pp. 225-227), seems to echo such a notion of thirdness and pulls it toward a resistance that is not necessarily oppositional. Rhode tries to identify a practice that allows him to take pleasure in the reductivness of youth culture and popular culture while remaining critical of them.

The notion of thirdness, of in-betweenness, is central to the practices we are considering here as well as to larger theoretical constructs developed to analyze recent cultural shifts. For Homi K. Bhabha, thirdness is a key element in enunciating and conceptualizing a new international culture based on hybridity: "It is the inter--the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space--that carries the burden of the meaning of culture."[27] He locates culture in what he calls a "third space," a space that collapses new cultural practices and historical narratives.

This idea is presented almost literally in the work of Turkish architect Can Altay, notably in his investigation of what he has termed the "minibar." Through photo-documentation he focuses on those no-man's lands in urban areas where teenagers gather to socialize (pp. 162-163). By reinventing underground communities--often controversial aspects of a neighborhood--these minibars carry new cultural information and problematize the construct of urban spaces. The Japanese architectural firm Atelier Bow-Wow displays a similar interest by establishing an inventory of what they call "pet architecture"--a type of architecture that relates to small units built between larger buildings, existing almost like parasites. The Atelier strives to develop a new architectural language based on every possible solution for utilizing such "leftover" spaces (pp. 169-171). Both the minibar and pet architecture stand as metaphors for locating an alternative space that can generate new knowledge,

26 Kum Kum is a red pigment used in rituals and as decoration. It is also used as a mark of marriage on women's foreheads.

27 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 38.

Learning and Dislearning To Be Global: Questions at 44°53’ N, 93°13’ W and 22°54’24” S, 43°10’21” W
Paulo Herkenhoff

Some women have called for responsibility in the face of social oppression (individual latitudes). In Mineirinho (1962), Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector asked herself what her own social responsibilites were in the face of urban violence, and Jamaica Kinkaid, in her book A Small Place (1988), confronted white people about post-colonial racism in her native Antigua. In the late 1980s, North American artist Adrian Piper distributed her business cards with inquiring observations on racism to the public at art exhibitions. In her short and fast-paced video Meditation on Vacation (2002), Nigerian artist Fatimah Tuggar, born in Kaduna (10°33' N, 7°27' E), contrasts expropriation within the First and Third World polarity with modern strategies of appropriation in art by incorporating a large number of citations in a collage of images taken from films and from the Web.

The mechanisms of global articulation include immigration, drugs, Coca Cola, terrorism, communications, weapons smuggling, capital, omnipotent governments, weather, man-made global warming caused by dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, natural catastrophes, asteroids, disease (including the insect-transmitted variety), sex and AIDS, tourism, and art. Curatorial mobility becomes part of the tourism industry; criticism is reduced to a function of the market; collecting is investing; biennials are strategies within regional disputes over power or visibility. Focusing on the specificity of places and the singularity of artists and their practices, How Latitudes Become Forms disrupts the idea of curatorial practice as tourism, cultural shopping, or the researching of token artists for geopolitical purposes. The etymology and meaning of the word latitude is: a transverse dimension; breadth; width as opposed to length; also occasionally spaciousness. Unlike the old Northern Hemispheric system of compiling "world surveys," which occasionally incorporated artists from Latin America or Africa as long as they lived in the metropolitan countries, curating a show such as How Latitudes Become Forms requires actual traveling and personal engagement by curators.

Florian Pumhösl has been following the dispersion of modernity in unexpected places, from Armenia to Uganda. Working from Vienna (48°15' N, 16°22' E), with its indoor-modernism invisible to tourists, he has created a selective portrait of Kampala (0°18'45" N, 32°34'12" E) that shows the city's planning, building, and destruction by civil war. Whereas urban planning in Kampala reflected social and ethnic division and separation, modern architecture marked the passage from colonial status to independence. Pumhösl works with an ethos that refers to the model of exhibition spaces. He conceptually "remodels" history, using the character of architecture as a platform for other political ideas. As he concludes, "modernization is not a local phenomenon but it has local effects." Kampala, like Vienna and Yerevan (40°10' N, 44°31' E), has a discontinued history. All three localities provide parallel scenarios to the mainstream history. According to Pumhösl, "The Viennese understanding of modernism does not seem to take it very serious if ideas or things really exist(ed). It is more about generating images of modernity which can be used whenever needed."[16]

As for Latin America, modernism was a process of overcoming the colonial past. The discussions about post-modernity were exhausted even before modernity arrived to large portions of the Latin American population.[17] An age of the articulation of differences might now be supplanting Eurocentric art history. But the end of history was announced before the excluded artists and movements (many simply because of their geographic origin) were able to be included in that art history. How Latitudes Become Forms seems aware of the warning provided by Fredric Jameson: "How the various 'ends of art' are now to be coordinated philosophically and theoretically with this new 'closing' of the global frontier of capitalism is our more fundamental question, and the horizon of all literary and cultural study of our time."[18]

Does globalization correspond in art history to the consolidation of the process that has reduced every other production around the world to minimalism or Pop? Setting a poetical framework, and in contrast to virtual visions, the curatorial process of How Latitudes Become Forms makes its contribution to a worldwide time of exchanges through a concrete approach to artistic realities. It opposes universal voyeurism. It defies the visual

16 Florian Pumhösl, quoted in Paulo Herkenhoff, "Vienna d' Austria," in Gerald Matt, Lebt und arbeitet in Wien / Living and Working in Vienna, exh. cat. (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2000), p. 81.

17 See Néstor Garcia Canclini, "Redefinitions: Art and Identity in the Era of Post-National Cultures," in American Visions/Visiones de las Américas: Artistic and Cultural Identity in the Western Hemisphere, eds. Noreen Tomassi, et al. (New York: American Council for the Arts, 1994), pp. 160-171.

18 Fredric Jameson, "'End of Art' or 'End of History'?" in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writing on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 92.

Translocations
Jeebesh Bagchi, Steve Dietz, Gunalan Nadarajan, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Yukiko Shikata

Do we have any scale for the region deep inside the earth?

Reflexive + flexible = reflexible. I coin the term reflexible for all translocators, also for the digital commons.

All the best,
yukiko

* * * * *

From: Steve Dietz <steve.dietz@walkerart.org>
Date: Tue Mar 19, 2002 8:29pm
Subject: Re: race and the translocal

Dear reflexors,

I like this term reflexible. It also reminds me of the term rescension. Raqs, perhaps you could share that definition from your cyber glossary?

The urge for new terminologies--translocal, reflexible, rescension--and the reinvestment of old terminologies--sarai, commons--must reflect a certain inadequacy of current terminology (current understanding?) in regard to what we know to be the contemporary context. I would argue that to some extent the terminologies are not important. Of what import is "new media" versus "cyber art" or "information works"? On the one hand, they are just labels. On the other hand, they can open up new territories for our thinking, to help create new old spaces such as the digital commons.

* * * * *

From: Raqs Media Collective <raqs@sarai.net>
Date: Tue Mar 19, 2002 6:36am
Subject: Re: race and the translocal

Dear Translocators,

We think that Yukiko's evocation of the network (and a network can always be a network of networks) as a conscious remapping strategy is an interesting way of destabilizing the notion of both center and margin.

A form of cultural practice that is located at the intersection of many networks finds itself placed simultaneously in different maps of the world. We think that this should be considered the general condition of the information arts and new-media practices. Being made of data, and being immaterial, and being transportable, and not being the kind of works that need to stand alone, information artworks and new-media works can take to networks and to networked exhibition contexts in the same way that archaeological artifacts gravitate toward museums of antiquity. This (the network)--the decentered profusion of maps--is the natural habitus of the new-media work. Perhaps we are witnessing for the first time a culture that is global not only in its dispersal but also in its production, as practitioners form networks to make work happen.

For instance, the possibility of our work (the Global Village Health Manual) being included in the Kingdom of Piracy show, and being accessed through its decidedly Sino-Japanese interface, places our work within a "(syn)aesthetic" map quite different from it being seen in a curatorial context that frames new-media work in terms that are, lets say, "deep" Central European, or "far" North American, or even "thick" South Asian.

This leads to shows of shows, networked iterations of works in which flexible and fluid curatorial contexts are themselves up for consideration along with the works they present. Thus, the figure of the global curator, which Guna evoked earlier, becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Marepe

Gowda works with traditional materials and traditional skills identified with female labor. In doing so, she produces a work that not only comments on a specific Indian cultural situation but also implies a critical stance toward art history, aesthetics, and the perception and production of artworks.

Focusing on the specificity of places and the singularity of artists and their practices, How Latitudes Become Forms disrupts the idea of curatorial practice as tourism, cultural shopping, or the researching of token artists for geopolitical purposes.

A form of cultural practice that is located at the intersection of many networks finds itself placed simultaneously in different maps of the world. We think that this should be considered the general condition of the information arts and new-media practices.