2017 0032 mariana mauricio: o fundo do poço
june 25 — august 20, 2017
viewable 24 hours
vernissage on saturday, june 24, 19 h
At some point in our (perhaps) multiversal existence, in the suburbs of Rio, a domestic incident has occurred involving a bathroom, gravitational forces, and a poorly installed sink. O Fundo do Poço — which translates as something like “hitting rock bottom” — is a restaging of this particular event, a dramaturgy of material strain and subsequent release, of critical mass and equilibrium, and of cause and effect.
Mariana Mauricio works mainly with found objects and photographs. Her work begins and ends with the material and formal qualities of the single object, as well as its everyday function and cultural meaning in the past and in the present. By appropriating and restaging common household objects, she is emphasising narratives inherent to the objects, as well as “spinning” new material histories. O Fundo do Poço is as such a sculptural — and slightly humorous — take on the photographic documentation of a sanitary disaster performed only by material agents. It is a private trauma exposed to the public, a metaphor for collapse on many levels, and maybe even for redemption, or extraterrestrial abduction to a parallel universe of wholeness.
