In Decompressed, Vivian Caccuri investigates how music and sound as a physical phenomenon can alter and determine collective experience and states of consciousness. In these works we see creatures - human-insect hybrids, scenes of parties, devastated landscapes, huge sound systems, as well as abstract lines that may refer to sound waves. Ecstasy and despair are presented in an oniric and experimental form in the two-dimensional works that make use of mosquito nets as a support.
“Produced from 2021 to 2022, these works gesture to the whirlpools of emotions that the artist believes to have marked the everyday experience of living in Brazil in the last two years. Isolation, the growing feeling of social injustice, political and institutional instability, added to the euphoria and the desire to return to dancefloors and to parties as health safety measures relax, all serve as starting points for the creation of these works.” – writes curator Thiago de Paula Souza.
In recent years, Vivian Caccuri has also been dedicated to researching the relationship between humans and mosquitoes and the influences they have on the development of societies in Latin America. Clashes between humanity and insects have figured in her production, which looks into the mechanisms adopted to avoid damage to agriculture, pathologies, and even the undesirable buzzing produced by these insects. The mosquito net has since become a support for works that combine drawing, painting, and sewing and embroidery techniques. The transparency of this material, married with the graphic interventions created by the artist, results in images that are vibrant, yet at the same time yield lightness and movement. Caccuri also makes use of beads and pieces of metal that function as rattles, turning each work into a sound object.
The exhibition design has been devised with a view to creating an oniric space. Wires function as conductive elements that interconnect the works on show, forming an organism that takes its cue from a work in the Fantasma Roupa series – which consists of the silhouette of a large insect – positioned at the back of the exhibition space. Decompressed will also incorporate a large sound installation made from scaffolding and loudspeakers, with cables and wire resembling veins and arteries, reinforcing the organic motif that runs through the exhibition. The body also is also present in the sound reproduced by this soundsystem: the noise of veins, the heart, bones and other organs, captured in the artist’s own body.
Vivian Caccuri is interested in the potential of the collective as triggered by sound, as well as the feelings of physical exhaustion and anxiety in response to political and climatic scenarios that enter into conflict with desire and the possibility of overflowing. The multi-sensorial experience created by parties, which might elicit a state of trance, is investigated by the artist in its myriad positive or negative possibilities.
