Years ago, when we talked about her work, Vivian Caccuri told me in detail about some of the events that took place during the process of producing Caminhadas Silenciosas. Based on programmed perambulations in determined cities, or as she describes them, "experiences of urban meanderings", this project is among the artist's most emblematic, and has been ongoing since 2012. For each of these experiences, Vivian invites a group of 20 people, who would not generally know each other, to spend roughly eight hours together, agreeing as a collective not to communicate verbally.

Despite having taken place in cities as diverse as Manaus and Venice, Riga and São Paulo, it is Rio de Janeiro, the city where the artist has chosen to live, that continues to serve as a template for possible new iterations of the project, since Rio synthesizes elements that not only comprise these walks, but that also structure Caccuri's practice. Undoubtedly, one of these elements is the artist's interest in investigating how the effects of sound production in different spaces affect social interaction. In other words, key to understanding the artist's research is her interest in the way that sound (or its absence) works as a mediator in relationships, molding diverse forms of sociability, be they among human or non-human communities.

That conversation, a story that I’ve held onto in my memory, featured the description of an intense silence she felt during one such walk that took place in Rio. On entering a room with the group reserved for meetings with the greatest political authority in Brazil at that time, Vivian realized that the silence of this space did not only function as a shield against the pressures of power, but also created a sense of isolation in relation to the entire dynamic of the city in movement outside. This group of collective performances arranged by the artist, takes up the task of removing the dominion of verbal communication as the principal tool of human interaction, yet, rather than the protection offered by the silence that she encountered in that room, vocal abstinence seeks to attune our other senses and forge possibilities for communion, not only among the participants, but among the different beings that coexist and pass through public spaces.

Likewise, these possibilities for communion form the central axis for the works presented in Decompressed, Vivian Caccuri's first solo exhibition at Millan. The works brought together here are current examples of the artist's ongoing interest in the social interactions between different communities and also center on a desire for expansion and reconnection, in the wake of long periods of quarantine. This time, however, the research into sound is presented in parallel with her two-dimensional work. 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, a growing feeling of social injustice, political and institutional instability, added to 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.

Immediately in the first room we encounter a robust installation, conceived specifically for the space, consisting of a structure of scaffolding, multiple loudspeakers, and entangled wires, echoing bodily sounds produced by the artist's own metabolism across a range of channels. With the use of a contact microphone and a digital stethoscope, Vivian is able to register and record the noises produced by her digestive system, her womb, her breathing patterns, the movements of her bones and some more guttural tones.

In the second room, installed some distance from the wall and suspended on metal rods, we see her most recent two-dimensional works. The effect of beams of light on the material creates an illusion of depth and movement in the scenes, intensified as much by the gradation of colors as the embroidered figures. In Mosquito Shrine IV (2022), Derretimento (2022), and Void 2 (2022) the images Caccuri creates portray groups of interwoven, numbed bodies, in a range of poses and in pure ecstasy. Derretimento and Void 2 seem like smaller excerpts of the greater celebration represented in Mosquito Shrine IV, where we encounter other elements that recur in the artist's repertoire: the huge sound systems and embroidered lines that appear to translate soundwaves - connecting all of the beings that inhabit this shadowy landscape.

They too appear to modulate the energy in that space, channeling the pleasure, and despite the appearance of a moment of pure delirium and collective euphoria, here, personal satisfaction is primordial. The energy shifts radically in Mosquito Shrine V (2022), Descompressão (2022) and Compressão (2022). It's hard to say if it was the doses of psilocybin that dropped or a change in the sound frequency that altered the mood in the space. The bodies disappear from these reddened planes, and now the landscape seems to point towards the moments that follow in the wake of the great rapture just seen. Sound is still present, be it in the undulating lines reproducing sound frequencies, or in the loudspeakers hanging in the beautiful, albeit devastated landscape, that we see in Mosquito Shrine V. We observe an image that once seemed to belong in science fiction films, but in the face of the imminent climate catastrophe, comes across like a picture postcard of a near future.

The three-dimensional form of Fantasma Roupa Preto (2021) is the starting point for a huge web that connects all of the works in the room. Its sinister presence appearing to be the manifestation in textile of the mosquito referenced in the titles of two other works mentioned above, and they echo another thread in Caccuri's research - the not always balanced relationship between human beings and insects. In the presence of this figure of strange greatness in the exhibition space, we are made to speculate, if we too, like these subjects we have just seen in the embroidery, are also entangled and numb before the temple.