Rádio-Galena
We both feel the urgency to position ourselves in relation to the art world and to some of the readings of what art is, and what technology is. It’s very common to see, in São Paulo for instance, how high-tech fashion is overcoming art’s more human approach. Using materials with almost no technology, where the material supplies its own energy, is a way to position ourselves against this perspective of technology.
This is a curious question: to think if sound is intrinsically connected with its material. The piece that we presented on the Nodar bridge, for instance, wouldn’t have its poetic meaning in any other place; the idea that the bridge stitches both sides of the river (using laser lights). It might be possible to do it in another context but it would lose some of its essence and strength.
We tested three pieces in different situations and we thought it would be nice to leave them directly in the landscape and not stored in some “white cube”, where we normally have the opportunity to show our work. Contrary to the big city, Nodar offered the possibility to create objects working with the forces of nature: sun, water and wind. But once we arrived the reality proved to be different from what we had imagined and the river current hadn’t the necessary strength to move the mechanism of one of the pieces. We found, at the end, that the pieces didn’t fit well in the landscape, but we kept to the original idea of leaving the work in the landscape but tried that this wouldn’t happen in an imposing way. At their conceptual level, the pieces kept their message about materiality and the possibility to think about obsolescence. What is the meaning of something that has lost its purpose, that is no longer useful for anything? The strange combination of materials such as paraffin, wood, aluminum, laser, is a way of giving the expressiveness of the material an opportunity to speak for itself, rather than its regular utility. Sometimes we only care about the utility of things and dismiss the inner life that they possess, their own immanence.
Luciana Ohira (1983) and Sergio Bonilha (1976) were born and grew older in the city of São Paulo and they both hold a degree in Visual Arts by the São Paulo University, and a Masterin Visual Poetics on the same university and have presented their machineries in three of the world’s four corners.