Real and sham vestiges, geological strata, layers of memory, these mix and blend to deconstruct spaces linked with modernity and the civilized world.
Ana Vaz examines the history of evolution through an alternative depiction of past civilizational and architectural utopias. Her film titled A Idade da Pedra (The Stone Age) takes as its starting point the construction of Brasília, the city built from scratch in the late 1950s in the wooded savannah in the center of Brazil from the utopian plan devised and executed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. Brasília rose up on a territory known for its mineral extraction industry and is also the artist’s hometown. A stone quarry lost in the middle of an untamed nature. From the outset, there has been something anachronistic in Vaz’s work. In this open-air worksite, men are cutting stone, and that stone splits into slabs like so many strata of history past and to come. The quarry becomes then a metaphor of memory. Postproduction 3-D inlays of concrete structuring appear. A vestige, fantasy, or projection of what this territory will be in a few hundred years? Whatever the case, Ana Vaz deftly plays with timeframes.
The pieces featured here are directly inspired by Vaz’s film. They form an initial shift towards installation and volume. The exhibition space becomes then the site of a rewriting that encourages viewers to make for themselves the connections between the different objects. This adaptation ought to be considered a redeployment of the film, a three-dimensional collage in which the principle of film editing takes on its full meaning.
Elsa Delage