One of the artists interviewed in the videos below splits the authorship of her latest project with a group of children. Another offers company to lonely people through newspaper classifieds. And yet another uses materials found in the streets as canvases for abstract paintings. The artists nominated for PIPA Prize 2018 couldn’t be more different from each other. Get to know six of them in this post – namely, Ana Ruas, Anna Costa e Silva, Daniel Albuquerque, Laura Belém, Mercedes Lachmann and Rafael Alonso – through a series of exclusive video-interviews produced in partnership with Do Rio Filmes.
Ana Ruas
In her second exclusive video-interview to PIPA Prize, the PIPA Online Popular winner 2015 presents her most recent project, “Enchanted Forest”. There, Ana Ruas, who’s both an artist and art-educator, asked children to paint a canvas measuring 5 x 5 meters. She then combined her own painting to that of the kids, a mix free of any hierarchization. “It’s a sum of layers, of drips, and the evidence of this gestures,” she explains.
Anna Costa e Silva
“I offer company to anyone”, read a classifieds ad in a Rio de Janeiro newspaper in 2016. Published by Anna Costa e Silva, the ad was, believe it or not, an artwork. Developing works mostly centred in the relationship between two people – situations which can or cannot take the shape of videos or installations later on –, the artist started her career in movie sets, as an Assistant Director and Director. It was at that time that she realized her “interests lied more in the dynamics, the relationship, the intense situations among a group of people than in the actual movie we were making.”
Daniel Albuquerque
Daniel Albuquerque is interested in the dialogue between surfaces, mixing materials such as paint, plaster and even knitting in his oeuvre – his knitting series was, by the was, one of the first ones he ever created. “What moves me to create is the exercise of creation itself,” he states, “especially because it’s a possibility, a new possibility in the world.”
Laura Belém
Installation, intervention, photography, collage, drawing, video. In any of those media, Laura Belém seeks to establish connections between distinct elements, ressignifying them in the process. Growing up as the daughter of a sociologist, she also tries to relate her site-specific work with the history, architecture, memory and physicality of the places in which she was invited to intervene – invitations which have been more and more frequent in the last few years.
Mercedes Lachmann
For her first exhibition, in 2014, Mercedes Lachmann put a wrecked boat and 40 tons of stubble a public park near the city centre in Rio de Janeiro. Instead of being frightened by the grandiosity of the gesture, she simply loved the experience. And decided to work with large scale sculptures and installations for good. “Large scale are extremely interesting to work with, because they can involve public spaces, they can involve cities,” she says.
Rafael Alonso
How to articulate day-by-day life and abstract painting? The question guides Rafael Alonso. Using found objects as canvases and his everyday life as content for creation, he paints ultrassaturated works, involving lots of geometric patterns and bright colours. “In general, what happens to my work is a type of wonder towards the world. I walk around the city writing things down. And my way of writing things down ends up being shaped into paintings.
Watch all the PIPA Prize 2018 video-interviews here.