This week, we published another five video-interviews with the artists nominated to the ninth edition of PIPA Prize. Produced in partnership with Do Rio Filmes, they offer a broad and dynamic perspective on the work and career of Gustavo Torres, Laura Andreato, Maria Noujaim, Thomaz Rosa and Zé Carlos Garcia – always in less than three minutes, of course. Simply hit play to watch them below.
Gustavo Torres
Gustavo Torres’ video-interview is a little… different. Centering his practice in the connections between artwork, art institution and audience reception, he himself produced, filmed and edited his interview for PIPA Prize 2018. The result is a disruptive narrative which at once plays with PIPA’s video format and the artist’s discourse in this kind of context.
Laura Andreato
“My main work space is my mind,” states Laura Andreato. The artist, who also works as an art director and costume designer, says her creative process couldn’t be more different than that of the usual cliché of the “artist’s studio”, quiet and focused. On the contrary, the moments in which she claims to be more creative are the ones in which she is in transit, be it walking through the streets or taking the subway. It is, after all, in those places that the main subjects of her work, day-by-day life, can be found.
Maria Noujaim
Maria Noujaim uses her body as her main medium of work. A professional dancer, she creates sculptures from her very body movements, later presenting them in the form of performance. The result is surprisingly poetic, tying at once subjects such as language, time and matter. “How does a poem work in sign language?,” she asks; “How does a metric of time take place in the body?”
Thomaz Rosa
A song, a poem by Fernando Pessoa, a piece of tape. Everything can be a source of inspiration for Thomaz Rosa. “This part of the process comes from everything, from a connection to mental conception to choosing the material.” Using primarily basic pictorial shapes, like dots, lines and colours, his work consists on a “painting which speaks about painting”, in the words of the critic Luiza Teixeira de Freitas, investigating the process behind the creation of images through a semiological perspective.
Zé Carlos Garcia
Zé Carlos Garcia was only a child when he first discovered the pleasure of working with wood. It took him a lot of study and research, however, to understand that the manual labour he so much enjoyed could become a medium for thinking and communicating about the world. A goal achieved in the series “Bandeiras”, for example, in which the artist discusses the relationship between men and the war, or “Pássaros”, which approaches the connections between humans and animals.
Watch all the PIPA Prize 2018 video-interviews here.