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DAVID & GUSTAV
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David & Gustav
Video, 15’, 2005
David Medalla and Gustav Metzger are two immigrant artists who live in London. The former, born in the Philippines, has a nomadic way of life, and admits to feeling at home anywhere in the world. The latter, from a Polish Jew family, is his opposite. A survivor of Nazism, Metzger speaks of his traumatic relationship with his politically exiled status.
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> video (9.2MB)
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THROW
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Throw
Installation, 2004
This is a short history of street rebellions, and a symbolic attack to the omnipresence of surveillance cameras in contemporary society. With this double meaning, the work records the actions of citizens in Helsinki, Finland, who were invited to throw objects at a camera protected by a glass. The work alternates slow-motion images of the attacks with archival images of demonstrations in Helsinki streets.
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> video (10.3MB)
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VORACIDADE MÁXIMA
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Voracidade máxima
Interactive installation, 2003
The relationship between identity, immigration, economics, and prostitution is at the core of issues raised by this work. The installation is a reproduction of a hotel room in a prostitution district in Barcelona, Spain. There, Dias & Riedweg held meetings with eleven male prostitutes, acting out the identification relationship that is established between the sex workers and their clients. Interviews deal with the themes of upbringing, family, discovery of sexuality, sexual experiences, the decision to emigrate. The mirror-like relationship between prostitute and client was represented by masks that gave interviewees the identity of the artist-interviewer.
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> video (6.3MB)
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DEVOTIONALIA
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Devotionalia
Public art project and installation, 1994-2003
The first project of the Dias & Riedweg duo was made in collaboration with social assistance organizations, and started out as a traveling workshop for adolescents and children living in the streets. The workshop traveled to eighteen different locations in Rio de Janeiro. In nearly ten years of work, the project assumed various shapes without ever boiling down to a final version. At first, in workshops for the production of votive offerings (white wax models of participants’ feet and hands), it sought to reconcile children living in the streets with their own subjectivity. In later phases, the project served as a channel for their communities to communicate with other social spheres, always aimed at connecting fields that are far apart in the Brazilian reality.
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> video (9.6MB)
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MERA VISTA POINT
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Mera Vista Point
Public art project and video installation, 1999-2002
Largo da Concórdia square, São Paulo. In one of the largest gatherings of street vendors in a Brazilian city, thirty-three of them participated in the making of one-minute videos, in which they pitched their products to the cameras of Dias & Riedweg. The videos were screened at vendors’ tents during the 2002 Arte/Cidade Zona Leste event, and were offered as “gifts” in purchases above R$ 30 (approximately US$ 15), thus boosting sales at the tents. The project’s key point was a video bar located in a six-meter-high tower, placed in the center of the public square. The work rearticulates the art production, exhibition, and distribution systems.
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> video (13.4MB)
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TUTTI VENEZIANI
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Tutti Veneziani
Public art project and installation, 1999
Made for the 48th Venice Biennale, this work explores the theatrical quality of the city of Venice and its inhabitants. A total of thirty-six citizens from different neighborhoods, with different professions, ages, and social strata were filmed while dressing themselves, as if they were actors preparing to go on stage. During the acting out of this daily ritual to the cameras, they were invited to imagine the moment of their death, and to describe it in the past tense. By confronting the banality of an everyday action with the fictionalization of death, the work brings subjectivity and public life, the inner and the outer closer together.
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> video (7.6MB)
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OS RAIMUNDOS, OS SEVERINOS E OS FRANCISCOS
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Os Raimundos, os Severinos e os Franciscos
Public art project and multimedia installation, 1998
This work tackles issues pertaining to habitation, urban space, and immigration. The project invited immigrants from Northeastern Brazil, who work as doormen and janitors in residential buildings in the city of São Paulo, to present their workplace and their lodgings in the building. Conceived for the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, the theme of which was anthropophagy, the piece deals with the ethical cannibalism that drives the relationship between social strata in the capital of the state of São Paulo. The representation of meager, small rooms in building garages, where the doormen live, worked as a metaphor for the social invisibility of this group.
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> video (8.4MB)
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