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LOURIVAL CUQUINHA
Lourival Cuquinha is a self-trained artist working primarily in urban intervention and audiovisual media (photography, cinema and video) focusing on notions of city and its citizens’ command over the public space. From June to December 2009, Neto gained a residential fellowship in London, on the Artist Links (British Council) programme. Recent exhibitions include Brazilian Summer, Art & the City (Het Domein Museum, Sittard, Netherlands), Jul-Sep 2009; O Lugar Dissonante (47º Salão de Artes Plásticas de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil), Jun-Jul 2009, and Brazilian Video Art and Short Film Show (Collection of Latin American Art, University of Essex, Colchester, UK), Nov 2008.
For Night of Festivals 2010, Lourival presents a new video work narrating the journey of his Varal (Shaft) urban interventions – huge shafts of clothes hung both inside and outside of cities across the world.
The creation of Varal is in response to the habit of the people who live in the Santo Amaro community, Northeast of Brazil who modify their landscape with the rows of clothes they hang out to dry. Re-using this action and giving it gigantic dimensions, Neto explores social habits and their representations.
For each Varal intervention, Lourival collects clothes donated by Latin American citizens, sewing them on a cord rope and creating a huge ‘shaft’ which is then installed in visually arresting settings across the world – including Weimar (Germany), Porquerolles (France), Rio de Janeiro, Vitória do Espírito Santo, São Paulo, Olinda e Recife (Brazil), 2003 to 2007
Lourival says of his work:
Varal is a natural urban intervention for those people because they don’t have enough space inside their houses (or “barracos”) to dry their clothes. For that reason, they modify the landscape for a very functional reason. Re-using this action and giving it gigantic dimensions forms the basis of my work and further explores my plastic interest in social habits and their representations. The work is created using clothes donated by local Latin American citizens whom are represented with their customs and memories carried by the clothes they donate.
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