44 years ago, exactly on the 21st of July 1969, the newspaper “Folha de São Paulo” published a cover story titled “The moon in the pocket” [“A lua no bolso”]. With a writing clearly fascinated by the technological advances, it was a report about the contact of Neil Armstrong with the moon based on the observation of TV broadcasting. The man not only entered in physical contact with the celestial object but, more than that, he was “collecting with a sort of long tweezers the first samples of the lunar soil”. Yes, the moon existed and the human anxiety to reach new territories and to demonstrate the “veni, vidi, vici” could be extended beyond the Earth.

This curatorial proposal takes this article as a metaphor of the contact with those spaces that are not from our field. The moon here might mean the “other”, the remote or what does not seem usual but that is capable to be estranged through the perspective of art. Photography, video, ready-mades and painting are some of the media used by ten guest artists who have been in situations of artistic residencies, diving into different zones of  Rio de Janeiro, tracking details in the landscape of São Paulo or even having a vision of the existence based in astronomy and cosmology.

The image here is like the piece of a space dissected and transformed into an artistic object, shared with the public as if it were in a demonstration of the results of a space expedition. If a fragment of the moon has already been in the pocket of a man, different artistic processes are organized here in Largo das Artes. As a difference, the tangible futurism of 1969 gives space to images full of uncertainty about the challenge to recode one human experience into something material.

Raphael Fonseca – curator
July 2013

Pictures Gallery