SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE GROUNDFAIR

2011

Video installation (three-channel with original soundtrack)

Variable dimensions / Loop 07’03”

Series of 12 Photographs

Ink Jet on Canson Rag Paper 310gg

12 (42 x 30 cm)

“Saturday Night at the Fairground" features nocturnal recordings in a small and disorganized amusement park, populated by hundreds of children and squeezed between the Falete, Fogueteiro and Coroa favelas, in Rio de Janeiro. In the midst of obsolete and rusty boules, roulettes, toboggans and Ferris wheels, the images still reveal moments of joy and simplicity.

Made in 2011, this piece is part of a series of video installations and photographs, still in progress and entitled "Small stories of modesty and doubt", where Dias & Riedweg seek to extol modesty and doubt as the supreme virtues of subjectivity and at the same time, register the period of intense social and economic transformation that Brazil is going through.

Three video channels show fragments filmed at the same time and from the same location, but at different angles and speeds, thus materializing the existence of a reality more complex than the obvious expected. Superimposed on the small sounds recorded on site, a composition for piano created by Walter Riedweg for the video transforms it into a ballet of lights and colored and geometric gears.

 Installation views at Museum of Art of Lucerne, Switzerland, 2014; Lille 3000 Art Festival, França, 2015; Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, 2014; Sicardi Gallery, Houston, 2013; Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 2012

The focus of Mauricio Dias & Riedweg’s work is in making visible and heard the invisible and silenced people, the outcast and the marginalized in our societies. In other words, those whose presence is known but not acknowledged. In doing this, they apply both of interactive methods and of the techniques of theatre, performance and documentary films. The attention is transferred from the image of a group identity to the individual stories within the social space.

MAARETTA JAUKKURI, CURATOR OF DIAS & RIEDWEG’S EXHIBITION AT THE KUNSTNERNES HUS, OSLO, 2008

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Nocturnal Kick-Abouts