José Bento | Chão de estrelas

Chão de estrelas

This exhibition has an ancient birthplace, where what we call civilization begins. It is a small sample of a personal, individual clash, a single spine erect with a vast idea, actually concept, Civilization: to adjectivize Brazilian civilization: panindogreekindianafrosinomuslimcatholicatlanticjewishzen. We are part of a worldwide culture, we have our internal magnet, feet on the ground, with internal Civilizations: from Pernambuco, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, pre-industrial Caribbean from Fortaleza to the Amazon and Rio Grande do Sul and the Planalto Central, that expands creating a post-industrial extractivist monoculture, look at how much ground there is and how many trees have fallen. This ground plunges into a flow that begins with the Atlantic Ocean, the one that bathes your beaches, and leaks out from the Cape of Good Hope, the Tierra del Fuego, but perhaps long before the Bering Strait or through even more fearless adventurers who crossed the Pacific Ocean in their precarious rafts – all means were used to conquer the ocean that separates us, using the most advanced technology of each era, all using the base materials of wood and wind. Wood was for centuries what rare minerals are for computer chips and superconductors today. Before anything Brazil is an amalgamation of languages that converged coming from all of these civilizations. The work Chão de estrelas speaks about this topic in an almost popular way.

Ricardo Sardenberg, 2015