added value

2022

wood, madeirite and inkjet printing on bond paper 

320 x 270 x 160 cm

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Text by Alexandre Sá

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“With differences in degree and intensity, all Brazilian cities exhibit similar problems. Their size, type of activity, region in which they operate, etc. they are elements of differentiation, but, in all of them, problems such as employment, housing, transport, leisure, water, sewage, education and health are generic and reveal enormous needs. The bigger the city, the more visible these problems become. But these wounds are everywhere.”

Milton Santos

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added value is a development of work carried out between 2011 and 2016, in which João Paulo Racy begins to record the expropriations that took place in Rio de Janeiro for the Olympic Games (2016) and the World Cup (2014). And it is, in the face of such experiences of devastation that Racy approaches production in Visual Arts, makes her choices and establishes her trajectory on the circuit. Such expropriations, heirs of many others, although they render invisible different groups of survivors, expropriated and forcibly torn from their affective and subsistence spaces, illuminate the hunger and urgency of gentrification in the face of processes of occupation and international visibility of a broader political game , in which, obviously, we have very little interference. The artist's work prioritizes these marks of negotiation, these wounds that cannot be narrated that remained embedded in the remains of buildings while they still survived. Or as long as they can survive through the imaginary constructed as a repertoire.

 

In this specific case, Racy removes the hyphen from the term used by Marx which, in principle, would indicate the inevitable disparity between payment and the non-quantifiable value of the work itself. When performing such an operation, the noun becomes a verb in the past tense: vala; opening a gap of understanding to be answered by the work itself in conjunction with the viewer: what was worth more? The dispossessed image of a radical absence is printed here like a lambe-lambe on a replica of a billboard to be placed on the central axis of Casa França Brasil to, in addition to blocking any experience of continuity between the two ends of the building, impose itself as doubt , laugh at its precariousness as a work and expose itself as a geographical, economic and historical wound in Brazil and obviously, particularly moldable to the Rio de Janeiro universe.