OccupyCopan

In November 2011, I exhibited for the first time in a contemporary art group show. OccupyCopan brought together 25 artists in a 3,500 square meter space on the lower floors of the Copan Building — abandoned for almost two decades. Fernanda Brenner, who organized the exhibition, would found Pivô in that same space just a few months later.

I found a vertical void between two floors where a staircase once existed. I built a sculpture of tubular fluorescent lamps — yellow, blue and red — tensioned by steel cables, spanning the void from one floor to another. The composition was rhythmic: the colors alternated in cadence, like a vertical score of light. No support besides the cables — the lamps were suspended in the air, occupying the void that the architecture had left behind.

I still didn’t know how to articulate what I was doing. Only a year later, visiting Dan Flavin’s exhibition at Mumok in Vienna, I recognized in my own production the territory he had conquered: the fluorescent lamp as medium, light as matter that defines space. The undergraduate thesis I wrote in 2013, LUZCIDADE, starts precisely from this connection — from Moholy-Nagy to Flavin, from Flavin to my luminous interventions in São Paulo. OccupyCopan was the first gesture in this lineage.