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.