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daata Fair | Héctor Zamora

Héctor Zamora, Nas Coxas, 2018, single channel video, full HD, 01'49", ed 1/3

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For this edition of Daata Fair Digital Art, Luciana Brito Galeria is presenting a set of videos by Hector Zamora (1974, Mexico). The artist focuses his research mainly around the study of materials and forms of articulation of the natural, urban or architectural environments, usually subverting spaces, redefining and resignifying the conventional. Through installations and performances, his investigation reconciles these opposites and creates a critical strangeness that is able to displace meanings and understandings, tensioning the real and the imaginary, the public and the private, often problematizing historical, social and political aspects. This selection of videos evinces the overall direction of the artist's research which often involves the power of the collective in performance pieces, which are re-signified through the videos.

In "O Abuso da história" [The Abuse of History] (2014), the artist brings together a group of people to break three hundred vases of tropical plants, which are thrown from the first floor of the old Matarazzo Building, in São Paulo. Beyond the various subliminal readings, the artist's goal here is simply to grant himself the basic right to the creative act. Also following a similar concept of deconstruction, "Inconstância Material [Material Inconstancy] (2013) features a group of civil construction workers in the exhibition space of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, who, in a choreographic and intimate movement, rhythmically tossed clay construction blocks to each other, often allowing them to crash on the floor. The performance is a direct allusion to the systems of production and construction, and to how these mechanisms are linked to the foundations of our society. In Ordem e Progresso [Order and progress] (2016), Zamora evokes the deconstruction of a symbolic universe linked to boats, such as migratory movements and the Great Navigations, fleeings and adventures. To this end, he brought together several fishing boats, which were slowly dismantled during the exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris.

The subject of misogyny is dealt with vehemently in “Memorándum” [Memorandum] (2017). Here, Zamora used the architectural characteristics of a building to position dozens of women tapping at typewriters (without ink), forming a large female workstation. To the strident sound of the machines, the “memorandum” sheets, which subjectively refer to the women's own biographies,rain down from their workstations, reminding everyone how the role of the secretary has always been subjugated even though it is essential to the political apparatus, and how women have always worked to produce profit for men. The workforce is also addressed in the work “Nas coxas” [On the Thighs] (2018), where during the 11th Mercosul Biennial, the artist used the space to gather a group of twelve men and women, who moulded approximately 700 clay tiles using their own thighs. The popular Brazilian expression “feito nas coxas” [made on the thighs], which indicates when something is not done with care and attention, probably came from the imperial period, when the sexual act outside of marriage was performed quickly and incompletely, on “the thighs.” Nowadays, this term is often wrongly attributed, in a racist way, to the mistaken notion that in colonial times roof tiles were unskilfully made by slaves who shaped them on their own thighs

The work "Ensayo sobre lo fluido" [A Rehearsal on Flow] (2015) was made through the collaboration of Cuban musician and composer Wilma Alba Cal with a group of about a hundred other musicians. During the 12th Havana Biennial, they all came together in a practically abandoned art school complex, where each musician was positioned in a different room, playing a song written by the composer. This large-scale sound intervention led the public on a walk through the labyrinthine spaces of the complex, which up to then was inoperative, and became known for transforming the building into an enormous musical instrument.

Héctor Zamora