Guilherme Peters - Winter 2023 NEW WORK grantee
Guilherme Peters, 1987, São Paulo. His practice is based on the premise that, in order to generate form, it is necessary to expend energy. His performances, films, videos, objects and installations invariably make visible the efforts necessary for their realization – whether they are identified as a sound wave, electrical currents or his own breath. Peters has participated in exhibitions such as Artifice and Fiction at Institute of Contemporary Art of Singapore (2019, Singapore), XXXV International Festival of Uruguay, Cinemateca Uruguaya Lorenzo Carnelli (2017, Montevideo, Uruguay); Building Imaginery Bridges Across Hard Ground, Art Dubai Contemporary (2015, Dubai, United Arab Emirates) along with many other international exhibitions.
PROJECT PROPOSAL
“The submissive body trying to play with the libidinal economy” is a performance in which I wear a uniform like a football player. On the shirt, the usual place assigned to the player’s number is replaced by this symbol, an abstraction of a handcuff attached to itself. I wear the same leather mask, with a built-in microphone, that suffocates me and distorts my voice. This mask is tied to a solid cement soccer ball, using a pulley system. The ball is positioned in the center of a Vaseline circle, imitating a midfield mark used on football fields. Just in front of , a goal mark made with strips of oxidized iron sheets, fixed on the wall. The performance starts when I try to score a goal, when I approach for the kick, the ball is hoisted by the pulley system, and when crossing the midfield mark made with Vaseline, I am vulnerable to slip and fall. This is repeated, like a pathetic cycle, making evident the continuous failure to reach the proposed objective. The microphone captures and distorts the sound of my effort, creating a noise that intensifies. Vaseline spreads, making the falls more and more constant. Every time I return to my starting position, the ball hits the ground hard and gradually shatters, until it breaks completely, the body is released but the game is over.
Brazil has been called “the country of the future” at different times, this title serves more as a curse, creating a continuous expectation of a messianic future that is never fulfilled. This plays a very effective function of social control. The best metaphor I can think for this: a goal that is impossible to score, and the attempts resulted in an action that can be both pathetic, tragic and heroic.
In Brazil, Football is used to dissipate the emotional energy that people accumulate through a process of frustration in everyday life. The ludic universe of the stadium is a more comfortable field to exercise human relations. The final whistle of the judge returns the supporter to his reality, until the cycle closes with the whistle of a new game. Football is an activity of profound national identification. And this, of course, has always been exploited by politicians of different ideological hues. Even the elections in Brazil happen every four years, and coincide with the realization of the world cup. As of 2016, several extreme right nationalist movements that emerged appropriated the uniform of the Brazilian soccer team as a symbol of their ideological guidelines.
- Guilherme Peters
WINTER 2023 REVIEW COMMITTEE
Daria Pugachova (Winter 2022 NEW WORK grantee) is an artist, performer and art activist born in Rivne, Ukraine. In her projects, Daria uses participatory practices to unite a community and integrate art into daily life. She works with performance, video and socially engaged arts. Daria took part in exhibitions in Ukraine, Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Switzerland, Poland, Finland, Brazil and the USA. She is a finalist of Circa x Dazed Class of 2022 and a winner of the Piccadilly Lights Prize; her video Microcosmos was shown on Piccadilly Lights in London. Daria’s latest projects are based on her experience of war in Ukraine. She explores the topic of freedom and limitation, working towards emotional pain and trauma with the voice, body and ritual.
Sylvain Souklaye (Summer 2022 NEW WORK grantee) is a Brooklyn based French multi-modal artist. He is obsessed with sampling intimacies and epigenetics about people who don't belong to a determinate identity, gender, class, colour or nationality. Sylvain Souklaye performances are a granular collage of individual memories which are reincarnated for and via the audience. His body of work is a continuous and brutal flow of freedom and rage, anger and pain, past and future embodied into a collective moment.
Abigail Donovan (artist) frequently appears as one of artist collective the 181, Abigail Donovan’s most recent engagements include reST stOP, a nonlinear series of situational compositions undertaken at highway rest areas across the continental US; THE ABSOLUTE VALUE OF INFINITY ON ITS SIDE (O DISSIPATION), spring 2022 at Locust Projects in Miami, FL; upcoming THEREFORE in summer 2023 as part of the Volcanic Attitude Contemporary Art Festival in Naples and Sicily, Italy; and also opening summer 2023 THE COLORS ARE LIKE WORDS THAT ARE NOT WORDS BUT COLORS, a solo exhibition of glass compositions at Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York, NY. Donovan is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Delaware. She holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA from Swarthmore College.
Rokhsane Hovaida is an independent curator with a research focus on the relationship between digital culture and socially engaged practice. Previously, she has held positions in programming and communications at art institutions and galleries in the US and UK, where she has collectively organized over thirty exhibitions with a particular focus on community engagement and the digital experience. Rokhsane holds a MA in Curating the Contemporary from London Metropolitan University and a BS in Business Administration and Art History from San Diego State University. She is currently based in San Diego, California.