Tiago Mesquita
Lucia Koch’s Tumulto, Turbilhão (Tumult, Turmoil) show was thought up during glum times, with the far-right rising and civil and social rights under attack. Instead of simply focusing on recent, immediate experience, the artist speaks of how hard it is to react to seemingly insurmountable imperatives.
That is why she won’t engage in news commentary. Instead, she’ll create highly distinctive, colorful 3D pieces that tamper with spatial ambience. In the exhibition room, they give different effects, imparting meaning to subtle manifestations such as the color of the lighting, the atmosphere and temperature of places.
Lucia kept track of this conservative nihilism from the start. On April 7, 2018 she launched Longa Noite (Long Night), a project that saw her occupy the Sesc Pompeia theater lobby by covering the transparent glass roof with violet-hued PVC filters. This interference changed the lighting of the space, lending symbolical meaning to the color of light. Throughout the day, the room looked gloomy, obdurate, devoid of any promises of dawn, and it remained that way throughout the whole show. Those were drab days.
And it wasn’t by chance that the vernissage happened on a landmark date for the reactionaries that currently sit in federal government. The new dignitaries never had any qualms about publicizing their devastation plans, and they showed exasperation with whatever few guarantees of democracy had been battled into legitimacy during the New Republic.
For the show’s opening, Lucia Koch called on guests to wear red. The invitation had both asymbolic, position-taking sense, and a chromatic one. In contrast with the color of the light, the red ensured stubborn flashes in face of the darkness suggested by the installation. For that same reason, red wooden rods similar to the ones in the Sesc latticework were handed out to showgoers. The artist would suggest for them to manipulate the material. Alone or together, they could play with the rods, throw them on the ground, build shapes or meshes, and even oppose the penumbra.
Workshops led by Lucia Koch and Leo Padilha, entitled Trabalho Noturno (Nightwork), bred some more structured-out constructs. As a result, participants built new lattice work to match elements of the venue’s architecture. One such piece, created by a group of architecture students, was made into a standalone object designed by them alongside Lucia and Leo, and now on show in the gallery.
Collaboration, by the way, was key in the series of works presented almost non-stop by the artist since 2018. For Vento (Wind, 2019), she hanged tulle curtains from the façades of every apartment in Porto Alegre’s Península Building. From the ground to the sky, like a mystical Caspar David Friedrich painting, the colors imprinted on the fabrics ranged from pitch black to bright red. The neighborly spirit cheered people up and made the project possible, bringing dazzling light to Porto Alegre as the year began.
More recently, in Casa de Vento (House of Wind), she expanded her use of gradient toned polyester curtains on another Lina Bo Bardi-designed building: Casa de Vidro (House of Glass, 1951). On the outside, the piece interacted with the atmosphere. The wind, at different intensities, would constantly flicker the fabric. But this impermanence seemed viewed in reverse from within the house. The interest here was in the light effects of the blue-to-amber gradient curtain. There’d be bedrooms awash in pastel-like light in the morning, and dusk-tinged rooms later in the day. The light would associate different parts of the house with a routine-based, domestic time rife with contradictions, transcending the promises of the architectural plans.
The exhibition’s eponymous pieces Tumulto and Turbilhão (Tumult and Turmoil) deal with space and intangible transitivities of light and atmosphere in real space. Turbilhão, a group effort as mentioned earlier, builds on architectural elements from Sesc Pompéia. The red latticework takes the place of glass on the gallery façade. As a result, the inner-outer space relationship is altered. Formerly visual, it becomes multisensory. The noise from the streets, the winds, the moisture, the heat and the cold seep in through the gaps in the window. This impermanent character of slow, but steady change contaminates an otherwise more stable space. Atop the latticework, time is kept by a circle, built from the same material, which spins constantly and lazily, creating optical variations.
Tumulto features a more involved and baroque form. It’s built from gradient fabrics going from bright yellow to dark violet. It extends beyond the building’s floors and walls to create different light reactions in different places, disregarding architectural unity. The piece blows off colors here and there to check whether the lethargy is really unconquerable. The gradient tones signify the degrading of homogeneous lighting.
The artist strives to render visible these minor cracks, perceptible shifts that we allow to slip by, at a time when reality appears to impose itself in a blunt way. In each and every piece, there’s a narrative meaning to light. It’s about the shutting down of possibilities, a defeat without an epopee. The work insists on fissure, on change, on permanent transformation, even though it implies no guarantee at all. By staying in touch with the daily passing of time, the changes of the day, the transitions of light, the people, perhaps we might conquer the turmoil.
2019
Published for the exhibition Tumulto, Turbilhão, at Nara Roesler Gallery, São Paulo, 2019