A vessel used by Pedro Álvares Cabral, trees wrapped around a huge net or a flying saucer hovering over our heads. Anyone who goes to Ibirapuera Park, in São Paulo, starting this Saturday (22nd), will already come across these installations, which are part of the new exhibition on display at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM), called Realidades e Simulacra. But this exhibition is different and innovative: it takes place outdoors, but can only be seen through the lens of a cell phone. The exhibition, in augmented reality, will function as the well-known game of hunting Pokémon with cell phones. A QRCode was installed on a totem next to the MAM. Just aim your cell phone at this QRCode and a screen will appear with a map of the park, indicating, in yellow, where the nine works that are part of the exhibition are installed. Then, all you have to do is walk around the park and aim your cell phone at the place indicated on the map for figures or sounds to start appearing that will play with the public. “The exhibition is free. You get close to the map or the signs that were installed in each of the works and use the QRCode. You don’t need to download any apps on your phone. You just need to be connected to the internet. And it is necessary to allow the platform to use your camera, to use the GPS to locate you and to use the compass. It requires permission for the platform to work,” explained Cauê Alves, chief curator of MAM. “When you approach a work, on the map, the platform [que aparece no celular] it will turn yellow and then just click on the lens to open the work”, he added. Among the figures that will appear on the cell phone screen is the flying saucer, a work called Rasante and which was created by the artist Regina Silveira. The work was installed around the museum, in the Sculpture Garden. “My work is a UFO (an acronym for Unidentified Flying Object or UFO), a flying saucer. It’s the third time I’ve made a flying saucer as an allegory. And, this time, I prepared a sound animation to be seen as an apparition, a graft in reality. I thought the best thing I could put is this imaginary escape, in the style of the 50s, from those flying saucers that we always imagine in many fictions”, she said, in an interview with Agência Brasil. The vessel used by Pedro Álvares Cabral in the invasion of America in 1500 can be seen on Lake Ibirapuera, close to the fountain. With his Colonization Monument, artist Daniel Lima proposes an inverse monument, which points to the way in which this type of celebration reveals our colonized mentality is incapable of projecting an emancipated future for the country. The other works are spread across other spaces in the park, such as the Oca, the bridge, the Planetarium and the Bienal building. “The idea of holding the exhibition outside has several aspects. It has a side of democratization. It’s a free exhibition, so that makes it very accessible to the public. It also has a playful dimension, of being able to relate to the park [Ibirapuera] via cell phone. And there is also this possibility of exploring technology, in a relationship with the landscape and architecture of the park. I think it’s important to superimpose virtual elements on this Ibirapuera environment, which is a well-known place where people go. The exhibition will reinvent this environment”, said Marcus Bastos, one of the curators of the exhibition, in an interview today (22) to Agência Brasil. Monument to Peoples’ Resistance – Museum of Modern Art Realities and Simulacra Realities and Simulacra is the biggest exhibition this year at MAM, which is completing 75 years of existence. “This is a very important moment for MAM because we are celebrating 75 years and, in addition, the museum’s Sculpture Garden is turning 30. So the idea [com essa mostra] was to expand these sculptures, in order to pierce the bubble, to reach people who normally would not come to a traditional exhibition. We are occupying the entire Ibirapuera Park”, said Alves. The name of the exhibition is due to the fact that “digital today creates new realities”, explained Bastos. “When you have a digital object it is concrete, it is part of our reality. Mobile has changed the way reality works,” he explained. “We believed, in common sense, that the simulacrum was falsehood and that reality was the truth. And we are showing, with this augmented reality experience, that simulacrum and reality are complementary. It is not one or the other, but both. So, this is an experience that is face-to-face, physical and bodily, but that only happens on the cell phone screen. It is a fiction, but it is established as part of reality”, added Alves. The idea is that the exhibition, which is on display until the 17th of December, may include other works. “We will have improvements. Other works should enter, little by little”, said Alves. More information about the exhibition can be found on the MAM website.
Agência Brasil
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