Complementary technical description
Presentation text 2005
Chelpa Ferro
An installation-band, performance group and instrument factory, Chelpa Ferro returns to the Festival where it first performed seven years ago. After important participations in the Venice Biennale (2005) and Bienal de São Paulo (2004), Barrão (Rio de Janeiro, 1959), Luiz Zerbini (São Paulo, 1959) and Sergio Mekler (Rio de Janeiro, 1963) perform a “very Chelpa Ferro show”, but with room for silence. A drum kit built with 80 incense sticks will perform a “silent solo” as it is lit during a pause in the music produced by conventional and unconventional instruments: a samba-playing sewing machine, the ashtray of unsuspected musicality. Between instruments, video projections and incense drums, the artists navigate from rock to electronic music.
In 1995, the desire to make music brought together visual artists Barrão and Zerbini and video and cinema editor Mekler around the project - at the time, musical producer Chico Neves was also a member of the group. “From the beginning,we were all interested in music. Each one of us had a different background, but we all liked to do it”, says Zerbini. “For us,music is fundamental”.Within the context of sound, plasticity unfolds in original and diverse ways: in daily life objects that the group appropriates to extract noise, in the way in which they are deployed on stage and in exhibition spaces, in the images that are part of the act. It unfolds in installations such as “Acqua Falsa”, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in June 2005: sound emerged from a speaker hanging 10 cm up, facing downwards. The sound hit the water-covered floor, spread about the space and was absorbed by foam sheets hanging on the walls and covered by blue and white lights. Or in “Nadabhrama”, a metallic bush featuring leaves that agitated in response to the interaction with the Bienal de São Paulo public.
The new performance created for Videobrasil bears some resemblance to “O Gabinete de Chico”, a performance the group created for the 12th edition of the Festival in 1998. The arsenal deployed by the group in the event included video, an orange juice extractor and a foosball table. “This piece is a continuation of the one we showed seven years ago, but it is also an evolution. We perform, we set up an exhibition. Videobrasil offers the possibility of mixing it all, performance, installation,music, show, video. It was the first place that really fit us.”
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "15th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival - 'Performance.'": 6th to 25th September 2005, pp. 104 and 105, São Paulo, Brazil, 2005.