Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Deviations

The oeuvre of Caetano Dias emerged within the context of the 1990s and may be analyzed from a sociopolitical point of view, taking into account the Brazil of the last two decades. This artist’s perspective provides a parameter for understanding the constant tension between mechanisms of power and techniques of resistance, and his poetics center around the body.

The complexity in Dias’ work stems from a production comprised of operations with different media, starting with straight sculpture and painting, passing through actions and interventions in the urban scale, and ending in photography, video, and film, as well as Internet actions and interventions that generate Web sites and interactive work.

The range of issues proposed by Dias is a broad one, as they imply the creation of different metaphoric levels: the discussion of sexuality, the displacement of the statute of religiosity, the presence of mythical aspects, and of fabulations. Dias often positions himself as a voyeur, too. Finally, the exaltation of the viewer’s sensuality in relational experiences configures the wide set of actions and spinoffs that make the body into the significant protagonist that is capable of generating metaphors in his oeuvre.

Upon recreating the precarious and casting an eye on the baroque, Dias promotes human interactions inserted into the urban context of the city of Salvador and discusses the homosexual condition on a metaphoric level. And he does so by means of a homoerotic aesthetics, intermingled with a strong religious sentiment. One such example is the Bestiário digital series: the culling of images from the Internet, which skate away in a possible limbo, may take place as a measure of asepsis and by the elevation of porno to a sacred level.

It is in the field of urban interventions, be it in the real space or the cyberspace, that we may allocate the production of this artist, who researches different modes of existence and different models of action inside a reality. The scale chosen by Dias consists of recreating meanings and new subjectivities based on an aesthetics that conjugates simultaneous, interacting profiles.

Owing to the characteristics of the time that he lives in, Dias has no problem using a given medium in art. On the contrary, he takes advantage of the convergence and coexistence of different media to pick out of them the subject and the object of his universe.

Thus, when the artist transfers his appropriations from the analogical level into the digital, virtual, global level, he produces the series Santos populares, Sobre a Virgem, and Corpus Christi. Each of these has generated countless others, within the series themselves, and results in photos, installations, sites, performances, and videos.

In Dias’ work, the interest in the possibility of resignifying the body dates back to the early 1990s, when he would appropriate himself of engravings crafted by the traveling artists of the Brazilian colonial period to rework their exotic gaze. Constantly moving back and forth from construction to appropriation, Dias is an investigator of the possibilities of different media, and places them at the service of his reflections. He uses Internet search engines to find a repertoire of erotic images and reprocess them. By diluting their shapes and putting them out of focus, the artist returns them to a condition of anonymity: upon losing their focus, the images lose their origin; the features that configure identity—eyes, nose, mouth, forehead—are altered so as to change the image’s significance.

In a second phase in this operational sequence, the artist renamed those representations and created the Santos populares and Sobre a Virgem series. He promoted a displacement in the gravity center of the object in question and mutated its identity. He retrieved the “sacred” sense in popular tradition. The retrieval and the coming close to popular tradition do not take place with regard to form. “My intention is not to virtualize what is real as a technology of form.” Dias moves in the opposite direction of the form as represented in popular culture. He creates pictorialities using photography, updating the representation of the body: “I make use of resources that remove reality in order to subtract part of the matter ... I also combine images off the Internet with photographs of places that I go to in my day-to-day.”

The painting that dismantles in his photos and the drilling of Sts. Barbaras, for subtraction of matter, configure acts of violation, of iconoclasm; the same occurs with the Corpus Christi site—of ambiguous meaning—, in which image disintegrates wherever the user places the cursor.

All of these actions by Dias give structure to a creative process that builds and instrumentalizes the loss of meaning. The creation of a sensorial/playful relation, which establishes itself as a game and promotes interaction, contains the visual perception in its genesis and proposes a confrontation with reality. After all, the images chosen are significant parts of a given geographical or historical context. By means of actions that alter the “signical,” symbolic, and formal content, Dias promotes “resemantizations” that run the gamut from spiritual to aesthetic, despite the technologization of culture and the virtualization of the use of the body in the globalized world.

The “iconoclastic” actions created by Dias seem to border on abjection, but looks are deceiving. The titles of the works attest to their constant coming and going from construction to deconstruction. They create antagonism so as to destabilize a system taken for granted. Perhaps Dias does not exactly believe in a coming closer to the sacred. The attempt at reducing the sacred/religious symbolic burden places the image in a more humane level, bringing profane and sacred closer together. This intersection shows an attempt at reducing guilt, which lies in between desire and prohibition. The artist subtracts in order to neutralize a death drive. In the Christian era, the allusion to the denial of the body reveals a desire to reaffirm it. It is a way of promoting a sort of utopia of the body through nondenial.

The affirmation of the body becomes the proposal of another model of social management, as it is the mirror of our society. Religiosity, in this case, is alluded to, but does not happen in fact. The elevation of the profane to the sacred is simulated, a quasi-sacralization, as the image always dematerializes: in the saints, the out-of-focus photographs, or on the Corpus Christi Web site.

The site is almost an antisite, as it does not grant access to certain images. Conceived based on the principle of the myth of Midas—in which everything he touched would turn to gold—, whenever the cursor passes by the images, which represent the Passion of Christ, they fall apart. If, in Midas, gold can be associated with death, the image undone by the cursor can also be associated with the metaphor of death, brought about by the guilt of desire.

On the one hand, this field of abjection in his work may lead us to the notion of a predatory action, as the “looting” of images from the Internet lays bare the voyeuristic character of the action. On the other hand, however, the erotic-virtual action of Caetano Dias occurs according to the perspective of citizens of the globalized third world—in a direction opposite to the type of abjection found in the Duchampian universe or in that of Cindy Sherman—in which appropriation and resignification take place in order to destabilize the statutes in effect in art and market. Dias’ field of action is the universe of tradition and everyday life of Bahia, in the context of the global world.

By means of those actions, Dias questions the possibility of simulating absolute pleasure, by means of the “erogenization” of image on the Internet. He also looks into the idolization of the dead and naked body, as well as guilt, simulated in Catholicism by the ingestion of the body of Christ. By approaching with irony the notion that the iconographic representation of Christ is created “in the image and likeness of God,” he intensifies the conflict between guilt and desire by means of appropriation.

The turn of the millennium brings about another change in the work of this artist who, ever since, started seeking audience participation more and more. From 2001 onwards, Dias introduces a relational aspect in his work. And proposes another work in order to attempt, once again, to destabilize the notion of body in Christian culture: Re-ligar [to reconnect].

Migrating from the universe of Jewish-Christian culture to the universe of Eastern culture, the artist observes that, in the Kama Sutra, sex originates from a more permissive culture, in which the otherness flows along with relations. Re-ligar proposes a new way of interaction or reconciliation with the body, hence the almost mystical aspect of the Re-ligar video. The photos show ordinary people being “reconnected” to everyday life by means of suction caps. As in the Passion of Christ Web site, the work only turns real if it interacts with the audience, thus proposing a change in relations between people. In the suction caps, devoid of sacrality and free from erotic components, the connection between people takes place from a ground zero. Taken from the millenary Chinese medicine, the suction caps are meant to drain, purify, and free the energy flow between body fluids, hence the metaphor of fluency between people. Re-ligar once again reveals the notion of resistance, in the sense of unmasking power relations, so as to “reestablish” a new order between the body and its imagery.

This space for human relations and collective elaboration of the senses, which creates dialogues in simultaneity with religious, mythical, and fabulation aspects, creates the interstice that favors and expands certain zones of communication and, at the same time, problematizes the social sphere to which Dias alludes.

The confrontation that previously took place between the virtual and the real in the Corpus Christi site is elevated to the level of materiality with the coming into effect of the three-dimensional body meant to be consumed based on the metaphor for cannibalism present in the work Cristo de rapadura, in which a life-sized Christ molded after a black man’s body is made available for the audience to eat.

The representation of the dead Christ evokes the sublime that had already been hinted at in Bataille, where eroticism and death intermingle. Here, the artist allows a leakage in the fine line between erotica and sacrifice as propagated by Christianity.

In turn, Água benta geladinha is an installation comprised of a bar refrigerator, disposable cups, and water that invites the audience to drink a “sacred” liquid. The ingestion of the water (supposedly) leaves the audience prone to a sort of collective “purification” or “baptism,” and once again the artist faces the audience with a mocking and ironic experiment.

Canto doce 01, 02, and 03 is a series comprised of an installation (01), a photographic sequence (02) of the building of a sugar wall that barricades a street in the city of Salvador, and (03) of the building of a small labyrinth, with the participation of the crowd, at the Calçada railway station in Salvador. The series’ three actions generated a process of construction and swallowing of the works, characterizing evanescence and the ephemeral. As a counterpoint to the aesthetics of disappearance, they now present themselves as photo and video recordings.

In Doce amargo, in turn, the copy of a male body simulates an indigent. Dias created a solid sculpture, melted in sugar, to be placed at public spaces such as wastelands, forest areas, squares, or walkways. Whenever the item is exhibited, the action of the public that is faced with it must be filmed, as a recording of the different reactions that contact with the work may elicit.

Santa preta de duas cabeças – fala que te escuto 2006 is an urban intervention. It consists of a sacred image of popular use, removed from its context—the trade of religious icons—, modified, and reinserted in its place of origin. The anomalous image, located in a place that is no longer its own, makes passersby uncomfortable. At the street market, people exchange glances, eager to understand the two-headed icon, a noise in the sacred iconography. Caetano Dias calls attention to religious dynamics as a cultural process. In a way, the mutation imposed upon the icon is also an allusion to the changes in living organisms, a sacred transgenicity that speaks of the manipulation of life.

In Respire (Eternit), the artist discusses the persistence of childhood fantasies in the subconscious mind of adults. In this video projection, a person sleeps inside a water-filled Eternit-branded tank. The audio reinforces the idea of the water filling up the tank and being set in motion by the character. The recurring themes of subordination of the conscious mind to imperative childhood fantasies and the emergence of subconscious symbols and images are tackled here in a blunter manner. The inability to wake up or the subjection to a state of enchantment that one cannot leave becomes agonizing.

The dark attic in which people keep their fears and desires, old, useless stuff, things from the past provide the settings for this dream. The video is about the retrieval of childhood, where fear, curiosity, and fantasy evoke enchantment. This work also depends on interaction with the audience, which activates a device that can prevent the character from breathing or make it easier for him to do so.

Mar de dentro presents a series of sculptural objects built using the same materials as the slums. These objects are not actual houses or shelters, given their condition of impenetrability. They are projectiles, irregular bolides meant to roll aimlessly, created so that they can be activated by inhabitants of a slum in Salvador. They are nonsculptures, with no place and no direction, that roll downhill as a result of collective action.

The actions created by Dias cannot be measured using a single measuring unit. Yes, because his relational actions aim solely at the creation of intersubjectivities, of flowing, moving spaces in the inside of the subject, and they often border on iconoclasm.

In the action of sharing proposed in these works, the artist commissions the dialogue, puts to use the relation between subjects, and alters the modes of reception of art, the essence of his artistic practice. The expansion of the work’s primary goal and its supposed destination (the institution, the gallery, the market, the private collection) is constantly carried out by Dias, who, in the last instance and by indirect means, also puts at stake the exchange value promoted by the work. The exchange here is made of abstract transitivities that transcend the notion of style, be it thematic or iconographic.

The sphere of interhuman perspectives that aim to reconnect individuals and create spaces for communication among them, escapes the pragmatic immediacy of consumption logic. The artist builds procurements, possible relations between distinct units, alliances between different partners; in the videos Uma and O mundo de Janiele—one of the most delicate works produced in contemporary art—, what the artist seeks is fairer social situations, denser ways of living, through the construction of complex spaces for the building of subjectivity.

Thus, one can easily understand why photography, film, and video are the prevailing media. These are media that fit in perfectly with the formalization of his actions, interventions, and sensorial experiments, in which the notion of transformation is a vehicle that favors otherness, because what Dias aims at is a type of expanded communication that reaches the collective in the inside of its everyday life. The displacements that he promotes are indeed of a conceptual order, in the inside of the language, and do not disregard the aesthetical contents of the work.

If his experiments rebel against a situation of consumption and massification, still they do not oppose themselves to the artistic object. They take language as an integral part of the proposal, bear a strong semiotic load, and are vehicles that lead to the “other.” For Caetano Dias, there is no separation between object and action, and one is an integral part of the other. Thus, whereas the sensory experience stems from intervention, aesthetic fruition per se stems from the materialized work.

Videos, films, and photos, as in the series Coleção de cabeças, for instance, translate the materialization of the ephemeral. The series, presented in the form of a photo installation, was crafted from sugar sculptures. In their photographic version, the space-time in which these works are produced changes. Our notion of reality changes, our dialectical sense changes. The recordings of the actions, extended to Coleção de cabeças, when they reach us, are the only opening to the glimpse of a “duration” that dialectizes with the aesthetics of disassembly and disappearance enunciated during the interventions. When we look at the photos of the heads, do we remember their previous lives as sculptures? In this sense, there appears the counterpoint to an aesthetics of disassembly, of erasure, in which the discussion of the ephemeral touches upon the idea of death and disappearance as presence.

By means of photo/video/film recordings, it is as if Dias were facing death, the baroque tradition, and its religious burden. It is a sort of militancy of the desire that openly opposes any notion of tradition, without, however, affirming rupture. This is where the artist unfolds his bodies into metabodies, and formulates the enunciation of an erotic body and of a social body. It is also a way of surviving in a borderline condition, always in suspension. On the razor’s edge, Dias resists and promotes the confrontation of the challenge of life, in the realm of viscerality, of damned groups, of social and racial minorities, of deviations.

Most of your videos take place in the outskirts of the city of Salvador. Why do you prefer that region?

I come from the interior of the state of Bahia, where the living conditions are very bad. I used to see all of that adversity really up close. In the trips I used to take with my father or uncles, I would see people living in extreme poverty and could not help but feel affected by all of that reality, which I would compare to my own. The reality of people that I used to see living in the limit of life in the interior of my state left a deep impression on me. 
I guess I have become a voyeur of the state of things, and I believe that it ended up reflecting on my poetics. I do not consider putting together a work on the periphery or poverty, but somehow I always end up resorting, directly or indirectly, to those issues. The main focus of my work is not poverty or the periphery, but rather the man and his issues: identity, sexuality, body, religiosity. I had a very playful childhood, therefore, despite my keen critical sense, I would always view things with a certain enchantment, even if they were very cruel. And, of course, what I have seen and lived is inevitably present in what I think and do. 

The body, religiosity, blackness, and sweetness—symbolized by sugar—are constant presences in your creation. What is it that is special about these elements to you, and how do they connect to your artistic concerns, disquiets, and ambitions?

As I said before, what I experienced in the cities that I lived in marked me, even the more abstract stuff. I remember the sight of huge warehouses in Lapão, where the maize crops used to be stored. I would climb up to the highest bale to look down at that yellow sea of maize, or the sea of cotton, in which I would dive head first. The diving in the silos, lakes, and rivers of my childhood were very pleasant, and I always bring those memories with me. Perhaps that is where the body and the idea of immersion in my current work come from.
SI have always been a circumspect, shy person; I have always enjoyed listening, seeing, observing people, as someone who collects images, sounds, and smells, inebriating myself with the similarities and the differences between human situations and types, behaviors, habits, the different worlds that comprise our diversity in Bahia and in Brazil. My view has always been critical. I have always questioned our social structure, and I continue seeking to see the human reality of blacks, women, gay people, street children, the minorities that are so often cast aside to the margins of society. My family’s Catholic background was a strong one, but I have always had a very critical view of the religious universe, especially the Christian concept of the body; I have always deemed it very strange, opposite to real life. The ideal of a forbidden body presented by religion clashed against my own bodily experience, which was playful and replete with immersions in nature.
In my work, the body is taken to the limit, as in the pornographic images that are transposed into the dimension of the sacred, promoting a crossing, a contamination between God’s and man’s things, in an attempt at giving the creator’s creation back to man, in which we produce an entire symbolic universe in order to justify our existence. The boundaries between the body and the individual, the borders that separate and/or bring people together, are able to broaden or restrict the possibility of existing, of being in the world, and are strong enough to determine how each individual may project his horizon in life.
In that case, the people or situations featured in my work attempt to discuss how to be in such an adverse world, but I try and depict all of that with some sweetness. O mundo de Janiele or Canto doce pequeno labirinto are works that tackle that peripheral living, life as it is, to quote Nelson Rodrigues. Janiele is a nine-year-old girl who draws and discovers her horizon as she plays sweetly with a hula hoop on the rooftop of her house. In Canto doce pequeno labirinto, I placed along the path of passengers at a suburban railway station a construction made of sugar that might be reminiscent of the world of fables, as in the stories of the Grimm brothers, or even of the history of sugar in Brazil, which has left a spot that is still felt in present days. Bahia has the largest black population outside of Africa, and blacks in Bahia still feel the heavy shadow of exclusion.

Your work also features lyricism and the retrieving of innocent aspects of human nature: in Canto doce, people have fun around sugar walls; in Zilomag, adults play like children watching an object of wood and cement roll downhill. Is this one of the goals of your work, reminding the human being of his sensitive condition, connecting him to the other, enabling him to marvel?

Absolutely! I am interested in matters that pertain to the body, identity, and social aspects as well. Of course, something tender always ends up taking place, even when I tackle difficult issues, as in the loneliness of the woman helpless under the scorching sun of a summer day. But then there is a whole playful environment surrounding her: the seawater and the sun shining, the children having fun, the couples dating; it is a Sunday afternoon, it is life, the sweet and bitter in life. In my work, I am always seeking something that is not only poetic, but also has the possibility of touching, causing enchantment, and problematizing, be it by way of overcoming or transcendence.
Problematizing life through artistic action is something that has been occurring more often in my work. In Zilomag, the idea was to draw a parallel between the collective story of the people who live in the slums and the myth of Sisyphus. The people in the slums almost always build their houses using scraps discarded by the city. These houses often fall down during the winter storms, are rebuilt, dragged away again by the summer rains, and then redone once again; in between desperation and good humor, these people rebuild their lives without losing their cool. This reminds me of the myth of Sisyphus, who pushes his fate up the hill every day of his life. Thus, I created an object that lies in between Sisyphus’ rock and the reality of those people. The function of that object, which was built using demolition debris too, was having the people play with their own reality, their historical reality, which includes a tradition of collective work in which they sing cheerfully — as in xaréu fishing, in which they drag the net rhythmically in the early morning along the coastline of Bahia, or in sugarcane cutting, or stomping clay for building houses, or when they build their roofs in the weekends these days. 
In Zilomag, people push an object up the hill, let it roll down the hill, and then start all over. In Canto doce pequeno labirinto, I have built desire and tenderness into the path of the people, a sweet detour, a labyrinth for the public to get lost in candy, a wall that could join everyone around their personal and collective fables, a poetical madness for living and some fantasy into urban life.

In Uma, you recorded a couple making out in the sea, unbeknownst to them. How did that footage take place?

In 2005, I was giving a replacement class for the Contemporary Processes course at MAM Bahia, after having returned from an exhibition at the Ludwig Museum, in Germany. It was Sunday and the MAM workshops did not open. We chose to have the class in Guarajuba and I had a camera with me that I had just bought. As I taught the class, I was manipulating the camera. Suddenly, I stumbled upon a boy playing with a kite. On the background, a couple was making out in the water; the boy went out of scene and I went on recording the couple, distractedly, as I spoke to the students. Little by little, I realized I had a very interesting sequence shot. I followed the couple as they moved around in the water, and then as they left toward the sand. And she stayed alone in the sand. Her utter helplessness, her subjection to the other and to herself, her seeming falling apart. The camera was in total zoom, hence the unsteadiness. There was a long distance between me and the couple, and the beach was crowded. I was lucky to pick up that recording in the middle of so many people.

I am usually very careful when it comes to screening my work. In this case, I was even more careful: I only show it in museums or galleries, which have a more restricted audience. Even though the couple had sex on a public place for all to see, hear, and record in a completely crowded beach, I still had every possible ethical dilemma. I thought of giving up the project, but I could not do it, the work was too strong, it was about passion, about meetings that turn into helplessness, about pleasure and pain, about the solitude that persists within all of us, no matter where we are or who we are with, no matter how deep the ocean is, the incompleteness of depth is out there, it is in Uma [a, an]. An afternoon, a situation, an intercourse, a betrayal, a love fable, a hope. 

What projects are you working on now, and when—and where—will they be screened?

At the moment I have many projects, some of them already concluded, others about to be concluded, in addition to the ones I am getting started with. The video Tempo shows a landscape and the passing of a cold afternoon in São Paulo, as in a naturalistic painting.
Istmo, a short film shot in Salvador, presents three characters that pass by the same places and only meet in the end, which is a tragic one. In Istmo, I try to approach the male universe by means of a derelict, a man who orders a murder and is in love, and a butcher. The setting is a bus terminal.
Lago is an interactive video installation, created using footage of Lago das Carpas, a lake in the Cantareira Mountain Range State Park, in the city of São Paulo. The image is very close to a photograph of a paradisiacal lake, the only motions are those of nature itself, such as the action of the wind, the flight of birds, or some fish that come up to the surface of the water. On top of all of those natural actions, there will be the action of the audience, which will be able to interact with the work. It will be like a place for contemplating nature, in which the audience will be able to draw shapes on the surface of the lake.
In Mar de dentro, I work with a spatiality that generates a dive or a desire to almost touch, or even taste, this tiny little world in suspension, as something that brings us timeless memories/images. 
Duna is an interactive work set against the backdrop of the dunes in the northern coast of Bahia, where the body of a woman occasionally appears on the sand, in a sort of marking of space/time that reminds us of life passing constantly and vertiginously.
Erro is a video dance project that works solely with mistakes made with the camera or by the dancers, who perform naked in the dunes of Diogo beach, in Bahia.
In 503 – Diário de viagem features a simulated daily life in which relations take place between a self and solitude. In a supposed dive into the virtual meetings of relationship Web sites, where that solitude is mediated by the presence of characters from films and TV series recorded during the hours of rest in the intimacy of apartment 503 in a hotel room in São Paulo. 
Some of these works were done, and others concluded, during the residency that I undertook at the Lab of the Museum of Image and Sound (MIS) in São Paulo, between August and December last year. I also have some exhibitions confirmed for this year: a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Centro Dragão do Mar, in Fortaleza, one at MIS-SP, and another one at Paulo Darzé Galeria de Arte, in Salvador. For 2010, I have a solo exhibition confirmed at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia. During that period, I am also going to undertake two residencies: one by Videobrasil, in France, and the other in Barcelona, by MIS-São Paulo.

Metalworking, in which he got started at age twelve as an apprentice goldsmith and watchmaker, was the springboard from where Caetano Dias would dive, after nearly two decades, into the world of art. At twenty-nine years of age, the artist born in the small village of Bonfim da Feira, in the municipality of Feira de Santana, left everything behind—a job as a designer at a company in Camaçari and a language course at the Catholic University of Salvador—to live off his creations alone. 

The gateway to this new life came up in 1988, when Dias entered the Interferência urban interference group, whose other members included Donizete Lima, Mazzola, Paulo Portela, Ademir Tuy, and Carlos Rodrigues. The activity reached an end “after three or four years,” says the author from Bahia, and the graffiti he used to do at public spaces in the capital of Bahia gave way to personal experimentations, basically centered around the issue of the body and religiosity, and started reaching into the fields of painting and photography. 

“It is worth noting that making art at that particular time in Salvador was extremely difficult. Information on what was being produced around the world then did not arrive here. I had no background in the area, therefore I had to build my entire process as a self-taught artist, especially through information exchange and the construction of a common knowledge inside the Interferência group and with other friends, whom I had met after that turning point. And no matter what happened, I was sure about what I wanted: art,” Dias explains. 

From the year 2000 onwards, his range of supports and languages became broader, and Dias also began making sculptures, videos, and installations. Some of this work appeared in exhibitions such as Estratégias para a perda de sentido, held at Paço das Artes, the Marilia Razuk Galeria de Arte, in São Paulo, the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, and the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro in 2002 and 2003. His creations also featured at events such as the 1st Latin American Film Festival in São Paulo (2006) and exhibition Paisagens (2008), held at the Reina Sofía museum, in Madrid. 

More recently, the artist’s work has directly touched upon social realities that he is very familiar with: life in the poorer areas of the state of Bahia, the small private universes of the regular citizen, in his constant transit between the harshness and lyricism of daily life. One such example is Canto doce pequeno labirinto (2006), a structure made from melted sugar and installed at the Calçada railway station, in Salvador. Dias entered the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil (2007) with a recording of the work, which won him an award from the Videobrasil Residency Programme. 

Also in Zilomag (2006), urban surroundings provide not only the settings, but also the raw material for his creation. Using construction debris, the author collectively produced, with help from inhabitants of neighborhoods in the outskirts of the capital of Bahia, a solid block of cement and wood. The object, created for playful purposes, also became a symbol of its builders’ way of life. “The function ... was putting together something that would mirror the reality of the place, and then have the people play with their own reality,” explains the artist. 

Chance is another element that is never out of sight in the real-life fables devised by Dias. In Uma (2005), through the author’s lenses, the accidental recording of a couple having sex on the beach on a sunny Sunday became a recording of sensations and experiences of dreams, disillusions, waiting, and hoping. “The people or situations featured in my work attempt to discuss how to be in such an adverse world, but I try and depict all of that with some sweetness.” 

Dias’ work is part of collections owned by institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank, in Brasília, Casa de las Américas, in Cuba, the museums of modern art of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, the Afro Brasil museum, in São Paulo, and the Berardo Museum, in Lisbon, Portugal, among others. 

“I come from the interior of the state of Bahia, where the living conditions are very bad. I have always seen all of that adversity really up close,” says the artist. “I guess I have become a voyeur of the state of things, and I believe that it ended up reflecting on my poetics.” 

In Salvador 
With Paulo Darzé Galeria de Arte, which represents Dias in the state of Bahia, the artist had his work on display at Arco – International Contemporary Art Fair, in Madrid, in 2008. For this year, he has another solo exhibition scheduled at the gallery in the capital city of Bahia, Salvador. 

On the Web
Muvi – Virtual Museum of Visual Arts, a data bank aimed at mapping, researching, and disseminating contemporary production, offers Internet users an entry on the biography and artistic background of Caetano Dias.