Sculpture in Conversation with Architecture and Drawing

This is a goldfish net which was also made for Yokohama. It comes all the way from the ceiling. Again, it shows someone very much interested in drawing. It is like a maze, so when you move it, it completely changes perspective, and you have this small area that is kind of a micro-architecture. I don’t do it on purpose, but I guess sometimes in works like this you can see my architecture background.
There are five gold rings, they all hang from the ceiling and they have lots of chains falling from each of them. It’s called ‘Upside-down Flower’. The idea is, if you turned a flower pot upside down, then the chains would splash and naturally make this kind of abstract flower pattern on the floor.

Sculpture as Event

This is a reference image for my projects with gold. I was born in the North of Brazil, where we used to have one of the hugest gold mines. It’s an extremely religious place as well, so gold and gold jewellery have a lot of contradictory connotations. It has the notions of both monetary value and personal affection – as in all the times in life where the family presents it. I’m not Jewish, but I’ve heard Jewish people say how important those things are as well.
And then I came to Britain and went to Lyme Regis for a weekend where I saw a few people search for lost gold or jewellery with a metal detector. I got interested in these people and started trying to contact them; it turned out they have meetings, and they do all these visits to the countryside or the coast, looking for gold or precious metals. I found that quite interesting, the same phenomenon exists in Brazil. Well, it was a little bit different – we have some divers who go to the beaches really early in the morning, and they actually make their living of finding lost jewellery, it’s unbelievable how much money they make just diving in the sea and finding things.
So this was the idea behind all these works about the gold beach combers or gold seekers; it’s a very big group of works related to the projects in Japan. Basically the project in the warehouse was an event more than anything; it just lasted for one day. The curator invited me to do a really big project, because the space is gigantic, and I have to say that I got slightly annoyed with the restriction and I decided to do something totally opposite from what was asked. I was really cheeky and decided to do something totally invisible.
So I brought about 20 to 24 pieces of jewellery which had names printed on them to make them look personal. There were wedding rings, necklaces, all kinds of familiar jewellery you could have. Since the place was actually really big, I pretended to lose them in different places, like the toilet, the bar or the balconies, where people could find them. I was interested in what kind of reaction that would provoke – if people were going to nick them, if they were going to wear them, if they were going to leave notes. To my surprise, some people actually did leave notes; they were very concerned about the person who lost the piece.
It’s very impressive how, once a piece of jewellery leaves the shop, it totally loses its monetary value. It immediately gains a kind of personal value, so that there’s always this kind of gap in between, which makes it quite frustrating. If someone finds it, you get something that’s half; you’re just going to get the metal. It doesn’t matter to you – there’s no personal value in there for you.
The interesting thing is that the project relied on not telling the curators or the artists involved what the piece was going to be. There were two curators, and I told just one, so all the artists were wondering, where the hell is his work! It was quite a tricky thing to play, because once you tell, you can’t have people’s reactions, they’re just going to put it in their pocket and have a laugh.