Jorge Menna Barreto
I love Jorge’s work and practice
so much literally so much of what he was discussing relates to my practice, the
lecture even related to my essay right now.
Throughout
the lecture and the Q + A Jorge explained how his practice heavily involves site-specific
projects as he lets the site decide what he will build/create and even what he
is going to eat. He showed this quote to the right in the lecture when explaining
his inspirations and thought of investigating the relationship between agroecology
and site-specificity in his practice.
Many of
Jorge’s works are environmental sculptural installations that explore the
complexities of food and its relationship with society and nature. For instance,
in the Bienal de Sao Paulo 2016, Jorge showed ‘Restauro’, which began with
Jorge exploring this forest, working with farmers, investigating the foods
provided by the forest whilst also recording the sounds of the forest. Using
this research Jorge created ‘Restauro’ which is an environmental sculpture that
operates as a restaurant as he brought food from that forest to create a menu,
for the audience to eat. Jorge explained the use of audience interaction in his
work as having the audience engage through eating it allows us to consider the
human digestive system as a sculptural tool, becoming part of the sculpture.
This raises questions around the environmental issues related to eating habits and
their effect in the climate, encouraging awareness of food politics and climate
change emergency.
When
making work that raises these questions of climate change the art can often be
seen as ‘pushy’ which is something I have been considering in my own work, as I
have experience negative feedback with some works in development that had a
clear political message. Jorge addressed this issue in a way that allowed the
work to be what I feel would have been more effective, as he explained how his
work has no text or explanations around ‘Restauro’ explaining it was an
artwork, which did mean a lot of the audience didn’t actually realise ‘Restauro’
was even an artwork, however he had a system in place where if someone was to
ask about the work or what this was to one of the workers at the project (who
wore orange shirts as a uniform) then they would be able to discuss the piece
and the artists ideas and inspirations with the audience member. Having this
access to knowledge of the piece only being given when prompted by an audience
member seems to be an effective means of having those specific members of the
audience engage with the work.
This is
definitely a useful point for me to think about and when I had my tutorial with
Jorge, we discussed these topics further, mentioning how the audience need the
“ability to respond” in order to encourage engagement and interaction with the
art work.
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