Artists

Tarsis, Antonio

Cargo, 2022
Courtesy: Antonio Tarsis & Carlos Ishikawa, Foto: Damian Griffiths

Antonio Tarsis uses the city as a laboratory: it is the source of his artistic research. In urban space, he collects a wide variety of materials such as matchboxes, industrial packaging, and electrical components, which he then combines in a variety of ways and - in doing so - recontextualizes. Questions around the potency of materials and their relationship to diasporic memory, restitution, and responsibility permeate his practice and connect it to the curatorial focus of the Triennial.
His critical perspective manifests in his freight sculptures made of purple matchboxes. The fragile, container-like objects speak to the circulation of Brazilian goods in a global market economy. The artist’s use of charcoal points to larger contexts ranging from the exploitation of land and people to the transformation of natural resources into commodities and their journey through the flow of goods. In other work, Tarsis has linked these dynamics to the same colonial trade routes along which millions of enslaved Africans were once trafficked.
Cheaper than a lighter, Guarany brand matchboxes are still widely used in Brazil. Tarsis is fascinated by the purple color and tactile materiality of these handmade, mass-produced matchboxes. At the same time, he also questions the semiotic quality and impact of Guaranys as found objects from the streets of Salvador’s favelas. They bear the imprint of everyday urban life and, in areas with high drug consumption, are also often used as storage places for drugs. The matchbox, whose brand is named after part of Brazil’s Indigenous population (Guarani is also the name of a people from the country’s interior), evokes a multi-layered narrative of subjugation, inequality, and power.

Text: Mara-Johanna Kölmel; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton

Antonio Tarsis uses the city as a laboratory: it is the source of his artistic research. In urban space, he collects a wide variety of materials such as matchboxes, industrial packaging, and electrical components, which he then combines in a variety of ways and - in doing so - recontextualizes. Questions around the potency of materials and their relationship to diasporic memory, restitution, and responsibility permeate his practice and connect it to the curatorial focus of the Triennial.
His critical perspective manifests in his freight sculptures made of purple matchboxes. The fragile, container-like objects speak to the circulation of Brazilian goods in a global market economy. The artist’s use of charcoal points to larger contexts ranging from the exploitation of land and people to the transformation of natural resources into commodities and their journey through the flow of goods. In other work, Tarsis has linked these dynamics to the same colonial trade routes along which millions of enslaved Africans were once trafficked.
Cheaper than a lighter, Guarany brand matchboxes are still widely used in Brazil. Tarsis is fascinated by the purple color and tactile materiality of these handmade, mass-produced matchboxes. At the same time, he also questions the semiotic quality and impact of Guaranys as found objects from the streets of Salvador’s favelas. They bear the imprint of everyday urban life and, in areas with high drug consumption, are also often used as storage places for drugs. The matchbox, whose brand is named after part of Brazil’s Indigenous population (Guarani is also the name of a people from the country’s interior), evokes a multi-layered narrative of subjugation, inequality, and power.

Text: Mara-Johanna Kölmel; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton

Cargo, 2022
Courtesy: Antonio Tarsis & Carlos Ishikawa, Foto: Damian Griffiths