Artur Barrio

(Porto, 1945)

He is one of the essential figures in action arts and conceptualism in Latin America since the late sixties, when he burst onto the Brazilian creative scene in a context marked by political tensions and the growing repression of the military dictatorship. Interventions in public space and the search for a place of expression outside of artistic institutions come together in this creator as a sign of resistance that poetizes everyday life. In these actions, the artist's body is placed at the center of a critique of social coercion. The work of Artur Barrio constitutes a radical example of the way in which art can renounce its objecthood; a peculiar criticism of its conditions of production, circulation and consumption in contemporary society. The artist uses precarious and perishable materials, often organic, to create situacões (situations) that make their reappropriation impossible by an art system that remains committed to the fetishistic circulation of the object or document.

He presents in Medialab Madrid the documentary record of the action Livro de carne (1978-1979), a radical poetry of art and viscera, whose starting point is the situationist idea that there is no need to create a parallel reality, but that it is enough to decontextualize the existing one.