Biography

Founded in Rio de Janeiro in 2005, OPAVIVARÁ! is a collective of artists, all four anonymous members of which received BFA degrees from the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts, Rio de Janeiro. Its practice, which incorporates installation, performance, publishing, sound, and video, involves the creation of participatory situations through interactive and ephemeral public interventions. While humorous and playful, these projects also comment on Brazil’s political corruption and economic disparity. OPAVIVARÁ!’s performance Kitchen Drumming (Batuque na cozinha, 2013/17) features wearable noisemakers made from items of basic cookware including frying pans and kettles. Evoking outfits from Brazilian Carnival parades and the portable percussion instruments played by marching bands, these apparatuses are designed to suggest both celebration and protest. Kitchen Drumming takes its place in a lineage of Brazilian art made from the 1960s onward that includes the radical theater of José Celso Martinez Corrêa and Augusto Boal, the wearable Parangolés sculptures of Hélio Oiticica, and the multisensory interventions of Lygia Clark. Another work by OPAVIVARÁ! that employs domestic artifacts to enable collaborative experience is Collective Kitchen (Cozinha coletiva, 2007). For this interactive installation, the group made stovetops and food items freely available to artists, activists, and educators over a three-month period. In another work, The Bush (Namoita, 2011), it positioned lounge chairs and tropical plants in a circle and invited visitors to occupy the interior space, thereby establishing an open-forum “jungle.” More recently, OPAVIVARÁ! built Self-Service Paje (2015), a temporary pavilion displaying a variety of native spices alongside teas produced according to ancient Brazilian medicinal recipes. These and other works demonstrate the collective’s ongoing efforts to transcend the received limits of everyday life through creative variations on shared experience. OPAVIVARÁ! has participated in group exhibitions and festivals including Espaço Cultural Sérgio Porto, Rio de Janeiro (2006); the Bienal Anual de Búzios, Búzios, Brazil (2009); Ecologica, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2010); O Abrigo e o Torreno, Museu de Arte do Rio (2013); Acción Urgente, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, and Taipei Biennial (both 2014); Havana Biennial, and The City Is Ours, the Body Is Mine: Urban Spatial Practices in Contemporary Latin America, James Gallery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (both 2015); and Sao Paulo Biennial; Projeto Brasil/The Sky Is Already Falling, Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, and Transnomaden, Künstlerhaus, Frankfurt (all 2016). All the members of OPAVIVARÁ! live and work in Rio de Janeiro.