MATHEUS ROCHA PITTA
“A Famine Field” 2022
A Famine Field is a concrete and clay vegetable garden. Each of the 30 beds contains a batch of fruits, roots, and vegetables made in clay (approximately 9000 pieces) by a local traditional craftsman. The field covers an area of 720 square meters.
Historically, Brazil’s colonization began with the sugarcane monoculture, in the fertile lands near the coast. Cattle raising, subsistence and family farming was pushed into the less fertile interior, the famous “sertões”, the impoverished part of the country and the main source of internal migration in the 20th century. The work is set in this contradictory geographical context, but also along a Brazilian literary and cinematic tradition that locates the “sertões” as a site of political resistance and myth (e.g., Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger”).
The field is fenced off and no one can enter it except through an internal path, also fenced off. Its title comes from a place of the same name in Athens, described by the 1st century Greek geographer Pausanias. To the east of the Acropolis, there was a piece of land dedicated to Boulimos, Famine. It was a never cultivated field, resting in the center of the humanized city. Famine’s field represented the wildlife that humankind was not to touch: to do so was considered a sacrilege punishable by famine. Left untouched, the sculpture thus accomplishes this closure and containment of hunger, like an amulet or altar that would prevent its spread.
Matheus Rocha Pitta
Tiradentes, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1980
He currently works and lives in Berlin, Germany
In a short period of time and through diverse projects, Matheus Rocha Pitta has sedimented interests and strategies that allow us to identify, in a work that gets more complex with each new work, a critical enunciation about the gestures that rule common life. The artist removes the gestures from their biographical background and presents them as aesthetic acts with a historical dimension. Through the use of photographs, videos, sculptures, and installations, Rocha Pitta constructs his own repertoire of gestures, which are activated directly with the public of his exhibitions. Without appealing to the discursive statements of disciplines that take gestures of exchange as a frequent object of investigation (economics, philosophy, politics), Rocha Pitta articulates objects and images that he invents to generate knowledge that does not fit into those fields of study, but that have far-reaching ethical implications.
