BARATO / CHEAP

The public action and performance Barato/Cheap (2015) was held at Largo Sao Francisco, in the historical city center of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as part of Largo das Artes International Art Residency Programme.

It was possible thanks to the collaboration of the public, especially the homeless and the street vendors who work and live in the surroundings of SAARA popular market. In this project, the culture of the street of Brazil has guided Ferracin’s artistic practice.

In Barato street people are invited to cover the chosen poly-foam box with two or three colourful masking tapes. As part of their ambulant everyday job, they sell soda drinks in the street by keeping them cold inside the poly-foam boxes filled with ice.

In exchange the artist is asking the permit to take a photograph of the participants with their name and country of origin written on the lead of the chosen box prior being covered with the tape and after with their artwork accomplished to highlight their Brazilian creative identity.

A cultural “utopic exchange”, this action prompted the participants to “model” their own Polystyrene foam box, from the use of coloured tapes – a striking symbolism of Brazilian informal capitalism. Their action stimulated somehow an aesthetic response to their labor object “donated” by the artist.

In this process, it was inspiring to Marta to get to know the work of Brazilian artist Marcone Moreira and his installation Visualidade Ambulante (2010), the result of a research carried out from living with street vendors of the Tocantins River border, in the city of Maraba located in the Brazilian state of Para.