Pivô presents the group show “Brazil: Arbeit und Freundschaft,” conceived by artist Pedro Caetano. Caetano proposes an exhibition about precisely the three elements contained in its German name: Brazil, work and friendship. The project promotes a reflection on the processes of curatorship and the institutional relationships in structuring an exhibition from social relationships and the coexistence of artists without mediation in the Pivô space. Marcel Duchamp stated that he did not believe in art, but rather in artists. Following this line of thinking, the project discusses the role of the curator by giving the project’s participants complete autonomy.

The participating artists were selected as such: Caetano, as the project’s creator and first artist, invited a personal friend, who’s also an artist to exhibit the work of his or her choice at Pivô. After accepting, this second artist then invites another artist friend, thus continuing the process until 20 participants are on board. The invited artists choose the work to be displayed and are unaware of the other participants, except for the one friend who invited them.

The objective of this dynamic is to reveal certain tendencies and “cliques” in Brazil’s visual arts scene through an experiment proposed and conducted by artists themselves. The process of constructing the exhibition is as important as its result, to the extent that it becomes an object of study and allows the possibility for a good-humored diagnosis of the Brazilian art market itself. This “word of mouth” structure of the list of artists opens a series of discussions about the internal functions of the visual arts medium at the same time promoting a democratization of the curatorship procedures, opening space for unlikely dialogues and reflections that did not arise from an exhibition with a preconceived theme.

In the context created by Caetano, each artist is lord and master of their own work and actively participates in the process of composing the set of artists in the exhibition, in which the formed set is a reflection on the reach of this network of interpersonal relationships. The project expands the public’s relationship with the works, exposing the very function of the social milieu in which the artists exist.

To construct an efficient reflection of the circuit which he intends to question, Caetano placed just one restriction: that the “friend selected” be a professional visual artist. In the artist’s words: “This excludes the possibility that elements from outside the arts circuit enter the exhibition and that it loses its capacity to be indicative of this circuit; and it would thus sustain choices made based on friendship – the social bonds synthesize the joy of the exotic Brazilian people. From this same tone comes the choice of the exhibition’s name, because ‘it’s proven that it’s only possible to philosophize in German’; and it is also proven that a large part of the contemporary art world revolves around the enormous collections, artists and curators from that European country.”

The 20 artists who were “self-selected” through the method proposed by Pedro Caetano are: Marcius Galan, Marcelo Cipis, Jac Leirner, Antonio Malta, Paulo Monteiro, Suiá Ferlauto, Roberto Freitas, Marcelo Comparini, Barbara Rodrigues, Rodrigo Andrade,Shima, José Alberto Bahia Duarte, Henrique Detomi, Alice Lara, David Almeida, Thales Noor Rocha Nobre, Gregório Soares, Ana Rita Sousa Almeida, Débora Sousa Amor.