PIVÔ INVITES presents the project Corta Luz, by Rio de Janeiro-born artist Luiza Baldan. The artist rents a studio apartment in the Edifício Copan for the month of July and, starting from the relationship between her home and the studio in Pivô, located just a few floors below in the same building, she develops her study. In this process, work and life are mixed together in a dilated performance which begins at home and spreads throughout the building, studio and streets of the city center. The work has no specific end, itself being a recurring experience in the life of the artist, who changes addresses from time to time in order to produce works of this nature.

Since 2009, Luiza Baldan has realized artistic residencies in emblematic buildings, which belong to local collective imaginations, relativizing popular myths starting from the affection acquired through the habitation experience. Included among these projects are Pedregulho (Benfica, Rio de Janeiro, social habitats designed by modernist architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy), Península (Barra da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro, an “eco-neighborhood” / “neighborhood-condominium” constructed in the mid-2000s) and the Rapozo Lopes building (Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, dating from the late 1930s and containing the largest residential swimming pool in Latin America, currently deactivated), among others.

In the case of São Paulo, the Copan is one of its greatest architectural icons, and this is why the artist chose to live there for 4 weeks, using it as a starting point for investigations in its vicinity. The artist again turns to the transformations of this specific region, partially resulting from the processes of gentrification and real estate speculation, and the repercussions in the daily lives of its inhabitants. Baldan’s vision focuses both on the occurrences in the vertical scenery of the city and the intimacy of the Copan’s indoor settings, and her outlook transcends the aesthetics of modernist architecture in order to examine the circumstances of the local daily routine.

All the work in the artist’s studio is created in the same place in which it will be displayed to the public, a spacious room inside Pivô. In this prolonged interaction with the exhibition space, the artist incorporates the history, architecture and context of the Pivô space in her study. This process, aligned with the routine of progressive insertion in the city, covering and documenting its daily course, makes Baldan’s proposal a project that is not restricted to visual arts in that it opens up space for the discussion of architecture and urban planning and the role of memory.