Português
Pivô features within its Annual Exhibition Program, the solo show “Babylon burning” by Frederico Filippi. In his first solo institutional exhibition in São Paulo, Filippi continues to develop his research that scrutinizes the vertigo caused by civilization. The artist works on the idea of collapse of the contemporary society, using the image of Babylon both in the biblical meaning of Babel and the term coined by reggae music as a degraded metropolis, presenting at Pivô a selection of new works on different medias.
In his first institutional solo exhibition, the artist investigates the use of the word ‘Babylon’ – both in its biblical sense and as slang coined by musicians and lyricists of reggae and rap that associate the term to the idea of a degraded metropolis.
The core of the exhibition is the new video ‘Phantom’ (2015), in which a car drives at dawn in an industrial district of São Paulo carrying a sculpture made of speakers that emit the sound of oxen mooing. The overlapping of a typical rural sound to the image of an urban environment alludes to the biblical passage of the Tower of Babel, which describes the construction of a tower high enough to reach God. However, in the Book of Genesis, this bold enterprise was sabotaged when God made people speak different languages, making their communication absolutely impossible, which ultimately led to the tower’s destruction. The exhibition revolves around two key concepts: the tortuous image of a spiral that causes dizziness and disturbs the viewer and the idea of utopias and frustrated ventures, associated here with a certain mistrust of the civilising process and the ideal of progress.
