Leandro Muniz- I’d like to start asking you about your education.

MR- I graduated in communication and fine arts at the same time and, in both disciplines, I became interested in philosophy, in an erratic way. In the communication course, I started thinking about the technique and the media but back than I was already dissatisfied with this market field. At the time, I got in contact with video, cinema, hybrid languages and started thinking about the image.  In the arts course I was driving myself towards the tridimensional. So this training led me to relate body and language, matter and image. I only started making my personal work closer to the end of the art school. I was discontent with object making, although I was engaged in producing them.

Art is something that makes me think, so the natural way was to enroll in a MA program. For me theory and philosophy are inspiring, as well as movies and literature. Art makes me think in special way about how hard or how interesting it is opening up the language. What we call education is also finding your partners, that might be even dead. A formative experience is also how you create a way of living, and your own policies, among the flattening of the subjectivity.

LM – I was wandering about the differences between “Pacotão” (Big Package) and your previous works. The process of creating formal analogies between different things was in the maps of “Geografia de encontros” (Geography of encounters), or in the projections of “Astronauta e cosmonauta” (Astronaut and cosmonaut). But there are new elements in “Pacotão”: a chromatic saturation that appears for the first time, as well as a deliberate reference to pop art.  I see a new feature in relation to other projects that were related to cosmology and cartographies, even if those subjects were mostly excuses to deal with language. How do you see these changes?

MR – “Pacotão” comes just after some works in which I baked breads stuffed with astronomy and cosmology books. These experiments were a desire to bring my relation with the cosmos to a more mundane approach and also experiencing a different relation of time in the work. The book that was meant to be read, now is “swallowed” by the dough. It’s fermented, baked, then hardened or rotten. The object is in an ongoing process. Some years before imagining “Pacotão”, I passed by Pivô and saw the column, but it didn’t occur to me as a possibility of execution back then.

I guess this work plays with shrinking, enlarging, projecting images from different contexts at the same place; operations already existed in previous works. These are very fast operations,  related to appropriation and gathering of things that are distant. In  “Pacotão, I’m also interested in the temporary occupation of the space and its specificities. There are works that show up and disappear, but they are very strong presence as objects. I guess “Pacotão” comes from a sculptural thinking, but not only. I can’t move it unless destroying the building, what is an absurd image. For me, it’s something that begins with imagination, realizes itself in the object, but then continues by imagination too. That interests me, beyond the object “itself”.

LM – “Pacotão” has a deal of irony, in the relation between the architectonic column and the maize cookie package. Beyond the joke, we realize that there are many correspondences and differences between Oscar Niemeyer’s building, on which you installed your project, and Lygia Pape’s work, from which you appropriated the image of the package, even if it’s the refreshed layout. How do you see this encounter?

MR- It’s a little tragicomic, isn’t it? I think this is something that permeates my whole work: A relationship between sadness and irony. Niemeyer and Pape already existed in my mind and, of course, I can only make this work because they are part of Brazilian history. Somehow they are in the background of the work, but they weren’t a starting point. I’d say I was only able to do the project, because two people imagined a maize cookie package and a column with similar proportions.

I choose the package that is currently available, which still preserves many visual elements of the original layout designed by Pape.  I wanted it to be found at the grocery shop next door, instead of dealing only with a historical reference, although it’s laid up there.

The layout and the architecture previously mentioned are commonsensical. We incorporated Niemeyer’s shapes as a given and that just happened in Brazil, the use of cylindrical columns, for example. The same happened with Pape’s design. While researching for this project, I realized besides creating the logo and the layouts, she also designed a package in which the case followed the shape of the cookies, that used to come in boxes before this. So, the packages from all brands started to have the shape of its contents, while you eat the cookies, the package vanishes. It is as if we eaten the shape.

LM – Usually, Hello. Again‘s projects physically occupy the space. Your choice was to cover the central column with a surface treatment. Why did you choose painting?  After all, you could have used a plotter.

MR- I thought immediately about painting. It didn’t seem interesting to plotter, because of image quality, then because of the budget. Painting is important because it reproduces manually this object that’s industrially made. It keeps this question floating: Why painting something that could be printed?

I worked with two painters from different universes. Adelson is a lettering painter, he paints murals and panels for advertising. But here he made a tridimensional work, so he may have faced some differences. Matias works with grafitti so he can deal with scale.

In spite of its size, “Pacotão” is seen from a closer angle, so I wanted the painting to be the less expressive as possible. Piraquê’s package has a graphic and modular composition so it was possible, and relatively easy, to reproduce it through painting.

It was curious, because I never thought I would work with painting. In fact, I didn’t: It’s a work related to ideas, images and painting is among these subjects. I thought a lot about pop art: It is a replication of the consumption world, but there is something uncanny.  Not to mention the fact that it is the image of a maize cookie package sustaining the whole building, that’s already a tragic fact itself.

LM- It’s interesting to think how similar the final work is to the project. I think about the time spent making something manually that would look like the digital collage. I see a critical approach in this lost time used to make something a machine could do, as well as in the change of scales when you equalize the dischargeable cookie package to the architecture, that’s heavy and made to last.

MR – That was also nice about painting: Watching the column slowly becoming a cookie package.  The work began with the act of painting because the process was visible to the ones who passed by through the glass walls. Day by day the image was forming itself and transforming the column, like a parasite dominating a motionless object. It was like the work with the breads, an inversion of the ordinary over the monumental. It’s a very violent enlargement of something so ordinary. In that sense, it’s a critical action because it’s not a praise neither of technique nor manufacture.

LM – The title “Pacotão” (Big Package) refers to the change in scale, but also echoes popular expressions like “batidão” (hard beat), that run around, specially in Rio de Janeiro, where you live. It’s a title that reiterates the work’s operation, more than creating a conceptual description of it, like most of your other projects. How did you choose the title?

MR – I think it’s very nice when a title doesn’t ”behave” like a piece of art’s name. I usually nickname my works, but then they receive official names. “Pacotão” was the first project  that I kept the nickname. I agree, the title reinforces the work’s operation, it forces the “scale” in the language. It might resonate expressions that circulate on the streets. At the same time, I keep thinking about titles in the diminutive, like Mira Schendel’s “Droguinhas” (Little Nothings). Like  taking away the meaning of the word and opening space to the sound. I like diminutive and augmentative because they look like an inadequate measure. In Brazilian Portuguese it happens a lot: Creating expressions to grasp things that don’t find their place in the official language. So much that in the translation from “Pacotão” to English we loose the expression, although it also sounds interesting, “Big Package”.