MARCIO
CARVALHO
Objects Just Wanna Tell Their Stories
Carvalho visits European Ethnographic Museums and take pictures of masks and wood statues. On a second stage the artist projects those same pictures on body surfaces. The aim is to metaphorically bring those objects to life, animated by bodies. Most of these masks were made to be used in dances, rituals and performances within its spaces of origin. Most of them were taken from their spaces of functionality to be displayed in European museums with a very simplistic explanation about their life, existence and purpose which diminish the complexity of the societies from which they come from.

If these masks and wooden statues were “objects in transition”, made to be performed, to be impermanent, why European institutions and Museums are still perpetuating the idea of display and permanence? Isn't it betraying the very impermanent essence of those artifacts just for a start? Why an African scholar or student need to travel thousands of miles to watch and study his/her own culture?




