S

Luiz Roque (b. 1979, Cachoeira do Sul, Brazil; based in São Paulo)
"S" 2017
Full HD video (5:00 min.)
Courtesy of Mendes Wood DM and the artist

Luiz Roque employs the vagueness of the present to arouse our imagination about the future, using science fiction as a tool to question dominant understandings of the world. S is set in an unspecified location made out of nocturnal, underground train carriages and tunnels, where androgynous figures adorned in shiny clothing, jewelry, and makeup appear with a gleaming rotating sculpture, an appropriation of Brazilian neo-concrete
sculptor Franz Weissmann’s Cubo Vazado (1951). While the figure in the train quotes in sign language a text by Brazilian artist and activist Jota Mombaça titled Towards a gendered anticolonial disobedient redistribution of violence (2016), the movements in the tunnels combine break dance with voguing.

Both instances, sign language and dance, become clear instances of the body as a site and tool for action and thought. The black-and-white images add to the defused temporal nature of the
work in parallel to the bodies and sculpture moving in an erotic ritualistic choreography that blurs combat and seduction, echoing broader power dynamics and embodies social tensions. In this collapse of perceived opposites, seen through imagery, actions, and references, Roque’s interest in queerness as an emancipated state of fluidity shapes the work’s open-ended
narrative as much as its content and form. In a context of growing extremism and isolation, grounded in binary structures of world making historically enacting myriad forms of violence, which today manifest in the generalized state of ecological, economic, health, humanitarian, and political crisis, the nuanced qualities of S, are urgent, celebratory, and sensual statements
about other more mysterious ways of being, forcefully reclaiming utopia as a tool of social reformulation.

By João Laia (based in Helsinki, Finland)