Project Team: Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski, Alice Labourel, Anis Kamaruddin

Haunting Creatures @ spaces for protests?

The World Cup! A time to finally let the monsters out of the closet. All the national zombies – out, apolitical vampires – out (at night please), jolly sacis – out, too-political vampires – out (anytime…). In the same spirit, we let one of our creatures out into the world too (sort of…).

The project proposes the creation of a temporary space during the World Cup season in Brazil that exhibits art from stigmatised carnival workers while creating a place for encounters and meetings – desirable or otherwise. Placed in the vicinity of the stadium in Rio de Janeiro, the project creates a threshold between the stadium’s highly secure area and the vast ‘outside’. Breaking the barrier between the two, the project proposes a series of vertical legs that punctuate spaces for digital exhibitions utilising projections and augmented reality, while creating a landscape for sitting and climbing on the ground floor.

In this no-man’s land, the artists can potentially be recognised (despite never having been so throughout the many carnival years), and the anti-World Cup protestors can advance the front line while the World Cup fans (beware, the two can be one and the same) enter and leave the stadium.

The Haunting Creatures mediate the ordinary worker of the carnival and reposition their popular craft into art, an art of open (out)door diplomacy and peaceful confrontation. The design is inspired by the mythology of creatures from the popular carnival culture which the exhibitors work for annually.

The design subtracts the members of the insect-like creature, making it formally incomplete, as an analogy for the carnival workers that are not recognised as fully fledged artists. Utilising sensors and digital design, the creature becomes visible through the projection of the artists’ work, and an augmented reality layer. The creature’s form can be incomplete, blurred, full, mutated, and distorted, among other variations, depending on the amount and intensity of the activities around it.

As a space of protest, the creature’s formal visibility becomes the visual thermometer of the threshold of protesters, football-goers and locals. As a haunting presence, the project is a spatial experience where the outcome is a re-assessment of the social conditions of seasonal craftsmen brought on by the carnival industry – that, although brings much entertainment, traps hundreds of workers in an informal market with little social recognition, and which can often lead to a life on the streets, with all the possibilities and monsters that it holds.