“A gente não faz festa porque a vida é fácil, mas pela razão inversa” - Luiz Antônio Simas

RITUALS is a collaborative exhibition between Studio/Chapple, London and CAROÇO, São Paulo. Featuring six artists from Brazil and the UK, the exhibition invites a diverse range of practices to unearth the hidden rituals of everyday life as they emerge transnationally across both geographical landscapes.

Magic and routine suggest opposing ideas, even though it is said that one should not exist without the other. After all, we seek—whether consciously or unconsciously—a life built on daily rituals (or chronicles, or mundane novels; or Hollywood films) to justify the time we sell to the world in which we were placed. Romanticising the rituals of our daily lives is a common practice, especially among generations raised with access to films, soap operas, and particularly the internet. In Brazil, it’s almost as religious as bathing or eating—to have fun and allow ourselves a plunge into the playful world as an escape from the exploitative system built by those who colonised and organised early on, ensuring that their system still functions today. Stitching together contemporary and ancestral customs, the exhibiting artists weave a web of quotidian ceremonies.

Exploring image reproducibility as a way of fixing culture, Lady Letal recovers materials from queer culture spread online in Brazil in the 1990s, reproducing memes of São Paulo queer scene icons in varying and disparate media. Alongside them, Anna Bigão creates distorted images of her own body, mixed with garbage and food remnants, composing scenes that suggest a swamp of personal existence and artistic self-understanding. Finally, Biarritzzz completes the group of Brazilian artists selected by CAROÇO, with a body of work that explores transmission, identity discourse, and the ironic manipulation of communication systems within their internet-native generation.

Extending the gathering, British artists presented by Studio/Chapple create spaces of self-referential semi-fiction, navigating encounters with myth, ancestry and spirituality. Investigating personal themes of identity, faith, addiction, and connection, Georgia Semple’s work unravels the chaos in vulnerability, warping context and scale in surreal settings to symbolise the delusions formed by attachment to personal ideology. Leo Robinson’s practice of evolving new rituals and traditions to fill the voids left by colonial displacement emerge here through a fantastical instrument cast in bronze, influenced by historical harps and string instruments from West Africa and Ethiopia. Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy’s practice revolves around an exploration of the human condition, fascinated by the complexities and nuances that permeate everyday life. As if moments are suspended in time, Mattia’s intimate snapshots seamlessly move between motion and quietude, confidence and vulnerability; in Acedia, he suggests a state of listlessness, apathy, and spiritual or emotional fatigue.

RITUALS proposes a transnational dialogue between artists who, individually and collectively, challenge ideas of what it means to belong, to persist, and to live through these ceremonies of the everyday. It suggests a perspective shaped by individual experiences that tell family stories and personal journeys in search of identity. For some of us, adversity and impermanence give rise to an ecosystem of collaboration and familiarity—because coexistence, sharing, and cohabiting are necessary. We also propose in this curatorial gesture that, alongside the harshness of the real world, heterotopian rituals emerge from the cultural encounter of mixed identities: cosmopolitan myths, tales of city dwellers, of the internet, queer culture, sonic relics, streetwear and its unfolding layers. The exhibiting artists write an epic tale not only of survival, but of joy, play, and artistic creation that both builds and dismantles expectations. And still, having the freedom to enjoy a cold beer at the end of the day.

 - Marina Leite