All posts tagged: Festival Concreto

Brazil Alert: Narcelio Grud Concocts “Call Bell” / Dispatch From Isolation # 65

Brazil Alert: Narcelio Grud Concocts “Call Bell” / Dispatch From Isolation # 65

Brazilian street artist and public artist Narcélio Grud favors kinetic and sound-producing sculpture, preferably with your direct interaction completing it. What fun is a bell if you can’t tap it with your finger or bang it with a percussive drumstick of some girth?

Grud’s pieces are often on the street beckoning the passerby to use them to play music and we can see this new one could prove to be a thrilling prototype.

Narcelio Grud. “The Bell”. Festival Concreto. Fortaleza, Brazil. 05-2020 (photo © Narcelio Grud)

Adapting the call bell, that metal dome that alerts the attendant behind the counter at a hotel, Grud places shiny metallic cupolas all over plexi mothership one. Peal, peep, clap, clink, ping! He says we need something like this to draw attention to what is happening at this this moment.

“The alert calls us at this moment to pay attention!” Mr. Grud says. “Which are the bells that we can ring, and which are the bells that ring us?”

Narcelio Grud. “The Bell”. Festival Concreto. Fortaleza, Brazil. 05-2020 (photo © Narcelio Grud)
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INO and “Broken” in Fortaleza, Brazil

INO and “Broken” in Fortaleza, Brazil

The Greek Street Artist INO has been consistently observing the social and political factors that are at play in modern society and has been addressing these themes through his work painting large murals in more cities around the world. This week in Fortaleza aside the Atlantic in northeastern Brazil, INO created a headless female form that for him is evocative of a socio-political order that is “Broken”.

INO. “Broken”. Festival Concreto. Fortaleza, Brazil. November, 2017. (photo © INO)

“This is a place where someone can see very big contradictions,” he tells us, “the poverty in the street, people begging for food – while you eat in the restaurant, the prostitutes every night in the streets.”

He shows us a photo of a street scene where  women are being questioned by the police that he took at night while he was painting his wall from the vantage point of his lift up above. His imagination is activated by the scene, and he thinks of the frightening circumstances that women in the sex trade are put in that exploit them repeatedly.

“All of this, together with the rich people, the expensive apartments in huge luxury buildings that look empty, surrounded by barbed wire fences in each condominium yard…” It all is disturbing to him, and a scene repeated in many cities in so-called developed nations where the stratification between rich and poor is getting more pronounced than ever before in the modern era, leaving more feeling powerless and easily victimized.

For his new mural entitled “Broken”, completed here during the 4th Concreto Festival, the anonymous form is an obvious reference to people caught in a de-humanizing system. “The piece is depicting a naked thin woman in a position of offering her body, with a black splash coming from the head,” he says.

INO. “Broken”. Festival Concreto. Fortaleza, Brazil. November, 2017. (photo © INO)

INO. “Broken”. Festival Concreto. Fortaleza, Brazil. November, 2017. (photo © INO)

INO. “Broken”. Festival Concreto. Fortaleza, Brazil. November, 2017. (photo © INO)

INO. “Broken”. Festival Concreto. Fortaleza, Brazil. November, 2017. (photo © INO)

INO. “Broken”. Festival Concreto. Fortaleza, Brazil. November, 2017. (photo © INO)

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