The electronic music band Teto Preto [Black Ceiling, literally in Portuguese] came together in 2014, in the context of parties led by women and the LGBTQI+ community in downtown São Paulo. In the nightlife scene, they have assumed different formations and strengthened their performative spirit by articulating music, dance, and costumes through the persona of Carneosso, interpreted by Laura Diaz. In the installation Gasolina neles [Gasoline on Them] (2021), the group recontextualizes their first music video, Gasolina [Gasoline] (2016), in a museum space, more precisely in the underground of the same place where it was recorded: MASP’s free span. Often used for demonstrations, marches, and parades of all kinds, the area is marked by the memory of political confrontations.
Under the pulsating light of strobes, the installation is made up of three screens. On the central screen, the music video brings artist Loïc Koutana dancing in two different contexts: a demonstration held on Avenida Paulista against the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, and the backstage of a deactivated factory in the Brás neighborhood, in São Paulo, where several independent parties took place. Loïc’s spasmodic moves stand out against the ostensive presence of police, revealing two kinds of radically opposed choreographies. With a dance floor aesthetics, Gasolina neles repotentializes the original video by adding visual and sound stimuli, thus stirring up the spectator’s memory of bodies that, in acts of resistance, dance at night and protest on the streets.
CURATED BY Laura Cosendey, curatorial assistant, Mediation and Public Programs, MASP
In 2021-22, the Video Room program is part of the Brazilian Histories cycle at MASP, and includes works by Ana Pi, Teto Preto, Regina Vater, Zahy Guajajara and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.