Matheus Rocha Pitta

Matheus, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us about yourself and your career as an artist. To begin with, I’d like you to introduce yourself in any way you see appropriate. You can share relevant information as a brief introduction for those who don’t know you yet.

My name is Matheus Rocha Pitta. I consider myself a sculptor, although I make many other things besides sculpture. That’s where I think I can define myself, and it’s also a bit provocative. I was born in Tiradentes, Minas Gerais, in 1980, where I spent my childhood. Tiradentes is a very unusual city, even within the history of Brazil. Still, it took me a long time to understand how this is part of my formation. My career began in Rio de Janeiro, where I went to study at the university. I started as a photographer and experimented with video, installation, and sculpture. Since 2016, I’ve been living in Berlin, but I still go to Brazil to work.

It’s interesting to hear that you consider yourself a sculptor. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Why did you choose sculpture? You mentioned that it’s a bit provocative. Why?

Because, in the same way I think of photography – I say that the work becomes sculptural because sculpture is the relationship between things – creates a forceful relationship between bodies. It’s a much more elastic concept than painting, for example. To call it installation feels a little insufficient. Still, I like the idea of sculpture as bringing together two things that don’t live well together and creating a relationship simply by moving them. It’s not a sculpture in the classic sense of a block of marble in which you see something, sculpt it, and take it away. Sculpture is more about what remains of activities, the processes that occur in life, such as biological processes and economic processes. They all have a sculptural character of producing things.

Quando você começa a pensar nisso, é uma ferramenta muito interessante e provocativa, no sentido de aumentar nosso conceito de que seja uma arte tridimensional. Ela não é só um objeto em um pedestal. Ela está no mundo e é formada por tensões que estão aí. É onde me sinto mais confortável para dizer o que faço.

(Translation: When you start to think about it, sculpture is a very interesting and provocative tool that expands our concept of three-dimensional art. It’s not just an object on a pedestal. It exists in the world and is formed by the tensions that are there. That’s where I feel most comfortable describing what I do.)

When considering yourself as a sculptor, as you’ve just explained, could you talk more about your techniques and materials? How do you shape or develop your sculptures? In general, how do you approach these processes?

I started working in photography, and one of the things I’ve carried from that over the years is the freedom of photography, in which you take ownership of everything. You point the camera at something and shoot it. Most of the time, I always work with material that already exists and rarely start a process from scratch. I take something that already exists and take it somewhere else. I enjoy working with food; though challenging, it’s super interesting. I also work with cement, something that many people know well. I discovered a technique when I was taking photos for a job in a Belo Horizonte cemetery, where there are cheaper tombs made of masonry, with brick walls in addition to the options of marble and granite tomb. The top of the tomb, the headstone, is a concrete slab, made in the cemetery for economic reasons, as it is produced on-site and doesn’t need to be transported, which saves costs. It’s made from a metal mold with no bottom, and sheets of newspaper are used to insulate the concrete when it’s wet so that it doesn’t stick to the ground. After a day, when the slab has dried and hardened, the newspaper stays stuck to the slab and so goes inside the tomb. In other words, the dead person has something to read (laughs). I already had a collection of newspaper cuttings about subjects that interested me. I discovered and refined various elements by using this technique, but basically, the core of it is the same. It’s a popular technique and super cheap. It’s very interesting because, on the one hand, you have the funerary context, something almost universal and which began as funerary art, and at the same time, you have the issue of poverty, the lack of means and how to deal with that. Two axes are super important in my work: the funerary axis can be translated into a historical, memorialist axis related to marking time, and the other axis relates to where I come from, which is a poor country where we are used to dealing with having only the bare minimum, and making an image from that bare minimum, like making milk from stone, for example, which is a job I’ve done. This side of poverty is interesting because it questions our notions of what is good and bad. It’s a way of provoking a reflection on the material status of art, and involves a certain democratization, too.

When we talk about classical sculpture, we automatically relate to the idea of marble, of using an already rare material to produce something even rarer, elevating what is already elevated. Does your interest in dealing with non-traditional materials in sculpture go beyond cement?

As well as cement, yes. For example, my work involves food. If we talk about value, if an artist spends R$50,000 to buy a block of marble, nobody would consider that a waste, even though that block of marble is used to create a sculpture, which is something impractical. If you spent that same money on milk and didn’t use it as food, it becomes a sin and is almost offensive, because the value of food is not just its monetary value but also its use value. Destroying an absurd amount of food, for example, would cause immediate revulsion in everyone without the need for much explanation, and that’s very interesting. Why do we feel that way about food and not marble? One of the most interesting things about working with food is that you get an immediate response from people regarding its value. For everyone, food has value. When I work with food, it’s not about decorating it like in a fancy restaurant, or using rare ingredients to put together a dish, but about creating a way to ensure that the food circulates so that everyone can be served. When you turn ingredients into food that can be eaten, very interesting problems need solving, such as its constant replenishing. This involves everyone in a really great way, because the value is not abstract, it’s very concrete.

And the need for food is one of the few things that is equal. Everyone needs to eat. Everyone is hungry.

Yes. For example, I’ve publicly served “Stone Soup” twice. One of the performances was in Rio, where the sculpture had to be shared in the street, just as in the legend of the stone soup, and open to everyone. That’s part of the story. The first time I did it, 80% of the people were from the art world, but 20% were from the center of Rio and sat down to drink soup. The second time was very funny because it was more astonishing. Some people came to Porto Alegre, for the second iteration, and it was winter and super cold. Some didn’t want the soup, but the homeless people didn’t care about the stones did want to have soup. The work is part of these existing social divisions, which the work begins to diagnose.

How did you promote the performance without creating a gap, perhaps to the point where the homeless people didn’t feel comfortable participating?

It occurred behind the IFCS (Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences at UFRJ) in Rio, in a very cozy, small square. During at a time when there weren’t many people passing in the street, just more homeless people, we created an inviting space on the steps of the IFCS. We cleaned the staircase and covered it with cardboard. It was super simple and humble, and we very calmy set up our buffet. Everyone made themselves at home. In the photos and videos, you can see that we managed to create an atmosphere around the soup. That’s something very interesting about food. Normally, arty people wouldn’t be there drinking soup served on the street. The work creates a bridge to enable us to understand the issue of hunger very calmly, even though it’s a delicate subject. The soup contains this element because half of it is made of stone. When you’ve finished eating, the plate still looks full. It’s hard to eat because it’s heavy. The spoon hits the stones and makes a noise. It’s interesting how this creates an almost ceremonial gravity around eating. In this way, art manages to address the issue of hunger, even for those who have never been hungry. At least, that’s what I’d like to believe. “Stone soup” is a super simple soup recipe with four ingredients: Carrot, potato, garlic, and onion. The broth is served with bread, and the four ingredients are carved out of soapstone. It’s stone carving in the most basic sense. However, the sculpture needs to be there because it makes the division between the part that is stone and the part that is life. It’s more about taking the pedestal away from the stone sculpture and bringing it into real life, into the field of relationships that the pedestal and the white cube have removed it from. In doing so, a set of tensions emerge that the sculpture begins to carve and display.

Você começa a entender a escultura não só como essa coisa de esculpir o material, mas começamos a entender as nossas relações com o material, as relações sociais com o material, relações da cidade com o material. E essas relações são muito materiais, no sentido de que também criam coisas. Se forem excludentes, elas criam muros, barreiras e cercas.

(Translation: You begin to understand sculpture not only as this thing of sculpting the material but also as our relationships with the material, our social relationships with the material, and the city’s relationships with the material. And these relationships are very material in that they also create things. If they are exclusionary, they create walls, barriers, and fences.). That’s what I like to use sculpture for. I work with things that have a primitive, sculptural essence. The difference is that I apply them to other fields. Sculpture isn’t limited to stone. It only ends when the plate is empty. Before it is served, it has one meaning; when it is served, while you are eating it with the stones inside, it has another; when the plate is empty, only the stones remain, and then it has a third meaning; and a fourth when the stones are returned, because they have to be used to serve someone else. This displacement of materials reveals relationships that are also sculptural.

Where do you usually find the inspiration to deal with delicate and real themes, such as hunger and lack of resources, and how do you negotiate these issues in your work?

These are indeed delicate subjects and, nowadays, there is a certain taboo about poverty that bothers me a lot. It seems that being poor is considered a sin, or something wrong. There is a whole other tradition of economic thinking that is ignored today, and I think this is very bad. Although it’s a delicate subject, nobody needs to feel themselves offended by being hungry. Everyone is hungry. Hunger accompanies us all day: we wake up hungry and feel hungry at lunch and dinner. There’s no point in ignoring this reality; we need to confront it as it is. We must not carefully deny this reality, pretending it doesn’t exist. I’ll give you an example of a piece of research I’m doing on the world of fake news, such as click farms, which are a world of totally precarious employment, etc. There’s a social scientist talking about it who’s worried about not offending the workers. I’m sorry, but the worker guy is already fucked, you know? It’s important to understand what’s going on and to try to understand these relationships. The relations of oppression are real; we can’t ignore them if we want to solve the problem. Brazil is back on the hunger map after four years of the Bolsonaro government. I’m not referring to a specific person, but to a problem that needs to be addressed. This is also related to how food is produced, which has existed since colonization. If we pretend that the problems don’t exist, we’ll live in an illusion, on a fantasy island. I believe that art has a different purpose. It serves to help us escape reality when it becomes too harsh, but it can also help us understand it better. In “Stone Soup”, everything is made with great care. For example, the soapstone used to make the pots comes from Minas, where I was born. The way we serve the food creates a welcoming space. My work deals with these issues, although it doesn’t thematize them directly. I’m not providing information about hunger; I’m making people experience hunger. It’s not hunger because it’s simple and cheap, but because there’s a stone in it. The plate is full, but half of it isn’t edible. It just represents something to eat. I try to handle super-heavy subjects with delicacy, which also applies at the material level. I work with cement and paper, which are two very incongruous materials. Cement has something very rough about it, and the hand that works with them both must be both rough and delicate so the paper can also survive that. One interesting thing about working with food is its universality. No one can claim ownership of this subject. As an artist, I don’t think I have to represent anyone. I find designating artists as representatives of an ethnic group, or type of people, rather complicated and dangerous. Art is an experimental state, and politically, representation has been in crisis for a long time. Democracy is looking for ways to stay alive after representation. Still, this discussion has completely broken down because representation doesn’t work properly and will never be fair. I don’t think it’s fair to put the responsibility for this on the back of the artist. Art is an experimental state that involves existential exposure, which is a fragile thing. However, as artists, we can deal with it and adapt.

You mentioned at the beginning that you like working with the idea of taking what already exists and putting it somewhere else to see how it behaves in a different environment. This contrasts a lot with the idea of representativeness because, as you said, it’s a terrain of experimentation and, to experiment, there needs to be this displacement, this change of position. There needs to be a change of subjects, of things.

It is the “poetic license” that allows you to experiment with things you don’t know. So, the artist will never be an absolute authority.

That’s interesting. Poetic license is the basis of art, and it’s been less discussed lately because we’ve focused more on trying to fit the artist and their practice into a definition, rather than allowing poetic freedom.

I see my work as influencing many people. Sometimes, I think it’s bad; sometimes I’m proud. But I don’t make art in the sense of wanting to be a role model – nothing like that. I make art to understand the world I live in. It’s a world that gets harder to live in every day. Things that 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, I would never have imagined would happen, have happened. But it’s still a world I love.

A época em que eu vivo é a única época que existe para eu viver, e é sobre essa época que vou me debruçar. E isso é outra coisa de que sinto falta hoje em dia. Um pouco diferente de quando comecei, que é uma certa falta de atenção ao presente.

(Translation: The time I live in is the only time I can live in, and that’s the time I’m going to focus on. Another thing I miss these days, which is a little different from when I started, is a certain lack of attention to the present.). Although the question of history is important in my work, I approach it to be able to understand the present. Sometimes, I feel that we live in a closed present, without many perspectives, in the sense that looking at the past doesn’t change the present. Many things are accepted or experienced as natural, but, in reality, they are historically constructed. We live under an increasingly brutal regime of economic expropriation and loss of workers’ rights, which has only been amplified by digitalization and is set to worsen. For example, I pay a lot of attention to researchers from São Paulo who study Bolsonaro because they are very interesting. The figure of the micro-entrepreneur is an invented myth. People believe they are micro-entrepreneurs, but really, they are being exploited. There is an illusion that they are part of a class. For example, it’s interesting to understand how these relations of economic oppression occur today. They have changed and are very much related to urbanization and all the digital technology which didn’t exist when I was a child. This is something new. We must be free to discuss and criticize it without offending because people say you can accept anything. Everyone accepts it, but it’s not about that. We’re talking about how to understand, resist, and try to change. There is conformism even in how politics is judged today, which is a moralistic way of saying how virtuous a person is. The individual evades tax and does a little bit of charity. This is very poor in the worst sense of the word. Politics is being limited by conformism, accepting a certain reality presented as a natural one. Art and artists work with images, myths, and things outside of reality. What we’re talking about here, for example, about the idea of the micro-entrepreneur, is concretely a fantasy, just like something an artist creates. In this aspect, it’s interesting for art to be political, and to reveal our fantasies. Since these fantasies have a strong political background, how can we achieve some pedagogy through sublimation as well? There’s no point in doing pedagogy by saying how great we are, that we like Indigenous peoples, that we’re benevolent. We must demystify the paternalistic attitude, which is the most patriarchal thing around. It’s like placing your hand to your forehead and saying: “Oh, you poor thing,” putting the other person “lovingly” into an inferior position. There’s a lot of talk about patriarchy, but nobody talks about the paternalistic attitude. One thing that I think is extremely important to mention is the question of this paternalization towards the public. This happens, for example, during an exhibition; you say, “This is very complicated, nobody will understand”. By doing this, you’re assuming that the other person has a kind of disability and so adopting a condescending position, as if the public were made up of children. Nowadays, many terms in circulation end up losing their original meaning. It’s important to understand that we often act in an unconsciously patronizing way. If we don’t recognize this, we’ll never be able to get rid of these patterns. It’s delicate terrain, and difficult to deal with. Still, you must take it lightly and continue developing a critical eye towards the world, but with love. Constructive criticism doesn’t have to be bitter and negative. Love can be constructive criticism.

And it’s interesting to think about how the field of art can be the best environment for discussing such issues so that these topics aren’t necessarily resolved but rather observed, questioned, and analyzed.

We’re not here to solve things but to bring a new perspective to the problem. I’m glad that’s the case because the job of artists is to create art, not to rule the world. But that’s what art is. It’s about creating a space, an atmosphere in which we can talk and understand from a different perspective. Often, the solution to a problem involves just that change of perspective. Art is very useful for that. It’s not about immersing yourself in yourself but getting out of yourself and into another world. That’s what is great about being an artist and enjoying art, going to the cinema, reading a book, going to an exhibition.

Matheus, as my last question, I’d like you to share with us the main challenges you’ve faced, or a challenging situation throughout your career.

It’s always a challenge to create something that doesn’t exist yet and convince someone that what doesn’t exist yet will be cool (laughs). But after about 10 years of making art, I realized that I had a vocabulary and became more relaxed as a result. The creative process began to happen more fluidly. Because I’m living in Berlin, I’ve started to realize that the reception, especially of this work in which we’re talking about hunger, and food, is completely different here. For example, I had a group of directors from institutions in Berlin visit my studio last year. I had just arrived from Brazil and finished “A Field of Hunger (2019/2022, Usina de Arte, Pernambuco). I was dazzled by this occasion and said to myself: “Oh, it’s going to be a quick visit, so I’ll take advantage of the fact that this work is fresh and print the photos”. I showed them to everyone and then someone asked: “Matheus, is this … made of chocolate?” That was after I’d explained everything (laughs). For me, presenting “The Hunger Field” to an audience that doesn’t really experience hunger is challenging. Nobody in Brazil has ever confused clay with chocolate. Looking at this work, we are dealing with a tradition of works that talk about the Brazilian outback, which has a whole imagination of its own in which its traditions are written. We don’t have that here, but I also noticed that with another work I did in Hamburg, “The Sirens of the Curfew,” which are figures made from chains – and are a dialogue with oppression and lack of freedom – art professionals thought it was a work about sadomasochism, about the universe of pleasure. And that was the last thing I was trying to communicate. It’s a challenge to present issues that interest me and move me to an audience that isn’t very aware of them because of the privilege they’ve accumulated over a long time.

In Brazil, hunger is often manifested in arid, dry, and extremely hot regions, while in Europe, the opposite is true, and exists in cold regions. I keep thinking of Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters,” which depicts misery in winter… It’s incredible how he managed to convey the feeling of hunger through art. Through this, we can see the contrast between the perception of hunger in Brazil and Europe and which imagery one or the other uses to remember hunger.

There are cultural differences, but there’s more to it than that. I don’t think there are any more “potato eaters” in Europe these days; if there are, they’re very hidden. It’s something almost existential. People can’t understand, and don’t realize, what they’re talking about. Hunger in Brazil is evident, and it’s on everyone’s face. That’s why I’m finding it challenging to do work that people don’t see as “chocolate.” That’s the challenge, apart from the cultural barrier – to be able to implicate a person who has a full belly. I’m setting myself this challenge because it’s an interesting thing. This lack of understanding is serious. It’s no good just talking about it; you must start taking this lack of mutual understanding seriously. I may also be blind to some things here. Likewise, they may not be seeing things from my side either. There may be a lack of mutual vision. There may be something here that we’re missing.

Yes, exactly. As you mentioned, your research on reducing cultural myopia is very interesting. It’s a path that can only expand through exposure to two, three, four or five different visions. It requires, therefore, a plurality of perspectives.

Because it’s something that’s going to happen a lot. Our perspective of a future with climate change is no fun at all. This global food production network, which is very much based on monoculture, will be dismantled a little with climate change in ways that we don’t know yet. But the self-regulation of the climate is ending, so the regularity of the harvest will also end. We have before us – perhaps in the next generation and so we won’t see this – a disaster of the first order. How we deal with food distribution will have to undergo a radical change beyond the content of our food. The change must be in both the production and distribution of food. Monoculture exists when you think of food as a commodity, in accumulation, etc. This is a very recent thing in human history; only 200-300 years old. In the past, people only stored and accumulated grain for the winter or possible droughts. But modern agriculture, which is associated with colonization and slavery, has changed all that. Land use is now mechanized, scientific, and super-extractive. In the future, we must change this perspective if we want to guarantee food for everyone.