SAO PAULO.- A Gentil Carioca is presenting the exhibition “QUEM VIVER VIVARÁ!”, celebrating 20 years of the OPAVIVARÁ! collective. The show's critical text is written by curator Pollyana Quintella.

Part of the show presents an overview of the collective's work, including works never seen in Brazil or São Paulo, as well as new objects and installations. As is characteristic of the group, all the works are relational and require the active participation of the public, which, by interacting with them, contributes to the construction of an authorial horizontality.

“In a world that is fractured, fragmented and hyper-individualized by virtual relationships, we have always created works that call for being together, sharing desires, bringing bodies closer together and horizontalizing relationships,” says the collective. For them, the “public moment” is activated in the shared experience — it is not something given or instituted, but generated in collective and open coexistence.

OPAVIVARÁ! is one of the longest-running art collectives in the country, recognized for promoting moments of interaction and coexistence through activations, actions and experiences that involve visitors in public or private spaces. Their works are part of important collections such as: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum NY, Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ), Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP), Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM/SP), PIPA Foundation, Catherine Petitgas, Missoni, among others.

OPAVIVARÁ: QUEM VIVER VIVARÁ
(THOSE ALIVE WILL VIVARÁ!)

Pollyana Quintella

For twenty years now, OPAVIVARÁ! has sought to negotiate socio-cultural meanings through partici- pative propositions, usually mediated by transfigured objects. If the lesson garnered from the ready-made was that of rejecting any ontological definition of art, in the case of the collective the appropriation of ob- jects from daily life is not necessarily removed from aesthetic interest, as it tries to explore not only their sculptural qualities and material ambiguities, but abo- ve all the narratives woven around them; the way in which they inhabit collective imaginaries and displace meanings through profaned uses.

In their hands, images familiar to us become so- mething else, often inviting us to experience how sub- ject and object move from one position to another, both reflective conditions of a mutual engendering – the greater exercise of language. After all, their devices move from the condition of end (an object given to frui- tion) to the condition of means, a lesson learned from the best Brazilian art of the 1960s. Added to that, their

Duchampian version is closer to the fascination with fairs, street vendors, popular markets and department stores, in a technological hybrid that transits between the artisanal, the pre-industrial and the industrial, ready to jumble the ordering systems and the classification of matter.

To do so, they employ various methodologies. They resort to surrealist operations of accumulation and superimposition (through stacking, duplicating, mirroring, distorting…), as well as obsessive tactics that provoke unconscious associations in the observer, pro- ducing humour and wit. Bidets are turned into fountains; soap dishes into teats to be ‘suckled’ by the audience. An ironing board transforms into a kind of massaging skateboard shape, while a parasol connected to a wa- ter source makes it rain on those seeking protection. Everything is recognizable and yet somewhat delirious. A classic example is the group’s hit Multi Beach Chair (2010-1019), in which beach chairs made of aluminum and nylon are integrated into one another, producing a collective piece of furniture that invites togetherness. Somehow the work is answering the call of sociabili- ty that is already underway in the codes of use of the crowded beach, here transformed into a device.

The taste for the double is equally recurrent, and refers to the semantic ambivalence of an object that, seen as a work, sounds as unorthodox as it sou- nds everyday (the famous Freudian unheimlich…). The mention of the figure of the couple is implicit in This Is a Pipe, but it goes further when it encourages less normative groupings, as in This Is a Pipe for 3, 4, and 5 (2025), all of them seeking to establish temporary pacts of intimacy.

These procedures of coupling, uniting and inter- connecting one object to the other, also present in Rain Funnel (2019-2025), carry the suggestion of co- pulation and form hybrids whose amorous encounter modifies the components reciprocally, leading their identities adrift. The object is its conceptual and phy- sical double, or the I is another.

In the best cases, what is at stake is still confusing categories, betting on identity disorder. In Karaoken- te (2025), a work made especially for the exhibition, we see an adapted stove, whose burners now host speakers and microphones, while the oven contains a subwoofer. On the lid, a screen displays karaoke programming, available to the public. The great do- mestic icon, usually associated with activities carried out by women and the maintenance of family order, is transformed into a monster-machine and a tool of pleasure, borrowing the technology of tuned up cars, icons of a certain masculine performativity. Here, the procedure of collage refers not only to the material and techniques superimposed in dialogue, but to so- cially rehearsed codes and dynamics. It is no longer possible to locate it in the sphere of public or private, individual or collective, masculine or feminine. If there is any home here, it is endowed with implants, trans- plants, graftings and prosthetics that disturb passivities.

Furthermore, on the one hand, the work also reminds us that the gallery that exhibits it is located in a small street of houses that once had a domestic function, and was little by little devoured; on the other hand, the fact that the piece is on display forcibly contrasts it with the ‘real world’ situations it emulates. It is in the tension, or rather, in this space of negotiation, that it all happens.

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Then, a twenty-year trajectory in the format of a collective requires some revision. Opavivará has mainly been read through the lens of Nicolas Bourriaud’s re- lational aesthetics – even though the critic unjustifiably ignored previous contributions of Brazilian art. Inspired by models of free and radical relationality imagined by Félix Guattari in his Chaosmosis, Bourriaud coined that concept attempting to encompass a practice then still devoid of parameters, that was emerging in the late 1990s, despite having germinated in the 1960s and 1970s. Basically, it was a type of art interested in creating social environments in which people could get together to participate in shared activities. For the critic, the revolutionary utopias of yesteryear that were anchored in the great narratives of the twentieth century gave way to everyday micro-utopias, in search of alternative forms of sociability, critical models and constructed moments of conviviality.

In Brazil, the boom of artistic collectives of the early 2000s was also a response to the dense process of precarity set in motion by late capitalism, whose dis- mantling of social pacts was the result of the rise of a perverse neoliberalism. At once, collectives such as OPAVIVARÁ! instigated new social arrangements and questioned the very status of art, creating frictions between institution and market.

However, the romantic approach that recognized the celebration of a democratic and egalitarian exer- cise in these procedures eventually ran into its limits. The 2010s were responsible for introducing new pro- positive dilemmas. At the national level, the effects of affirmative quota policies led to a more heated debate on ideas about art and participation, which was fur- ther intensified by the massive entry of social media into the constitution of a digital public sphere, whose most expressive (and contradictory) caricature may well have been the 2013 protests. What would gradu- ally reveal itself was not the convivial union that made the art field into a new kind of refuge, but the conflicts of a world in transformation, a fractured sociability, as well as the lack of reflexivity contained in the fantasy of a free audience.

By the end of the decade, the collective-trend had cooled. It was less about discussing ways of doing things than about debating who could do them. Racial, sexual and gender issues emerged in a disruptive way, producing a series of revisions throughout the circuit and questioning power positions. As the result of po- litical struggles, the art scene was partly reconfigured and pervaded by more diverse social agents. From the point of view of artistic practice, the direction went towards themes and subjects rather than forms and systems. At the same time, the excess of mediation made way for a practice that was pressured to perform mainly as a digital image and, consequently, became distanced from the body and the vulnerability of real encounters. The critique that had pointed out the limits of participatory proposals now saw the emergence of an even more individualized practice, the result of the strong consolidation of the market, still interested in well-packaged products. There were losses; there were gains. During the pandemic, ‘Opa’ decided to re- treat, avoiding solutions that forged correspondences between what was on and off the screen. Meanwhile, we collectively experienced symptoms of fatigue about a practice excessively fascinated by two-dimensional images.

But everything keeps on moving. More recently, we have acknowledged that the relationship with Dif- ference will not be resolved as representation (a fai- led lesson of modernity), but rather as the production of presence. There is a new kind of game happening, led by social terms that have transformed the idea of participation itself into something more complex. In the meantime, the collective is experiencing a kind of second wind, accompanied by various revisions. It’s not possible to measure its effects on such a short term, but we can recognize that which the work again calls for as the inescapable imperative of the present: to return to the body.