Sobre humano

"Sobre Humano is based on a season I spent in the city of Rio de Janeiro, during which I started doing research on contemporary humankind, its ancestry, or the origin of its desire for development.

The human and architectural scale of the city. The outreach of things, the approximations and separations, the body submitted to itself. The reinvention of a new type of body, albeit precarious, but built at all costs.

The staircase made with bull bones is an almost-living sculpture: it breathes, it smells, it has fat and it sits like a 'soft-body' upon a wall. It was assembled with wire and glue, and it is based on the idea of attempting to build a 'new orthopedics', creating joints and articulations, like a 'new body'.

Sobre Humano is a symptom of a feeling towards an idea of development.  The bone staircase is not an abstraction of an animal skeleton, but rather a skeleton of desire. 

The smell of the bone, the squalidness of the object, the piece’s structural precariousness all aim to be an invitation to experience, rather than mere contemplation. Maybe the visible is activated in a much simpler, relational way.

Rio de Janeiro as the symbol of a 'new America'. The idea of growth of the Latin man through a new global economic map. Psychoanalysis, meditation, politics or any other type of emotional 'staircase'.

The fact that it was made in the Laranjeiras neighborhood, at the foot of Christ the Redeemer, makes the process the 'soul' of the project. Only later did an art critic make reference to the stairs which appear in the religious scenes. 

I am more interested in the process than in the result. Thus, what drives the creation of this piece is the experience of the location. In the process, fictions flex along with the stories and its narratives." 

Carlos Mélo in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)