More than crossing disciplines, Chico Machado seeks to blur them. With a background in visual arts and theater, the artist also works in the field of music and teaches arts. Throughout his extensive career, Machado has been creating “undisciplinary” works that intentionally stretch the boundaries of defined artistic fields.
Blending elements of kinetic, sound, and participatory art, as well as performance and video, the artist builds low-tech mechanisms in Obra circular, his commissioned piece. These mechanisms reveal their materiality and captivate through their exposed gears, allowing the viewer to witness the path between the human body’s activation, the resulting movement of the apparatus, and the subsequent sound effects. Starting from what he calls “operativity” (“how” something is made), Machado provides machinery—designed in negotiation with the human scale—to an experiencing audience, inviting them to set it in motion. The piece proposes an energetic act, involving generation and repetition through physical action, engaging in a body-to-body interaction with the temporality summoned by and for the present.
Charlene Cabral
Chico Machado (Brazil, 1964) is an artist, performer, and professor in the Department of Dramatic Art at the Institute of Arts at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. He holds a PhD in Visual Poetics from the institution. He has held dozens of group and solo exhibitions and has participated in several stage shows in various capacities. He has received several regional and national awards in visual arts and theater. He is the coordinator of the Grupo Insubordinado de Pesquisa (GRIPE) and has been conducting research in artistic poetics at the university since 2005. He lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
