The installation Rapunzel by Flávia Bertinato is presented at CCBB Rio de Janeiro and won the CCBB Contemporâneo Award.
Unlike the Grimm brothers' fairy tale, the character's braids do not lead her to live a romantic story. Bertinato's Rapunzel's extensive braids are doomed to containment.
The installation is made up of seven iron spools, covered in wooden sheets, of different dimensions, with pulleys and cranks, one attached to the wall and the others, distributed throughout the exhibition space. The spools carry meters and meters of braids, made manually with 700 kilos of natural sisal fiber, with golden surgical scissors tangled in the weave.
The cranks and scissors within easy reach suggest the visitor manipulates these elements. But he won't be able to do it due to the weight of the material and the immobility of the scissors, attached to the braid. Some spools are connected to each other by braids, which also impedes circulation in one part of the room. Public participation does not occur through physical interactivity, but through imaginative interaction. The inaccessibility of subject-work contact is part of the artist's proposal.
Flávia Bertinato assesses that Rapunzel absorbs a seminal characteristic of the 1960s production, which is the ambivalence of opposing forces: containment x expansion, limitation x freedom, revelation x concealment and exposure x secret. This installation also deals, according to the artist, with the legacy of the avant-garde of the 1960s/70s, which is the participation of the spectator. In this case, it is not the physical action that needs to be sublimated, but the mental interaction, from which the visitor attributes symbolic and sociocultural meanings to the thematic load of the fairy tale brought into contemporary times.
Curator and art historian Taisa Palhares says in Rapunzel's presentation text: “Bertinato accesses the popular imagination to put us in front of common sense in relation to the ideas of love, seduction and femininity, naturally with irony and ambiguity.”
Click here to access the Taisa Palhares' full text
