Maurício Chades – SAIC Graduate Exhibition 2022

SAIC SHOWS 2022 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2022 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Maurício Chades

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation

Graduate Exhibition Two (May)

mauriciochades@gmail.com

mauriciochades.com

Maurício Chades is a visual artist and filmmaker from Brazil. Decay, death rituals, speculative fiction, interspecies relationships, and tensions between city and forest are some of the subjects that cross his production. Between moving images, writing, object, graphic, photography, bio-art, projection, public events, performance, and installation, his works permeate different formats as a way to better respond to the problems raised by each project. With a Master’s in Art and Technology and Bachelor’s in Audiovisual from the University of Brasilia, he is pursuing an MFA at the SAIC School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department. In Brasília, he participated in the collectives Espaço AVI, Kinofogo Cineclube and NINHO – Collective for Research in Art, Interactivity and Agroecology. His short films were screened at some of the most important Brazilian festivals, such as the Tiradentes Film Festival, Curitiba International Film Festival, São Paulo International Short Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro Int’l Film Festival, and Brasilia Film Festival; as well as festivals in the United States, France, India, China, Argentina, and Colombia. He participated in group exhibitions, such as the FILE-International Electronic Language Festival. In 2019, he presented his first solo show, Pyramid, Urubu, at The Brasilia Digital TV Tower.

Maurício Chades - Human Fertilizer Tutorial

Human Fertilizer Tutorial, Video installation

The Keratin Fertilizer Tutorial is a video in which Celeste, an earthworm-drag, teaches the audience how to build a worm farm that breaks down hair, making a plant fertilizer as the result. To activate the worm farm system, she shaves an otter.

Artist Statement

Mostly grounded in environmentalism studies, my work usually relates to a place or a system that I perceive as a microcosm within a global situation. Three interconnected subjects mark my production: decay, death rituals, and frictions between forest and city. It unfolds on: the queer interrelationship of bacteria, earthworms, fungi, plants, and humans as soil-forming agents; the effects of light pollution; family memories and botanical identities; reimagination of Western-Christian death rituals as a response to the denial of death stimulated by the capitalist economy. Following these threads, my work process involves a combination of academic research and playful experimentation. It is always open to how different beings, humans and nonhumans, can collaborate: through digital decomposition/composition, when I decay images or create algorithmically edited films; when decomposing microorganisms allows the production of human keratin fertilizer; and also when I invite the public to participate, whether by learning home composting techniques or walking night trails to find light installations.

Tensioning the limits of moving images, my video works expand to different genres, such as Live Cinema performances, video installations, and experimental films. Over a decade of production, my work has also been manifesting in different media beyond kinetic experiences. I believe that each work demands its own aesthetic and techniques. Thus, with each new project, I face an exploratory stage – I always have to learn something new, from techniques of mycology, animation, permaculture, or programming, which also creates opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and indeterminate encounters. Therefore I could say that my work is based on the premise of being experimental and generative – often emerging from unforeseen results thanks to the contribution of biological, digital, and electronic systems. By understanding art as an aesthetic-political tool, I see experimentation as a state of becoming in which we can think of ways out of the infinite socio-environmental crises generated by capitalism.