The RAIMUNDOS, SEVERINOS and FRANCISCOS
1998
Video Installation (single channel with audio)
Interphones with 188 audio recordings
Loop 52 minutes / Variable Dimensions
The video features 30 janitors and janitors who live and work in residential buildings in the city of São Paulo. All migrants from northeastern Brazil, they share one of the three most typical names of this region: Raimundo, Severino and Francisco. The piece reveals a panel of the country's internal immigration and its silent but omnipresent integration in the history of civil construction and in the economic-social structure of Brazilian metropolises.
The final scene is a pantomime in which the thirty men enter the scene of a typical doorman's flat, reconstructed with belongings of the participants of the work. One after another, each doorman enters this lonely little space until it's full, denouncing the lack of generosity and democracy in Brazil's contemporary civil architecture.
Almost all doormen and employees who work in residential buildings in São Paulo and Rio are immigrants from the Northeast. Most of them are men who came to work on the construction of the buildings and ended up staying in the building as servants, guardians and janitors of such places. Its massive presence in Brazilian capitals exposes the discrepancies in the country's economic reality, whose social borders are today even more evident than geographical.
Installations: 24th Bienal de São Paulo, 1998; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 1999; Attitudes Genève, 1999; Attitudes Ailleurs, Buenos Aires, 1999; ACC Galerie Bauhaus Weimar, Germany, 1999; Le Plateau, Paris, 2005; Witte de With, Rotterdam, Holland, 2006; Loop Barcelona, Spain, 2008; Galerie Seroussi, Paris, 2008; Americas Society, New York, 2009; MAM Museu de Arte Moderna Rio de Janeiro, 2012; Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Switzerland, 2014; Centro de Artes Helio oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, 2015; SESC 24 de Maio, São Paulo, 2019; Collection Musée National d’art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Photos © Zaida Siqueira / Stills © Dias & Riedweg
The presence of Raimundos, severinos and Franciscos, as signified by Dias & Riedweg, can no longer be simply confined to their domestic duties in the lobby of grand apartments. By encountering them, where we least expect to, in the highly mediated and translated forms of this artwork, in the midst of the Bienal de São Paulo, they have entered our lives both as individual personalities and symbolic personages of the struggle for justice and representation that must go on, both inside the conflictual realm of art and in the diverse global world that lies beyond it.
Homi K. Bhabha, ON DIAS & RIEDWEG, AT THE Catalogue of the 24th São Paulo Biennial
THE Process
