Working since the mid 1990s, Lucia Koch (b.1966) is known for her ability to shift the perception of a space through precise interventions using filtered light and architectural elements. For her most recent project, ‘Longa Noite’ (Long Night), the artist covered the long glass ceiling of Lina Bo Bardi’s iconic leisure and cultural venue Sesc Pompeia’s theatre hall with a purplish cloth. This gigantic light filter blocks daylight and turns the space’s former airy atmosphere into an everlasting and uneasy nightfall – borrowing a technique from feature-film cinematography (the classic ‘day for night’ strategy immortalized by François Truffaut in the movie with the same name).
The installation significantly alters the viewer’s colour perception, especially the reds (the colour of the Workers Party and one the artists invited viewers to wear to the opening). To reinforce this optical effect, Koch has randomly spread hundreds of long red wooden sticks throughout the area. During the exhibition period, she will invite the audience to play with these objects or try to build new structures from them as ways to fill time, while waiting for the ‘long night’ of Brazil’s current political turmoil to end.
- Fernanda Brenner