“In contemporary art, performances and installations have an immanent subversion, in the sense that they strengthen our need to redo the repressions.
In Entrevidas, this is literally so, since it was a response to the repression during the dictatorship. It’s not surprising that this type of work may feel strange and indigestible”
“In the performance (Entrevidas) I did outside my studio in calle Cardoso Junior in 1981, and later in the installation of the same title, the feet walking among hundreds of eggs lying in the street are a menace, a danger for the eggs.
So the experience is one of tension and fear. This is what I mean by ‘redoing the repressions’. You can build an analogy between the repression and menace of the feet and the dictatorship”
“In this work, although we find ourselves in the dilemma of having to choose between life and death, life is reaffirmed through the symbol of the egg. The installation is a poetic act – it subverts meanings and it allows for different readings”
“I mean that installations and performances in contemporary art articulate themselves in that mythical ancestral space of the ritual, while at the same time appearing like a children’s game: it’s what is called fazer de conta in Portuguese, to pretend.
Here, the artist works with reality, with the real world; exposes it, turns it upside down, showing new dimensions, new truths. The artist exorcises and subverts the repressions”
Anna Maria Maiolino
Scalea, 1942