Antonio Társis on 'catástrofe orquestra #1 (Ato I)' at the 36th São Paulo Biennial

In an interview, artist Antonio Társis discusses his work 'catástrofe orquestra #1 (Ato I)', featured in the 36th São Paulo Biennial and later at Centro Cultural La Moneda in Santiago, Chile. Társis traces his artistic roots to childhood, when he accompanied his mother, a domestic worker, and observed the packaged goods in her employers' homes, noting the stark contrast with their own scarce refrigerator. After his mother's death, he began painting, treating Salvador as an open archive where value extraction, violence, and commodity circulation intersect with Brazil's colonial and slavery history. He views packaging as a system of codes that manipulates behavior through color, symbols, and logos, and his work dismantles these engineered languages. The piece orchestrates a collision of materials—matchboxes, charcoal, and pendulums—to represent historical forces from industrialization to current technology. Társis describes catastrophe not as final silence but as the moment stressed matter emits its strongest frequency, and he seeks to compose the collapse of world, life, and death as an ongoing system. The work was shown at the 36th São Paulo Biennial and during its itinerancy at Centro Cultural La Moneda, Santiago, Chile.