Marilá Dardot

The installation Zero Tolerance Silver Clouds connects the U.S. immigration policy of “Zero Tolerance” with Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds (1966). In 2018, images from a detention center in Texas shocked the public by showing approximately 2,000 migrant children imprisoned, separated from their families. In a caged space, the children were seen wearing silver blankets made from the same material used by Warhol in the balloons of his work. The “American Dream” establishes ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers. By invoking an icon of contemporary art, the installation confronts these ideals with the reality of U.S. immigration policies.

At the invitation of the #novoysola collective, Marilá Dardot implemented the Tort(guerr)illa project in Mexico City. The initiative draws from classic Mexican tortilla shops to spread feminist voices hand-to-hand. On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2022, establishments across the city wrapped their tortillas in purple paper, printed with phrases selected by Dardot from five feminist magazines published in Mexico during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s: Fem, La Revuelta, La Correa Feminista, CIHUAT, and La Boletina. This artistic action seeks to recover the historical memory of feminism and disseminate it in the streets and the daily life of the home.

Work created for a month-long intervention on advertising billboards across Belo Horizonte, as part of Inhotim’s “15 Seconds” project. Each day, a new animation featuring words cut from the front pages of Brazil’s major newspapers highlights the collective forces that drive the country’s history: those that endure, those that resurface, and those that emerge anew daily. By removing these characters from their news contexts and presenting them explicitly as historical agents, the work aims to provoke reflection on their roles in shaping society.

Marilá Dardot writes the phrase “A la esperanza vuelvo” with water on a light blue wall by the river in Matanzas, Cuba. As the sun erases the words, the artist continues rewriting them repeatedly until the water runs out. Ir y volver was first presented as a performance at the XIII Havana Biennial, in Matanzas, Cuba. “A la esperanza vuelvo” is a verse by Carilda Oliver Labra, a Cuban poet who lived there all her life.

The two artists, Marilá Dardot and Fabio Morais, are invited to create a library for the 29th São Paulo Biennial. The result is an unfinished space, a house, a labyrinth under construction. Visitors enter through spaces lined with tiles and wallpaper, pass through doors, and walk on carpets, all featuring images of book covers. Bricks and books are elements of construction. In one of the rooms, there is a library with three collections: the response of the artists participating in the 29th Biennial to the question: “With which book would you build your house?”; an open invitation for the submission of books from artists, and finally, a selection of contemporary literature made by the two artists.