Marcelo Moscheta
Parallel 45N

rocks suspended in front of a wall, with black tags hanging from them with GPS co-ordinates
Marcelo Moscheta, Parallel 45N, 2015. Stones collected from the United States/Canada border, 3-claw gear pullers, laser cut tags.

For Parallel 45N, Moscheta travelled 150 km of the United States/Canada border between Hereford, QC and the Richelieu River, collecting rocks as he went. A straight line drawn indifferent to the terrain of the land, this section of the border runs along the 45th Parallel North, commonly known as the midpoint between the equator and the North Pole. The rocks presented here, having compressed, shifted, fractured, and been reconstituted, are relatively indifferent to the concepts of national borders and latitude, yet tagged with the GPS coordinates of where they were found, they mark a particular moment in their life, where they rested in between nations as informal markers of statelessness. In Moscheta’s work, geography, cartography, nationhood, land, identity, science, and affect intersect creating a tension between abstraction and materiality.

rocks suspended in front of a wall, with black tags hanging from them with GPS co-ordinates
Marcelo Moscheta, Parallel 45N, 2015. Stones collected from the United States/Canada border, 3-claw gear pullers, laser cut tags.

Artist bio:

Born in São José do Rio Preto, 1976, Lives and works in Campinas, Brazil.

The common thread running through Moscheta’s work is a great fascination with nature, and a willingness to travel and experience the landscape. This experience of travelling and living in diverse environments stimulated his interest in depicting the memory of a place, developing a classification procedure like that of an archaeologist questioning the boundaries of territory, geography and physics through art.

Since the start of his artistic career in 2000 he has created works and exhibitions arising out of journeys to distant places, where he collects objects from nature and reproduces them through drawing and photography, creating installations and objects.

Recent solo shows inclue 1,000 km, 10,000 years (2013) at Galeria Leme and the site-specific Contra.Céu (2010) at Morumbi’s Chapel. In 2011 he was comissioned by the 8th Biennial of Mercosul (2011), to produce work around his research on the brazilian/uruguayan border, and he participated in a residency onboard a tall ship at Spitsbergen, at the North Pole. In 2014 he participated in the Vancouver and Montevideo Biennials. In 2013, his work appeared in the book Vitamin D2, Phaidon, an anthology of contemporary drawing.

www.marcelomoscheta.art.br