Lives and works in São Paulo.
I have spent much time over the past years unburying forms and perceptions of gestures, as if they were the object of an archaeological inquiry. Focusing on the intersection in everyday life and art, gestures are disconnected from their individual biographical background, arranged in a ritual sequence and portrayed as deliberate historical acts with a political dimension. My work inscribes itself in the Brazilian contemporary invention of participatory art, I am specifically indebted to Lygia Clark’s notion of a “Ritual without Mythology”.
I use photography, video, food and sculpture to identify and construct my own liturgy of gestures, which are activated in conjunction with the ‘users’ of my works. A large source of primary material from this construction comes from a collection of newspaper (and printed media) photographs, which are removed from their context and archived under gestural categories.
Those gesture became several series of works that explore language, possession and motion in a way that has far-reaching ethical implications. They were presented at the São Paulo (2010), Taipei (2014) and Cuenca (2018) Biennials; Fondazione Morra-Greco, Naples (2013), Castello di Rivoli, Torino (2017), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2020) and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2025) , among others. I live and work in Berlin, to where I moved in 2016.
Extended Biography
THE FIRST PROJECT AT GLUCK50
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015
The sculptural project is a radical reading of the legend of the manna, the miraculous bread the hebrews ate in the desert while running from slavery in egypt, towards the promised land. Rocha Pitta inverts the elements by poetically inserting the desert inside the bread.
NO HAY PAN is a very simple sculpture: a bread filled with sand, that has to be used, to be opened, in order to be revealed. By locating the artwork in the most archaic symbols of human work, bread, the artist raises difficult questions about our present. Not by accident, the title comes from a slogan of spanish protests.
Gluck50 was temporarily transformed in a bakery in order to make the sculpture available for everyone. The artwork was sold at cost price and produced daily, bringing the economy of daily life into the gallery.
Abstract from the catalogue - essay by Kaira Kabanas
For me it is a question of producing a rite without mythology. —Lygia Clark
In “no hay pan,” Rocha Pitta explicitly references the manna myth through the actual baking of bread, a production process at the exhibition’s conceptual center. But rather than conjure the divine character of the event, the artist keeps everything about the actual site of the bread’s production visible: from the ingredients and mixer to the functioning oven and the space where the bread is sold. If the Israelites ate God’s miraculous bread in the desert, Rocha Pitta brings the desert inside the bread: each and every loaf is filled with sand prior to baking. Rocha Pitta thus forgoes reproducing the bread’s actual use and status as a divine food. But, in so doing, he nevertheless keeps the story’s materials alive.
At Gluck50 the exhibition begins with series of photographs that show individuals encountering and opening the bread. Arranged horizontally from left to right, each framed photographic sequence, containing three to eight images, corresponds to an individual act of breaking bread. Arranged in chronological order in a line along approximately five meters of wall, each set of photographs shows the following: in the first image the bread is seen by itself; the next two (sometimes three) images track an individual who approaches it, bends down, and lifts it up in such a way that the loaf’s round form obscures their face; the images that follow reveal the stream of sand that falls from the bread once it is broken. The final image in each sequence shows the empty bread on the ground and the individual leaving the scene. To document this ritual of breaking bread, Rocha Pitta used Polaroid instant film. An outmoded technology, the continued charm of Polaroids has to do less with the fact that the film develops itself and more with the anticipation that ensues between the moment the image is taken and the moment the image magically appears.
By virtue of their technology, Polaroids provide a finished print but no negative with which the image could be reproduced, thereby display- ing unique moments in time and space. The “drama” of the work is preserved in these singular images.Yet despite their resistance to photographic reproducibility, Rocha Pitta’s Polaroids do not record natural gestures. Instead, we witness a visual codification of the body’s movements and thus a paradox: the instant film technology lends the images an aura of spontaneity, but the cumulative effect of the photographs is to deliver the repetition characteristic of ritual. It follows that the work’s meaning is not bound to the artist or to the participant but is immanent to the structure (i.e., the ritual) in which they are each put into play. At the center of the work is thus a fundamental absence: the artist and participant enter into relation on account of work, but neither is subjectively expressed in the work’s structure.
This is not to say that the artist is in actuality absent. He is there, both present behind the camera and orches- trating the scene. In interview, he also confesses that his presence is necessary for the work’s successful completion. He explains, “I need to be there personally and tell the story to the person... I need to take care of the work.” But here the work to which he refers is a displacement from objects to acts—acts that are repeated so as to found the ritual and make its conventions visually legible in the image. Consequently, the repeated ritual of breaking the bread is what provides the condition of possibility for the work to take place and on which the work’s meaning ultimately depends.
The ritual is given, but in the end one can choose to participate or not; to buy the bread or not; and, if purchased, to use it or not—or even to use it in a way not prescribed by the artist and his images. But if the bread is unwrapped, one finds another detail of the work, a newspaper quotation printed on the loaf’s wax paper wrapping: “But there’s a stoicism behind the despair, which is expressed in the Andalucían saying a buen hambre no hay pan duro (‘when you’re really hungry there’s no such thing as stale bread’— a Mediterranean version of ‘mustn’t grumble’).”
As part of an article published in the midst of economic disparity, this modern proverb claims bread as a minimum condition for the sustenance of life, while it at once gives value to what might otherwise be deemed useless. But within the overall structure of Rocha Pitta’s work, the saying and the article’s explicit political content remain hidden, even as it is the source of the exhibition’s title.Accordingly, the politics of “no hay pan” does not reside in these words but, more precisely, inheres in the exhibition’s formal structure. Rocha Pitta departs from sacred meanings to engender conditions for imag- ining another use in a ritual of his own design. In so doing, he abandons the sacred myth of manna in order to preserve the right of ritual.
In this context, the hole under Rocha Pitta’s tent can be read as a reference to the natural cycle of life and death. Further elements allude to the idea of a natural setting and the passing of time: a rock located in front of the hole and the structure of the tent which itself resembles the skeleton of prehistoric animals. The space of the gallery transforms into a contemplative natural environment as a place of refuge from architecture.
Rocha Pitta's sculptures are formally reminiscent of primitive, nomadic tents; his tents, however, possess a mystical content that radiates through the formal content to the surrounding area, penetrating the ground.
With an amazing, magical mastery of composition, Rocha Pitta lowers his sculptures from above into specific, “chosen” places, creating symbolic encampments: he demonstrates that camping in intimate, prehistoric dwelling typologies can reveal a possible path to finding inner balance.
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015
Installation view at Gluck50, 2015