Entre o Novo e o Nada
2005

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The video installation “Entre o Novo e o Nada” tensions the boundaries between real estate capital and the subjectivity of dwelling. The project, made possible through cultural funding resources, operates within the field of relational aesthetics and urban intervention to question exchange value in opposition to affective value.

The proposal is a radical gesture of displacement: the acquisition of a house in a peripheral neighborhood of Recife to be offered, in a direct swap, for a shack in a community, including all the traces, memories, and belongings of its original resident. In the hiatus between the "new" masonry and the precariousness of the institutional "nothing," the project reveals the gears of gentrification and speculation that push bodies and histories to the margins of invisibility.

By proposing this exchange, the work seeks not only to denounce the housing deficit, but to investigate belonging. What constitutes a home when it is reduced to a financial asset? The installation captures the vacuum of this process, transforming the real estate transaction into a performative act that exposes the fragility of the right to the city. “Entre o Novo e o Nada” is the record of what remains when the market attempts to price the priceless: identity embedded in the territory.