PIRAÑAS

AMAZON RIVER (PIRANHAS)
Preserved piranha fish, wood, paint and glue.
Variable dimensions.

A school of 170 piranha fish have been arranged in space, to depict the idea and the movement of the Amazon river. This installation is the result of a workshop held in the Amazon basin in Brazil. 25 artists from countries around the world were invited to make art in the rain forest for three weeks.

I decided to work with native material that could not be found anywhere else, and that depicted the sense of the place where it came from. The preserved piranha fish are sold as souvenirs for tourists. With their mouths wide open, they seem to be swimming after the viewer, showing their sharp teeth, and their eyes and bellies painted red. These ferocious looking piranhas seem to fulfill the tourists' ideas and fantasies of the rain forest; the rain forest which itself embodies the notion of nature as threatening, wild and dangerous.

PIRACUCU
Fish scales, metal.
Variable dimensions.

70 kilos of giant fish scales were threaded on a metal strand and arranged in a coil. These are scales from a unique Amazon fish, which is three meters in length. In the Amazon basin, one can find these scales in tourist shops, where they are sold as souvenirs and as nail files. As it is a material exclusive to that region, it is exotic and unrecognizable to foreigners. Presented as an art object, its meaning or function is not accessible to the (foreign) viewer, who can only appreciate its formal qualities.

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“ In a return to her method of placing
preserved animals in positions and arrangements in
which order and repetition predominate, Cardoso made
a sculptural installation entitled The Amazon (1992),
comprised of numerous desiccated piranhas mounted
on stands, which face in the same direction as if
swimming in unison. Upon their pedestals they are
simultaneously magnificent and threatening and yet
also inert tourist souvenirs, embodying all the clichéd
cultural assumptions about these fish, once menacing
natural wonder now industrially farmed “.

“ These works investigated the commercialization of nature and, like the piranhas of The Amazon, the cultural construction and consumption of the exotic ”.

Roca, Jose y Martin, Alejandro.
Animalario de Maria Fernanda Cardoso.
(Bogotá: Seguros Bolívar, 2013), 19 - 20.

2013
- Herzog, Hans-Michael. 2013. “Maria Fernanda Cardoso.” In Cantos Cuentos Colombianos : Arte Contemporáneo Colombiano, 90–105. Zürich: Daros-Latinamerica.

2005
- Fidelis, Gaudêncio. Uma História Concisa Da Bienal Do Mercosul. Porto Alegre: Fundação Bienal do Mercosul, 2005.

2004
-Herzog, Hans-Michael, and Nadin Ospina. “Maria Fernanda Cardoso.” In Cantos Cuentos Colombianos : Arte Colombiano Contemporáneo, 255–75. Zurich: Daros-Latinamerica, 2004.

1996
- Roca, Jose. “María Fernanda Cardoso.” In Fuera de Límite: Liliana González, María Fernanda Cardoso, Juan Fernando Herrán, Miguel Huertas, 11–13, 36. Bogota: Banco de la Republica and Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, 1996.

1992
- Artists to the Amazon. Directed by John Arden. 1992

1992
- Metken, Gunter., Reynaldo, Roels., Maria, Fenelon. “Maria Fernanda Cardoso.” In Arte Amazonas : Ein Künstlerischer Beitrag Zur Konferenz Der Vereinten Nationen Über Umwelt Und Entwicklung "Rio-92, 141–43, 216–24. Brasilia: Goethe-Institut Brasília, 1992.

English