SAO PAOLO, 19 Jan 2022:
An array of 365 mannequins dangling from steel cables in Brazil’s largest city is meant as a tribute to the more than 600,000 Brazilians who have lost their lives to Covid-19 and the health workers who have been battling the pandemic for nearly two years.
Siron Franco’s installation Renacimiento (Rebirth), was set up last weekend on the grounds of the Casa das Rosas (House of Roses) cultural centre on Sao Paulo’s emblematic Avenida Paulista.
The figures, which vary in size and are dressed in a wide variety of clothing, are suspended 6m (20 ft) above the ground.
Franco said that he wants to celebrate life and physical contact against the backdrop of the social distancing imposed on Brazil by coronavirus, which has claimed 621,000 lives in the vast South American nation.
Only the US, with 851,000 fatalities, has a higher death toll from the pandemic.
“Represented by the mannequins, those who departed cry out for the integration of peoples, for the understanding that we must love our species and for the defense of equality and the inalienable rights of all,” the 74-year-old artist said.
Works by Franco, a Sao Paulo resident since 1969, can be found in important institutions at home and abroad, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
– EFE