Brazilian artist Vivian Caccuri creates objects, installations, and performances that seek to reframe everyday experience and, by extension, disrupt traditional narratives. In her work, the artist focuses on sensory perceptions, particularly on sound as a physical phenomenon and its social, historical, and political context, for instance through immersive sound installations with heavy bass, subwoofers, and sound amplifiers. Caccuri’s recent works focus on the mosquito as a pars pro toto of colonial attempts to conquest nature.

A large embroidery on netting, Caccuri’s Mosquito Shrine II tells the story of the arrival of European colonists to the “New World” through the lens of the mosquito. The allegory features the insect as a deranged paramilitary force, alluding to the power of tropical nature and the disaster of man-made structures—poorly planned artificial dams, sugar plantations, slavery—that have made mosquitos both ubiquitous and deadly. Resulting from the artist’s research into eighteenth-century testimonials and records detailing stories of illnesses in the Western hemisphere, the piece aims to reframe traditional narratives of the history of colonization, offering a disruptive perspective of the conquest of nature in the West. 

Vivian Caccuri (b. 1986, São Paulo) has participated in the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennial in Kerala, India, and has created commissioned works for the Serpentine Galleries, London; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; the High Line, New York; and Röda Sten Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden, among others. Caccuri is the author of Music is What I Make (2012), awarded the Funarte Prize of Critical Production in Music in 2013, and a contributor to Making It Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art (2019).