Chuá (Whoosh)
2022
awning and hydraulic system
Whoosh series
Site-specific for Arco-School Coop, Field at Work Residency Project – Second Edition.
Photo: Julia Thompson.
Chuá is a very special project. “Field at Work” is a residency held at a school for children and teenagers called Arco, which is itself a teacher cooperative. This means the dynamics of the school infrastructure and the daily labor of teaching are imagined, discussed, designed, and put into work horizontally. Though it is a regular school, its art teachers are all working artists, which builds a very enriching environment not only for studying and making art, but also stimulating and questioning the role of art in society as a whole. Within the residency, we construct our works together with a group of students. My proposition, Chuá, was to take an already existing object of the school – the awning – and transform it. What happens if an awning starts to rain? If the rain it usually protects us from, slips inside it? An awning-turned-sky. Collaborating with the school’s physics teacher, we created a hydraulic system that could transform an object they have looked at everyday for years into something else – something that seemed to have a life of itself, and at the same time, was their same old awning when turned off. “Chuá” is an onomatopoeic word in Portuguese for the sound of rain and other type of running water.