A monument, supported by greek columns, with a Portuguese tile mural depicting a colonial scene, is scribbled with unreadable graffiti. São Paulo, March 2022.
"THE WORLD TODAY by Hugo Faz. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose embrace of art and science-fiction still generates instigating questions about human evolution, was the starting point of inspiration for Hugo Faz's vision of The World Today.
If the black monolith once transformed our ancestors, making them intelligent but perhaps also competitive or aggressive, it is invited back after many ages to be a guiding thread for witnessing contemporary society and to help with asking unsettling questions.
Does the current complexity of human relations, urban development and dynamics actually make for better living? What does the advent of crypto entail for the average person? Is a society that's become used to isolation and virtuality still capable of empathy? Is there a point to our civilization? What makes the essence of the human experience? In our age, in which post-truth thrives and where “all that is solid melts into air”, Truth becomes a non-fungible token, molded to what the minter wants it to be. Faced with such an 'imbroglio', what is the reigning paradigm?
Innocuous or transformative, discreet or disturbing, starring or observing, the black monolith experiences the present and its inhabitants, naming visions, telling truths or making guesses about the world today. What are yours?"
