There is an elephant in the room

Work shown at Parallell Vienna, Austria (September 2019)

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There Is An Elephant In This Room (2019) is formed by 5 textile panels that, when joined together to form a single larger panel, measures 2.40 x 4.5 m – the same measurements of an average sized male adult Asian Elephant. This work was based on the English language expression, “the elephant in the room”, which refers to a highly obvious problem that no one is willing to address. It was executed following the simple premise of hiding the outline of the animal in plain sight, in a room that has the exact same height as the average Asian Elephant – 2.40m. Different abstract patterns are seen on the back of each panel in order to mislead the viewer into overlooking the elephant. The Asian elephant has been listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1986.

This work follows Brazão’s ongoing research on the physiological concept of escapism and addresses the contemporary tendency of refuging oneself from crisis by avoiding it.

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