Hugo Brazão

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Hugo Brazão

Cat did it!

(2021)

Cat did it! takes as its starting point the story of Koko, the gorilla who, after reportedly tearing a sink from the wall, used sign language to indicate ‘cat did it’, apparently shifting the blame onto one of her pets. Whether or not the gesture constituted deliberate deception, the anecdote opens onto questions of guilt, responsibility and the impulse to distance ourselves from the consequences of our actions.

Moving between animal behaviour, scapegoating and rituals of ablution, the exhibition considers the act of cleansing as both physical and psychological: from washing the body to ‘washing one’s hands’ of responsibility. Deception and purification emerge as parallel strategies of self-preservation — ways of negotiating discomfort, guilt and the desire to emerge clean from the mess we make.

Location

Museé d'art Roger Quillot, Clermont-Ferrand

Dates

2022

Materials

Quilting tecnique on outdoor fabric


Photo Credits


Reinis Lismanis

Île du Dôme takes as its starting point the science-fiction graphic novel L’Île d’Auvergne (1993), which imagines a future in which rising water levels have transformed the Auvergne region into an archipelago. In this flooded landscape, the city of Liberty is built across the trunks and canopies of giant sequoias whose roots have adapted to permanent submersion. Despite the scale of the catastrophe, the human relationship to nature remains largely unchanged: survival is still organised through occupation, extraction and control.

Developed as a site-specific work for the Musée d’Art Roger-Quilliot, Île du Dôme proposes a different evolutionary response. Here, humans themselves become rooted: skin turns to bark or stone, bodies become static, and individuals merge with the landscape as living islands capable of supporting other forms of life. The work uses this speculative transformation to rethink ideas of adaptation, interdependence and communication, imagining a society no longer positioned above its environment, but physically embedded within it.

Île du Dôme takes as its starting point the science-fiction graphic novel L’Île d’Auvergne (1993), which imagines a future in which rising water levels have transformed the Auvergne region into an archipelago. In this flooded landscape, the city of Liberty is built across the trunks and canopies of giant sequoias whose roots have adapted to permanent submersion. Despite the scale of the catastrophe, the human relationship to nature remains largely unchanged: survival is still organised through occupation, extraction and control.

Developed as a site-specific work for the Musée d’Art Roger-Quilliot, Île du Dôme proposes a different evolutionary response. Here, humans themselves become rooted: skin turns to bark or stone, bodies become static, and individuals merge with the landscape as living islands capable of supporting other forms of life. The work uses this speculative transformation to rethink ideas of adaptation, interdependence and communication, imagining a society no longer positioned above its environment, but physically embedded within it.