Matheus Rocha Pitta

Arranged in 30 beds, thousands of fruits, roots, and vegetables modeled in clay form a large vegetable garden that, despite its fertile appearance, produces no food at all. A paradoxical image of abundance. Fenced off and inaccessible to the public, the work evokes at once the history of sugarcane monoculture, the unequal distribution of land, and the persistence of hunger as a social and political reality. The title refers to an ancient field dedicated to hunger in Athens, described by the Greek geographer Pausanias. This mythical ground was to remain untouched to keep the plague from spreading across the world. In Um Campo da Fome, these questions connect with references from Brazilian culture, such as Glauber Rocha's Aesthetics of Hunger, making scarcity both the subject and a critical image of the country's historical formation. By turning the garden into a closed-off field, the work exposes the contradiction between production and deprivation, abundance and inaccessibility, food and exclusion.