Swiss visual artists Lea Meier and Nicolas Delaroche were in São Paulo, Brazil, from May to August 2019, as part of the art residency program at the Pivô Art Center, located in the center of the city.

Lea Meier is an artist exploring the notions of dirtiness, desire, body and failure through performances, textile, text and drawings. She uses sexual energy as a fount of creativity, in order to create spaces and atmospheres propitious to intimate, feminist and political speeches. The artist has a Bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of the Arts in Bern and a Master’s (2015) in contemporary artistic practice from the University of Arts in Geneva (2012).

In Sao Paulo, Lea worked mainly connecting her subjects with the public space of the city and its sanitation politics. In one of her actions, she mapped places symbolically connected to Switzerland in Sao Paulo, for instance the Helvetia street, and performed cleaning those spaces. In this work, Lea plays with irony as a way to question her Swiss identity from a decolonial perspective.

Nicolas Delaroche’s work explores the relationship between objects and their context. After completing a degree in Photography at ECAL, then a Master’s degree in Practice of Contemporary Art at HKB, he has been focusing his practice on photography. In his photographic work, he is interested in the reserves of museums, collectors’ apartments, places where multinationals exhibit and store their art acquisitions. 

During the residency, Delaroche created a photographic investigation of private art collections in Brazil named «Never Seen». The purpose of his photographic series is to offer an overview of the art accumulated by  51  collectors  and,  thus,  to  question their  practices, influences and tastes, as well as the dialogue between these works, domestic objects and architecture. According to Nicolas, «the particularity of the Brazilian art market lies in the fact that its most emblematic works are found in private homes and not in museum institutions».