1+2+1 (Antonio Wolff, Biba Bettega, Mau Medeiros, Richard Romanini) is a hybrid group expressing visual narratives through photography, moving images, immersive environments, installations and design.

Our first work is a transmedia installation that explores the Brazilian experience of euphoria and its paradox during the World Cup.

The artistic project was structured around reflections on the different cenarios, as they were experienced and intensified while living in and observing Brazil during the matches. The objective was to explore personal impressions, above all. It was not our intention to create a descriptive catalogue of the country. The project counted with the contributions and experiences from professionals in various areas of work, and the resulting synergy produced a transmedia installation.

By assigning an equal value to both personal perceptions as well as intrinsic elements of local culture, we were able to create a narrative where the “short circuit”, identified as a typically Brazilian attribute, served as a catalysing element.

Photographed portraits of the different colours and textures of human skin reinforced the diversity of races, each with its unique characteristics, that make up a single identity. Multiple layers drawn by the body, whether spacial, perceptive, temporal or sensorial layers, built an invisible architecture of relations.

In the installation, the body interacted with two antagonistic albeit complementary spaces, the hollow cage and the hermetic aquarium, a golden “prison” and a glass box for a magnifying lens. In the one, screams would muffle, whilst in the other, screams were lost, propagated to another skin, deforming it.

The dichotomy of spaces is reflected on its constitutive elements – the ball, a paradigmatic ludic element, is also a “­weapon” at Clóvis bate-bola‘s Carnaval. The strength of the Dionysian energy of the “Feast of the Flesh” and of the “game” dissolve when the fragile rules of the game are “broken”. When manipulated, the natural element, the plant and the soil, transform into an artifice of closed space.