This Saturday 19 of November the PROA Foundation will inaugurate the exhibition belonging to the Brazilian artist Luiz Roque, that can be seen with free admission from 16.

In this way, For the first time in our country, Urubu and XXI can be seen, which are currently also exhibited in the central exhibition of the 59 Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani.

Urubú is the name of a bird of prey that lives from the southern tip of South America to Canada.. It is a big bird, with dark brown almost black plumage; head and neck plucked and red in color. short beak, ganchudo, scavenger. He identifies corpses with his sharp vision and smell, flying low enough to detect gases produced by the decomposition of dead animals.

This bird lacks vocal organs, as well as the silent film by the Gaucho artist Luiz Roque that bears his name. Urubú is the Super8 video that Roque filmed confined from the window of his house in the Copán Building in São Paulo, a modernist residential skyscraper created by Oscar Niemeyer and Carlos Alberto Cerqueira Lemos in the 1990s 50, from where he captured the bird's flight.

In Latin American LGBT++ language, his films intertwine family stories, identity aesthetic forms of Brazil and Latin America in general, with moods, human and non-human dialogues, territories, landscapes.

XXI is a film with another tone. Filmed in the City of Buenos Aires, between Chacarita and Paternal, touches on sensitive topics such as disease and death, that have gone through our experience in recent 3 pandemic years.

In conversation with Matilde Sánchez for Clarín regarding her participation in Venice, Roque comments “In almost all my films there are cars, motos, trains. there is always transfer. I don't move the camera, I like the straight plane, I prefer reality to move, be bodies, animals or machines. Then there are all those things that affected me so much in these two years; my mother died of covid in 2021 and my father had to enter the same month in the same sanatorium, con Alzheimer. It was a devastating circumstance, that runs through XXI”.

His exhibition at PROA21 includes these two videos, Urubú y XXI and a third piece in progress.