deposition
2018 –
Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter
Negotiation, property lease agreement between artists and Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, and the former Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) / Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) Corn Trading Pit Floor, comprising 32 pieces, including 24 single steps and 8 four-step sections.
Image credit (above): Everton Ballardin
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deposition, an on-going collaboration between artists Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter, centers on the displacement and collective re-situating of a corn commodities trading pit salvaged from the grain room of the Chicago Board of Trade, which was dismantled in 2018.
The two primary elements of the work are: a property lease agreement – guided by the grammars of commodities trading pits – that is signed and executed by the artists and the exhibiting institution; and the 32 pieces of the former Chicago Board of Trade corn trading pit floor.
Installed in 2021 at the heart of the modernist Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, a pavilion originally constructed to house agro-industrial fairs, the seven-tiered octagonal trading pit (a discarded embodiment of financial-capital and liberal-economic ideology made obsolete by its own logics of abstraction and acceleration) was situated as a key work of institutional critique within the 34th Bienal de São Paulo’s “Though it’s dark, still I sing.”
The first of eight planned international exhibitions of the work, deposition digests the multiple senses of the word (legal, geologic, art-historical, religious, political) as it rifles through the material and immaterial logics aggregated in the floor.
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Presented for the ︎︎︎34th Bienal de São Paulo by ︎︎︎Marissa Lee Benedict, David Rueter, and Daniel de Paula, curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Paulo Miyada, Francesco Stocchi, Carla Zaccagnini, and Ruthe Estévez. Production lead by Felipe Melo Franco.
Programming curated by the 34th Bienal de São Paulo for deposition included ︎︎︎Vânia Medeiros and Beatriz Cruz’s expansive Conversações series; and sound programs from ︎︎︎Novas Frêquencias by Chico Dub.
The production of the work was supported by the ︎︎︎Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Resource Center (Chicago, IL), University of Oregon, Oregon Arts Commission, and the Ford Family Foundation.
Salvage of the trading pit from the Board of Trade made possible by ︎︎︎Dan Peterman and Gregory Lane.
A publication on the work is forthcoming, edited by Karsten Lund and designed by ︎︎︎Studio Kader.