CAPACETE entertainement

The purpose of CAPACETE entertainments is to exhibit and produce previously unseen conceptual and contextual works, comprising of a variety of artistic strategies. CAPACETE entertainments documents its activities and serves as a starting point for the self-representation of a group of national and international artists. Capacete’s activeties is part of a long term interdisciplinary presence in Rio de Janeiro, which aims to research and document aesthetic, social and political processes in Brazil. The historic, urban, topographic, enviromental and social context of Rio de Janeiro is an important laboratory that (re)actualises Brazilian complexities. Rio de Janeiro is a strategic tool to identify, articulate and give visibility to these processes, reaching very heterogeneous audiences.

CAPACETE entertainments considers it vitally important not only to represent and promote continuity in the languages of art, but also to provide a platform for organizing and documenting the artist's production and making it available to the public. The artist’s agent is the content of his own work. CAPACETE entertainments is primarily interested in the "space" that exists between the art gallery and the city in the multiple manifestations of its urban history.

Since 1998 CAPACETE focusses on collaboration networks and has produced several projects with diferent partners, such as the International Rio Film Festival, national and international galeries, institutions and organisations. It is of a extrem importance for CAPACETE to collaborate on different aspects in the production, showing and organizing of art projects, with very special concerns for South America, where it has been building up diferent collaboration projects (El Basilsico (ARG), Lugar a Dudas (COL), EiEi (CHI), Hoffmanns’ House (CHI), Galeria Metroplitana (CHI), TRAMA (ARG), DUPLUS (ARG) and many others).

In the past years, CAPACETE entertainments has developed projects with artists including Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Marcos Chaves, Bruno Serralongue, Rubens Mano, Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, Pierre Huyghe, Shimabukuo, Pierre Bismuth, Marssares, Ana Infante, Camila Rocha, Eeij Liisa Athila, Ducha, and Marepe among others. CAPACETE entertainments aims to affect the city by entering into it, transforming it, remapping it, or finding new meanings by revealing it in a different light. All of these projects explore interfaces that occur between city and image (moving or static) or word (written or spoken). They attempt to excavate spaces which may reveal the constant mutation that an urban center undergoes as it oscillates between narrative and place, language and location, fiction and architecture, social universe and public space, politics and collective sensitivity, nature and advancing technology.

Different aspects of the urban center is taken into account, in order to make it possible to define and create new languages in written, visual or spoken forms, and thus transform the urban environment into an historic circuit of personal experience.

Actually CAPACETE entertainments develops its program through a variety of strategies, like its

(1) - Residence program *
(2) – Mobile Residence program – “ROAD”
(3) - Mobile projects
(4) - Collaboration with other organizations and festivals

Until 2005
(1) - Newspaper “Capacete Planet” (2000-2004)
(2) - Artist catalogue
(3) - Mobile office “A banca”

that aim to simulate new ways of thinking within the artistic context by spreading it outward to the many centers of the city; to the places and the experiences which we think we know, as well as to places and experiences that elude us.


* We work with several collaborations on diferent levels: El Basilisco (Argentina), Lugar a Dudas (Bolivia), French Residency Program (France), L’age D’or (France), Frame (Finland), Gasworks (London), FondsBKVB (Netherlands), Japan Foundation (Japan), Air (Belgium)



Brief history: CAPACETE entertainments initiated its activities in July 1998, under the name of Espaço P, in a residential apartment on Paissandu Street, Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro. While still at this address, its name was later changed to Espaço Purplex. In 1999, it was renamed Capacete Projects. It subsequently joined forces with AGORA until the end of 2001 and became CAPACETE entertainments. As an invited artist for the São Paulo Biennial 2002, CAPACETE entertainments presented its second concept for mobile production/office “Banca Nº 2” with two projects by Marie-Ange Guilleminot and Marssares. Between 2002 and 2005 it had its main headquarters at Darcy Ribeiro Cinema School in the center of Rio de Janeiro and for 2003 it received a major grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation - Canada. For projects in 2004 it received a major grant from the Prince Claus Foundation – Netherlands.