Rochelle Costi | A casa como laboratório

Rochelle Costi’s work opens us to the poetry of the banal and the everyday – that which dazzles our existence. She was never interested in grand events, but in what makes up the real fabric of our lives: the transformative beauty of small, everyday things. In this sense, Rochelle Costi was an artist of the infraordinary. Throughout her career, she avoided spectacular themes and grandiose settings, choosing instead to explore the ordinary – what our eyes always see but don’t always perceive: the simplicity of rooms, furniture, wardrobes, common objects, forgotten corners, small insects, walls, patterns, textures, cheap goods, and even market stalls. For curator Alexia Tala, “the exhibition A casa como laboratório should not be viewed merely as a tribute to an exceptional artist, but as an invitation to inhabit the world with a different intensity – the same intensity with which Rochelle inhabited this world.”

The artist’s own home refl ected the essence of her gaze – one that assimilated everything from the inside out. Her house, in this sense, became a privileged setting – not merely a refuge, but a laboratory of discovery and intimate geography, where affections, tensions, and memories took shape. Like a true cabinet of curiosities, the exhibition A casa como laboratório transforms the pavilion space at Luciana Brito Galeria into a reimagining of the artist’s own home, presenting some of her most emblematic works.