On occasion of Though it's dark, still I sing, the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, deposition, a collaboration between artists Daniel de Paula, Marissa Lee Benedict, and David Rueter, is installed at Oscar Niemeyer’s Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion. The work centers around the displacement, exhibition, and reprogramming a large-scale corn trading pit, salvaged from the grain room of the Chicago Board of Trade. Reinstalled at the heart of the modernist 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—is repurposed to host the exhibition’s public program. Directed by contractual frameworks established by the artists, the work deposes the complex network of relations manifested in the floor, from material and immaterial transactions that externalize the weight of commodity production and circulation through speculation, to the perpetuating violent power-dynamics that shape global-space.

Marissa Lee Benedict is a visual artist, writer, and researcher. Considering subjects that range from technologies of water management to the laying of fiber optic cable, her work draws on traditions of American land art to investigate the architectures and conditions of global space. She has a master’s in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and she was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. Benedict has exhibited at venues such as The Arts Club of Chicago; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; 68 Projects in Berlin; Contemporary Art Brussels; and the Transit Screening Lounge for The US Pavilion as part of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennial (in collaboration with David Rueter). She has participated in numerous national and international residencies, including Artport Tel Aviv, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) Desert Research Center, and the Van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL).

Daniel de Paula is a Brazilian visual artist and researcher working between São Paulo and Amsterdam. His work reflects on historical objects, forms, and materials that reveal geographical space as the reproduction of dynamics of power. de Paula was awarded the Mondriaan Funds Proven Talent Award in 2020. He holds a bachelor’s in fine arts from Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, and studied in the Human Geography masters program at the University of São Paulo. He has exhibited widely including institutions such as: The Arts Club of Chicago; Kunsthal, Gent; Museu de Arte Moderna (MASP), São Paulo; Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea (PAC), Milan; and Museu de Arte Contemporânea (MAC), São Paulo. He was a 2018-19 artist-in-residence at the Jan Van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL). His work is represented by Galeria Jaqueline Martins and Francesca Minini Gallery. He has been reviewed in Artforum, Flash Art, Mousse Magazine, Folha de São Paulo, and Het Parool.

David Rueter is a visual artist, programmer, and an assistant professor in art and technology at the University of Oregon. Employing video, custom electronics, software, cartography, drawing, and performance, Rueter's experiments and interventions summon the contingency of established technical regimes and their philosophical counterparts, tracing suppressed narratives and opening cracks for radical imagination. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s graduate program in art and technology studies, Rueter has exhibited at venues such as the The Arts Club of Chicago, 68 Projects in Berlin; Contemporary Art Brussels; the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL); and the Transit Screening Lounge in The US Pavilion as part of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennial (in collaboration with Marissa Lee Benedict).