Taking the form of a chandelier of rounded silhouettes, Vasconcelos’s work—named after Bizet’s opera—is constructed with black velvet ribbons and ordinary colourful plastic earrings, blending operatic erudition, tragic ceremoniality, and festive vulgarity. Feminine, colourful, and seductive, empty and suspended like the tragic end foreshadowed by the black velvet, Carmen operates at the unstable intersection of highbrow and popular taste, now freed from the old constraints of class.