Portugal highlights five of its artists who are also participating in the 32nd Biennial of São Paulo with a project developed by the consulate general of Portugal in São Paulo along with the curator Isabella Lenzi, featuring Lourdes Castro and Carla Filipe’s artist’s books, film screenings by Grada Kilomba and Gabriel Abrantes, and a performance by Priscila Fernandes.
Grada Kilomba
In all his films, Gabriel Abrantes unsettles and distorts certainties and utopias. The contradiction of stereotypes and ambiguity are forms found by the artist to challenge established truths and myths. The artist is presenting a total of eleven films in short sessions until the end of the show.
Grada Kilomba is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Her work, a staged-reading film of her book “Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism,” exposes issues of gender, race, violence and trauma. It offers a strong and moving insight into the experience of alienation, transformation and empowerment through its characters.
In a critique of the workaholic and exclusionary society we live in, Priscila Fernandes’ perfomance “Jardim da Gozolândia” (Garden of pleasures), proposes a refusal to work and an ode to leisure and laziness. The artist recaptured medieval myths of a land with no work, plenty of food, eternal youth, desires and vices. And it suggest that to re-imagine and re-create this place might be another way to perceive a different future.
The artist books of Lourdes de Castro reveal the various materials, techniques and themes in the work of the ironic, poetic and extremely critical artist. She transforms the books into a space of experimentation, a place of exercise and reflection, completely attached to her personal life.
Visual poems typed in a typewriter create a debate on work and repetition. Carla Filipe’s artist book addresses the political and social changes experienced in Europe in recent years. The short and rhythmical sentences are mixed with images of hands-on work activities.
The title of the exhibition was extracted from Carla Filipe’s visual poem, “The future will be a replica,” which talks about a matter of the present moment in relation to the future. It may also speak to a possibility to intervene in what is about to come, considering the multiple possibilities of thoughts of what is built now can/cannot/should/should not/wasn’t supposed to be destroyed.
The critical and ironic eye of the artists towards the present time and its unfolding form a courageous interpretative speech about transformation. This exhibition would not have been possible if we weren’t living in a new, fruitful and promising time in the relationship between Brazil and Portugal. Through its art, the exhibition gives dimension to the dialogue as a source of rediscovery between the two countries.
“O futuro será uma réplica”
Consulate of Portugal
Jardim América: r. Canadá, 324
Through December 11
Natália Coelho, born and raised in São Paulo, is both a multi-disciplinary art director and an art lover. She attended three years of Fine Art school at Centro Universitário Belas Artes, but ended up transferring and graduating in Digital/Multimedia Design at Istituto Europeo di Design. She works at a publishing house as a creative in the marketing and events department. Her passion for art and technology has always been so strong that she decided to dedicate herself to both fields, both as a curious visitor on the alternative art scene in São Paulo and as an experimental creative in daily design projects.
Contact: [email protected], cargocollective.com/nataliacoelho
