This project is not backstage. It is scene. It is not making-of. It is work.
Insisting on Existing: Protocols of a Public Studio was a solo exhibition by Analize Nicolini, with a critical text by Kamilla Nunes, presented at SOMA – People & Culture in Curitiba, Brazil, in 2026. The exhibition formed part of the artistic and curatorial occupation conducted by the artist at the institution since June 2025, while establishing itself as a specific exhibition framework: a process-based exhibition in which the studio became public as a space of production, thought, archive, circulation, negotiation and presence.
The exhibition refused the separation between backstage and scene, process and product, economy and poetics. Materials in transit, completed works, experiments, records, remnants, objects for sale, protocols, documents and exhibition decisions appeared as layers of the same operation: making visible the material, symbolic, affective and institutional conditions that sustain the existence of an artist-curator.
The conceptual axis of the exhibition approached insistence as an ethical, aesthetic and political gesture. To insist on existing did not mean affirming an abstract permanence, but exposing the concrete conditions of survival, labour, displacement, precarity, care, reconstruction and continuity. The studio ceased to be a private space and began to operate as a minimal institution: a place where work, life, research, market, affect, archive and public encounter intersect.
The central nucleus of the exhibition was the full body of My Story, Let Me Tell It, a work initiated in 2024 and developed across four acts. Across these acts, the title phrase moves from the mirror to space, from space to voice, and from voice to sculptural body. The work articulates self-representation, narrative sovereignty, dissident embodiment, accessibility, regimes of visibility and the dispute over the right to narrate one’s own story.
In My Story, Let Me Tell It — Act I, 2024, the phrase is applied in adhesive vinyl onto a mirror. The surface reflects whoever stands before it, while the statement intervenes in that image. The central operation consists of affirming authorship over one’s own narrative in contexts where stories are often interpreted, corrected or appropriated by others. The mirror ceases to be merely a physical reflection and makes visible how identity is produced in the encounter between image and social gaze.
In My Story, Let Me Tell It — Act II, 2026, the phrase expands into a suspended installation composed of 53 serial plates placed at different heights. The work interrupts the average line that silently organises the exhibition gaze. There is no central axis and no neutral measure. The heights derive from real variations in stature and line of sight, turning difference into structure. Authorship ceases to be only a statement and becomes architecture.
In My Story, Let Me Tell It — Act III, 2026–, the work occupies voice through a video-performance based on the public reading of the 37 Yogyakarta Principles, presented on a vertical monitor with an applied mirror surface and audio. The phrase crosses the juridical and normative field, shifting authorship from the individual plane to the regime of rights. What had been an autobiographical affirmation becomes public enunciation: to narrate one’s own story requires moving through the law.
In My Story, Let Me Tell It — Act IV, 2026, the work returns to the body as volume, surface and inscription. A cast of the artist’s body is covered with wheat-pasted layers of overlaid images: money, phenotypic and genetic classification, alphabet, numbers and a visual reference to braille. The sculpture becomes a surface of inscription for regimes of value, classification and language. The body does not appear as transparent evidence, but as a field of overinscription, opacity, disputed legibility and narrative sovereignty.
By bringing together the four acts of My Story, Let Me Tell It, the exhibition presented a work in formal and conceptual expansion. What begins as a phrase before a reflection becomes spatial structure, public reading, juridical device, moving image and sculptural body. The work affirms that telling one’s own story is not merely speaking about oneself: it is disputing the material, visual, institutional and political conditions under which an existence may appear.
The exhibition also presented works and processes that expanded this field of insistence: Insisting on Existing, 2026, an installation composed of a modular cement column, smaller cement artefacts with embedded gloves, a punching bag and a suspended tatami; Here We Will All Lick Ourselves, 2023; Here We Are Left to Be Happy, 2022; In the Wounds I Reach, 2022; If You Need Art to Act, 2024/2026; Small Great Traumas, 2025; Annul I, II and III, 2023; Lights of Leblon, 2019; Company I and Company II, 2024; and Rhizome (or Genesis), 2016. These works articulated wound, care, residue, impact, labour, memory, landscape, colour, gesture and survival as inseparable dimensions of the artist’s practice.
During the exhibition period, Insisting on Existing: Protocols of a Public Studio hosted a public programme with Jonathas de Andrade, presented within the context of the artistic and curatorial occupation conducted by Analize Nicolini at SOMA – People & Culture. The programme included a six-hour continuous screening of Jangadeiros e Canoeiros, a film by Jonathas de Andrade, and unfolded through public conversation around work, territory, popular knowledge, permanence and contemporary South American art.
The presence of Jangadeiros e Canoeiros within the exhibition did not operate as thematic illustration, but as an intensification of the curatorial field of the show. In dialogue with an exhibition centred on permanence, process, labour, body, authorship and survival, the film expanded the discussion toward collective forms of existence linked to the sea, the São Francisco River, the transmission of knowledge, territorial resistance, popular culture and sensitive imagination.
Insisting on Existing: Protocols of a Public Studio consolidated Analize Nicolini’s practice as expanded work, continuous process and institutional platform. The exhibition proposed the public studio as a space of critical coexistence, active memory, visible economy and permanent transformation.