Daqui de Onde Estou (From Where I Am): Curatorial Project / Collective Exhibition

BraSA.Art collaborates with SOMA Galeria and We Exhibit to present Daqui de Onde Estou (From Where I Am), a collective show featuring South American artists Ana Campanella (Uruguay), Analize Nicolini (Brazil), Barbara Oettinger (Chile), Soiis Rabelo (Brazil) and Guita Soifer (Brazil).  

Curated by Fernanda Andrade and Analize Nicolini, the exhibition that opened on 29 August invites the audience to share Nicolini’s process of building her artistic identity through a compelling dialogical narrative between some of her artworks and the other fellow artists from the gallery specialized in Brazilian and South American Contemporary Art.

The photographs Estudios I and Estudios II (2018), by Ana Campanella, are part of the series Nuevos Ensayos para Ecoeuritimia. The neologism combines Echo, in a reference to the nymph of Greek mythology, and Euritmia, in an allusion to the harmonious proportions of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. In her essay, the artist builds a scenic situation to connect her body to cardboard structures, proposing new ways of presenting her image by recombination and assembly. 

In the same logic of a self-portrait that does not fix the identity of the person represented, we find the photograph printed in fabric of Guita Soifer, Untitled (2020), from the series Remains and Traces. The artist proposes an anti portrait, in the refusal to show the face (greater expression of our individuality), revealing only the back. Her intention is to question the excess of images of oneself proliferating through social media. The fabric is a privileged material in the artist’s creative process, exploring its variety of meanings also in her Free Books (2012), a series that presents a book as an object to be "read'' combining all senses.

Telling a story through a sequential narrative is the same strategy we observe in Barbara Oettinger's documentary Trompeloup (2014). The artist follows the story of the immigrant Felipa Morcillo, marked by the experience of exile on two occasions. The survivor seeks to tell her story through a message in a bottle. Oettinger's documentary is, in this sense, the bottle itself, protecting and perpetuating this story until now.

In order to maintain ancestral relationships, Soiis Rabelo works with organic materials such as land, hair and water to build a beaded necklace, Origins (2022), which contains her history. The clay used by the artist is collected from her backyard to form a family jewel, totaling 40 modules that correspond to the artist’s age. The necklace is a structure without beginning, middle or end, support of circularity and the cycles of life. 

The works mentioned above accompany the most recent artistic production of Analize Nicolini, who also has the solo exhibition Nos Resta Ser Feliz (We Can Only Be Happy) on display in Brazil, at SOMA Galeria, in Curitiba (Paraná). Her work explores verbal language in its visual and sound presentation in discourses that summon the viewer to an action, always returning to the fundamental points that structure her poetics, linked to interpersonal human relations and her surroundings. 

Nicolini starts from the idea that the diffusion of art needs to be inside institutions (such as museums and galleries), but also outdoors, as in her site specific Lights of Leblon (2018 - 2019), a project in which she brought photographs taken over the course of a year in the beach to that very same site. Or in her ongoing project Ending in Venice (2019 - present) a performance consisting of the collage of posters on the streets of Venice that drew attention to the idea of respect and harmonious coexistence between people and the city. Ideas and displacements proposed, too, in the happening In The Wounds I Reach (2022), in which the artist, wearing a red catsuit, facekini and cape made of recyclable polyamide with orifices and wounds, licked her wounds in a public square. 

In the sound installation Swearing (2022) the artist treats swearing as a medium, capturing sounds of everyday life and letting words emerge from her subconscious to orality, culminating in an indignant, choleric and imperative state that impels to reflect on the urgency of new actions. The neon installed in the exhibition Here We Can Only Be Happy (2022), draws attention to the need for care practices with themselves and others and to the pursuit of happiness. For a New World Order (2022), the coin-shaped sculpture made of recycled silver, resignifies the object, the logic of value and, as in a game of heads or tails, presents us with the urgency of more sustainable and kind economic practices with people and the planet.

Daqui de Onde Estou (From Where I Am) gathers a carefully constructed array of multimedia artworks that allow Nicolini to fulfill a desire born during an artistic residency at La Serenissima in 2021 - that of revealing herself, sharing her starting point, the baggage accumulated along the way and the place she has reached so far, by proposing to the visitor to look at the world side by side, from where she is.

Hosted by We Exhibit, the show continues till 14 October at the headquarters of the art services company in Santa Croce.