Prospect Magazine • One painting at a time: Flying a Kite by Djanira
Article on painting from Brasil! Brasil! at the Royal Academy of Arts, London • Online, February 2025
When Djanira’s work first entered Burlington House 80 years ago, people were dreaming of peace. The exhibition then was a symbolic gesture of solidarity, initiated by the Brazilian government to raise money in support of the Allies during the Second World War. There are so many ways in which those times sound similar to our times now, you could argue that things have not changed all that much. Be it the hope for wars ending; the state of the world requiring us to imagine—and believe in—a better future; or Brazil being forever doomed to dream of greater relevance on the global stage..... read more.
Catalogue • Flávio Cerqueira e as margens de todo um mundo
Essay commissioned for exhibition catalogue, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil • January 2025
O potencial de interlocução das esculturas d Flávio Cerqueira parece incontestável. É difícil encontrar alguém que tenha visitado o Muse de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) nos últimos ano e não se lembre da icônica escultura do menino negro virando um balde de tinta branca sobr si. Ela funciona como uma chave quase infalíve para o reconhecimento do artista quando nome e sobrenome não bastam. .... read more, in Portuguese and English.
Cover Story • Ayrson Heráclito: Healing Rituals
Essay • ArtNexus print issue nº123
Sine Içli: In Full Mystery and Potency
Writing Commissioned in light of the exhibition Sine Içli: Jittering Maps, 5 December 2024 – 18 January 2025, OG Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey
Mythological tales carry within themselves multiple stories in one. They grow their own wings, legs, arms and strands of hair that extend in multiple directions, as they are passed on, told and listened to, each time in a new context, focusing on different details, and connecting with a different human being. In this debut solo exhibition, Sine Içli delves into a mythological tale about descending into the underworld, a supernatural dimension perceived as subterranean and in many ways inferior. What this journey unveils instead are explorations of a condition of the feminine that seems timeless.... read more.
Sheila Ghelani’s Softly /Tenderly
Editorial • Publication accompanying Sheila Ghelani’s newly commissioned artwork at Fierce Festival 2024, Birmingham, UK
“Implicated in the slave trade…
Implicated in the colonisation of India by the British…
Implicated in countless other conflicts since then, some still ongoing.” read more.
Exhibition Review • We are walking birds
Brazilian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia • Arts of the Working Class
In 120 years of the Venice Biennale and the ups and downs of national representations, it is the first time that Brazil's official participation is exclusively created and curated by Indigenous artists. The pavilion has been symbolically renamed from being “Brazilian” to being “Hãhãwpuá”, stressing that Portuguese is as secondary as any national state label. Brazilian identity and the Portuguese language are, however, taken over not by one Indigenous replacement, but by many... read more.
Routes to longing with Hsi-Nong Huang
Hsi-Nong Huang: Ships Passing, 4 May–13 July 2024, London
There are some predictable associations that the combination of wood and metal may lead to: porosity and impermeability, natural and industrial. In my recent correspondence with Hsi-Nong, we spoke about family and I started to see family too in these sculptures, though not in any obvious way. I am thinking about a negotiation between tradition and movement, between openness and care (despite none of these being obvious dichotomies), and about various notions of future... read more.
Exhibition Review • Tomás Saraceno
Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life at Serpentine Gallery, London • ArtNexus print issue nº121
Interview • Moving Stories of the Land
A conversation with filmmaker Tian Tsering on his feature film Barley Fields on the Other Side of the Mountain (2017)
Tian’s striking photography journeys the viewer through the landscape gently, while telling the story of Pema, a 16-year-old Tibetan girl who, despite her inability to fully grasp the political disputes between Tibet and China, draws a path of her own in the struggle for freedom.... read more.
Vandria Borari Yupirungáwa
Artist Liaison • Vandria Borari residency and new commission for Invisible Flock exhibition This is a Forest – LEEDS 2023
A one-year long collaboration liaising with the artist, from initial workshops and consultations until securing a commission and developing a plan to produce the work in the UK, support through the residency, and exhibition installation...read more.
Land Body Ecologies
Research, Art, Environment, Human Rights
Hub resident at Wellcome Collection, Land Body Ecologies is a transdisciplinary research network employing artistic approaches, design research and storytelling to explore human experiences and relationships with the environment....continue reading.
What also defines a forest...
Research for Invisible Flock’s exhibition This is a Forest commissioned by LEEDS 2023 Year of Culture
Research Ideveloped over the course of 2023 on a range of definitions for terms that translate back to the English word forest. Definitions spanned from pragmatic understandings of what defines a forest, and specific criterias, to figurative uses of language and poetic readings. Presented as a range, they offer an insight into nuances that give away the varied perspectives from the languages and cultures that shape them..... read more.
Exhibition Review • Maxwell Alexandre
Nuevo poder: pasabilidad – Maxwell Alexandre at La Casa Encendida, Madrid • ArtNexus print issue nº120
Ana Hupe at ESCALA • Footnotes to a triangular cartography
Acquisition of artwork for the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America
In a format that alludes to school books and classic displays of ethnography museums, each of the three main panels that composes Ana Hupe’s Notas de Rodapé para uma Cartografia Triangular [Footnotes to a Triangular Cartography] presents a correspondence between three elements...continue reading.
Journal of Climate Change
Land Body Ecologies: A case study for global transdisciplinary collaboration at the intersections of environment and mental health
Co-author of article on transdisciplinarity for peer-reviewed academic journal, writing the sections on Creative Methodologies and Language...read more.
Tangled Tongues / Lenguas Enredadas
Zine collectively produced by seven authors adopting Spanglish as a medium to challenge linguistic and colonial boundaries. Developed as a result of a series of workshops with the same title carried out in 2023, initiated and run by Anahí Saravia Herrera and Nathalia Samhil Gonzalez Gutierrez. Cover design and illustrations are by Francesca Maria Asprella...continue reading.
Silent Spring at Luciana Brito Galeria
Curated by Alexia Tala, curatorial assistance by Cecilia VilelaOctober–December 2023
Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo, Brazil
Grounded in curatorial research focused on art produced by Indigenous artists from Latin America, Primavera Silenciosa [Silent Spring] proposes a coexistence with other artistic expressions deeply rooted in traditions related to their places of origin. Artists on show celebrate plurality and a relationship with nature defined by careful listening, while also holding space open for critical scrutiny.... continue reading.
Memory Georamas
Curated for SP-Arte 2021 Online Viewing Rooms, by Cecilia Vilela and Ana Roman
Commissioned by Piscina, a Brazilian platform for women artists
Georama is a hollow globe, in which the Earth's surface is represented as a concave sphere. In the 19th century, georamas were an attraction for curious onlookers who were invited to perceive this surface from a different perspective. In this selection of works, we gather poetics from artists who construct and reveal their own instruments to alter the perception of the physical world and the landscape that surrounds us: in their majority, the works deal with displacement – physical or otherwise – which entails an understanding of a temporality that goes beyond the scale of human life on the planet... continue reading.
LBE Reading Circle
London Hub at Wellcome Collection, London • June 2022 – March 2023
A reading circle for non-experts, hosted by the London-based team of Land Body Ecologies at the Hub at Wellcome Collection. A space for introductory and inclusive conversation, welcoming all levels of knowledge for exchange...read more.
LBE Shared Principles
Stemming from the first Land Body Ecologies team workshop, the Shared Principles were developed by Sheila Ghelani and Cecilia Vilela, alongside the wider LBE team through discussion and collaboration. These are seven principles that aim to anchor, guide, and inspire the working together carried out by research network Land Body Ecologies… read more.
British Library Voices of Art
Translation to Portuguese • Guy Brett: Ideas in motion by Hester Westley
Interview and tribute essay to Guy Brett... read more.
Us and them: On responses to the environment and our proximity to the other
Catalogue of the 22 Bienal de Arte Paiz, Guatemala
No one in a healthy state of mind doubts their own status as a person. But how similar to ourselves are we willing to allow the other to be? The criteria chosen to grant the status of personhood to beings other than ourselves can help reveal how a culture relates to the world around it. In Western societies, the attribution of personhood tends to bring along a set of generally agreed-on attributions of moral consideration.... continue reading.