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Cecilia Vilela


Writings

Ayrson Heráclito: Healing Rituals
We Are Walking Birds: Venice Biennale
Sine Içli: In Full Mystery and Potency
Routes to Longing with Hsi-Nong Huang
Tomás Saraceno at Serpentine
 ArtNexus: Maxwell Alexandre
Journal of Climate Change
22 Bienal de Arte Paiz Catalogue
British Library Voices of Art
Ana Hupe’s Women of the Fourth World

Curatorial

IC – Latin America, Centre Pompidou
Land Body Ecologies Festival at Wellcome Collection
ESCALA – Essex Collection of Art from Latin America
Vandria Borari Yupirungáwa
Memory Georamas
Silent Spring
Perverse Geography / Cursed Geographies

Projects

Land Body Ecologies: Research Network
Soflty/Tenderly by Sheila Ghelani
Forest Words
Shared Principles
Tangled Tongues
Sayings, Sea Salt and Sand
Decolonial Garden
More...

About + Contact
Cecilia Vilela

Sheila Ghelani’s Softly /Tenderly


Editorial support for the publication accompanying Sheila Ghelani's newly commissioned artwork Softly/Tenderly at Fierce Festival 2024, Birmingham, UK
October 2024


Softly/Tenderly is a new participatory artwork by Sheila Ghelani exploring the complicated history of gun-making within Birmingham.

First presented at Fierce Festival in Birmingham in October 2024, it includes a live experience of making small copper objects alongside other people, in a metal workshop.

The piece is accompanied by this small publication that containing Sheila’s intentions for the work and a series of facts about the history of gun-making, collaged together with Sheila’s process notes.

“Guns are not soft and tender.”


“Implicated in the slave trade…
 Implicated in the colonisation of India by the British…
Implicated in countless other conflicts since then, some still ongoing.”
Credits:
Sheila Ghelani - Lead Artist 
Nassy Konan - Producer
Marty Langthorne - Lighting Designer, Production Management
Cecilia Vilela - Booklet Editor
John Hunter / RULER - Booklet Design
Pippa Frith - Director (Producing) at Fierce
Greg Dunn - Senior Technician at STEAMHouse (Metal-work advice)

Softly/Tenderly is supported by Arts Council England and commissioned by Fierce and Performance, Possession + Automation, a three-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

More about the artwork at www.wearefierce.org/event/softly-tenderly and about the artist at www.sheilaghelani.co.uk.

Images: bottom left image © Sheila Ghelani. Others are photographs of the publication’s hardcopy and of a metal object produced as part of Softly/Tenderly.