"Uma Terra do Futuro" celebrates scenes of intimacy, devoted kinships, and intergenerational bonds as keys to liberation and collective existence. An insightful way to experience the deeply personal and transformative stories of these artists, whose works are a testament to resilience, creativity, and the ongoing struggle for recognition and belonging, is on full display."
- Cindy Sissokho, curator, cultural producer & writer
Nil Gallery (Paris) and Asfalto (Rio de Janeiro) are pleased to present Uma Terra do Futuro from June 21, 2024, a group show showcasing the works of eight visionary Brazilian artists: Lucas Almeida, Bruno Alves, Bianca Foratori, Victor Henrique Fidelis, Laryssa Machada, Ian Nes, Ana Neves, and Raphael Oboé.
"Uma Terra Do Futuro is an exhibition in which artists are imagining futures unearthed in everyday intimate, personal, and collective tales from the margins. Whether Black, Indigenous, queer, peripheral, or working-class, they (re)define their own spaces of indigeneity in situated histories in Brazil. What does it mean to exist, create, and express from outside of the main contemporary art production centres?
The word indigenous, or indigènes, in the French language refers to: whose origins are in the country in which they live, also referring to the population living in a country before colonisation, or those issued from French colonies. A concept that has blurred the lines between cultural belonging, citizenship, and agency. Palpable and interdependent parallels can be drawn between Brazil and France's ongoing racial, socio-economic, and political debates in a most current outcry to trace and mark out a community's historical recognition, the longevity of its existence, and sustainable visibility. To exist displaced in a dislocated territory — the notion of indigeneity is the political restless search for one's place of belonging in a land affected by a colonial continuum.
Uma Terra do Futuro is a gathering of interconnected souls and histories whose artistic production resonates beyond and defies the stereotypes associated with their geographical confines. The eight artists are narrating poetics of the everyday, from their home cities, bringing new articulations of living as politicised beings. Blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction, they create and articulate new worlds, allowing us to momentarily step outside of reality and bring our attention to the symbols that make up their home, its people, and the relationships that bind and nurture them, as a core source of inspiration. It is at the hand of their creation through the media of painting, sculpture, and photography that each of them carves personal and collective spaces of liberation.
The immaterial space in between physical spaces is rendered visible in the work by Lucas Almeida. The artist brings the architecture that connects us or divides us by representing and giving space for the immaterial gaps that define comfort, intimacy, or even difference. The abstracted portraits in this large, bright coloured painting dynamically animate a deconstructed notion of taking up agency.
Ian Nes deeply honours the everyday symbols of his home city, Cabo Frio, a city north of Rio de Janeiro. Nes paints familiarity in a place of contradiction between the economy of tourism and quotidian marginality as a form of archive, visibility, and devotion to the people and the things that matter and celebrate them.
Bruno Alves' works are produced with objects that he collected in his neighbourhood, in the southeast periphery of São Paulo. These materials such as sheets and clothing, are the predominant makeup for his compositions. They highlight portraits of people from his hometown.
Raphael Oboé's ceramic sculptures bring new interpretations and readings of cultural belonging and histories. Inscribed as a practice of self-representation and a healing mechanism for Oboé, the sculptures blur and escape categories and cultural influences, depicting visions of Indigenous resistance to colonialism. Each of the work aligns with ancient and new traditions of ceramic making, as their timeframe precedes their own production. The use of soil collected around the artist's home in the peripheries of São Paulo, is the predominant material resource for the works.
Laryssa Machada's practice focuses on deconstructing colonial and stigmatised representation and knowledge about her indigenous body by using the format of the telenovelas as a new way to sequence alternative storytelling. Machada brings together portrayals and scenes of queer women's intimacy as acts of resistance.
Communicative body language and gestures, freedom of movement, and intentional presence are emphasised in the poetic works by Ana Neves, whose intergenerational portraits of herself and people from her hometown of São Vicente Férrer, compose her paintings.
Victor Henrique Fidelis merges fiction with personal, familiar, and intimate cultural narratives, aesthetically borrowing from modernist painting traditions interweaved with pop and vernacular culture. The subject's body poses are core to the painting, which draws on ideas of comfort, protection, and the affective proximity of being embraced by loved ones in order to feel safe and held.
Bianca Foratori celebrates the matriarchs in her family. Motherhood and the intimate intergenerational love that grounds her in her home in the peripheries of São Paulo are central to the work. Colourfully depicted in domestic spaces, the portraits are predominantly composed of the presence of Black women as the holders of knowledge, tenderness, and pillars of the family.
The exhibition is a celebration and call for visibility through scenes of intimacy, devoted kinships, and intergenerational affect as the keys to liberation and collective existence."
- Cindy Sissokho, curator, cultural producer & writer