38th Panorama of Brazilian Art: A thousand degrees

Born in Serra dos Carajás (PA), Germano Dushá He is a curator, writer, critic and cultural agent. Graduated in Law (FGV-SP) and postgraduate in Art: Criticism and Curation (PUC-SP), he lives and works in São Paulo. His research brings together aesthetics, criticism and esoteric traditions, and his practice takes multiple forms — in curatorial, literary and hypermedia experiments — to investigate social imaginaries, and the energy linked to radical subjective experiences and processes of transmutation. Throughout his career, he has collaborated with institutions, galleries and publications in different countries. Among the most recent exhibitions he curated are Frontal Sphinx, from Galeria Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo) and Bends but does not break, by Almeida & Dale (São Paulo), both from 2023; Universal Heat, at Pace Gallery (Hamptons) and Every other week, from Casa Zalszupin (São Paulo) in 2022; It is The Unstable Hour, at Bruno Múrias (Lisbon), in 2019. He is currently coordinator of Fora, a multidisciplinary organization founded in 2018 that works with cultural projects and institutional strategies.

Thiago de Paula Souza He is a healer and educator. His research permeates the desire to expand and re-elaborate the exhibition format, and the power of contemporary art and education in rethinking the past and producing new ethical codes. Thiago's practice crosses different configurations of knowledge and power, articulating the construction of infrastructures to imagine a world in which violence is no longer its foundation. He has a degree in Social Sciences from Unesp and a PhD from HDK-Valand at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Among the institutional projects in which he has worked are: While We Are Embattled (2022), from Para Site, in Hong Kong, where he was co-curator; It is Acts of revolt, at MAM Rio; was part of the curatorial teams for the 3rd edition of Frestas — Arts Triennial (2020 – 2021), organized by Sesc São Paulo; We don't need another hero — 10th Berlin Biennale (2018); and was curatorial consultant for the 58th Carnegie International (2012/2022). Between 2022 and 2023 he was co-curator of the Nomadic Program at the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in the Netherlands. He is currently a member of the curatorial committee of the Ners Foundation. His most recent exhibition was Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950-1970.

Ariana Nuala was born in Recife (PE), where he lives and works. She is an educator, researcher and curator who engages with artistic collectives to discuss power dynamics, impermanence and diaspora. She combines strategies that emerge from the body for her exercise in writing, shaping her curatorial practice in a poetic way. She has a Bachelor's degree. in Visual Arts from UFPE and is currently a master's student in Art History at UFPB, with academic experiences at UNAM and CLACSO. She holds the position of Education and Research Manager at Oficina Francisco Brennand, an institution where she was previously a curator, and was also Education Coordinator at the Murillo La Greca Museum (2018-2020). She curated the exhibition Invention of Kingdoms together with Marcelo Campos at Oficina Francisco Brennand. Collaborated with galleries such as Marco Zero (PE) in exhibitions The Windows of Bajado. from Bajado, and Party for the Hunter, by Gilvan Samico; with Verve at the exhibition turncoat, by Fefa Lins (SP); with Almeida e Dale (SP) in the collective exhibition Bends but does not break, in collaboration with Germano Dushá and Rafael RG; with Cavalo at the exhibition Living Labyrinths, by Ana Clara Tito (RJ); with Nara Roesler (SP) at the exhibition Infinite others, by José Patrício, among other collaborations, such as curating the exhibition In addition. To whom. Here. by Abiniel João Nascimento at the Center d'Art Contemporain Paradise (France) and curated the collective exhibition Contouring strategies  which circulated in several SESC PE units. She was also the advisor for the PEMBA residency in the DOS BRASIS project and collaborates on artistic juries and in the creation of residencies for arts agents.

Adriano Amaral's work involves an examination of the nature of things in the world; the materiality and substance of what is around us as well as its value and power of transformation over time. His practice starts from an intuitive and plural approach, and results in complex immersive installations that are always sensitive to the context in which they are inserted.

After completing his master's degree at the Royal College of Art in London in 2014, Adriano completed a two-year artistic residency at De Atelier in Amsterdam and subsequently received the Mondrian Fonds Work Contribution Proven Talent in 2017. His recent institutional exhibitions include solo projects at Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, Netherlands), Vleeshal Zusterstraat (Middelburg, Netherlands) and Bielefelder Kunstverein (Bielefeld, Germany).

Group exhibitions include projects at Mudam (Luxembourg), Sixty Eight Art Institute (Copenhagen), Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Beelden Aan Zee (The Hague, Netherlands).

Photo: Alexandre Virgilio

Advânio Lessa was born and still lives today in Lavras Novas, district of Ouro Preto (MG). Both his land of origin, marked by his quilombola heritage, and his parents' trades (driver and basket maker), are fundamental parts of the universe that irrigates his poetics. Creating large-scale sculptures from wooden trunks of dead trees, roots and braided vines, the artist links his knowledge of basketry and carpentry with the wood and fibers found in the forests of the Ouro Preto region: Cipó Alho, Cipó São João, Candeia, Jacarandá, Folha Miúda and Rosemary. It is in close dialogue with this repertoire that Lessa, who is also a farmer, performs his pieces. In this sense, it does not seem misleading to us to say that nature here is a kind of co-author of his works.

The artist's production reaches the world equipped, at the same time, with an intense formal eloquence and a relevant discursive connotation. His sculptures, whose scales are close to that of the human body, attest to a reciprocal relationship between us and everything that is alive around us. In this sense, an important current trend resonates: in place of epistemologies dear to a Western way of conceiving the world, for which we humans are always in a superior position, cosmologies come into play where we witness a non-hierarchical relationship between all living beings.

Photo: Heber Bezerra – makeplug

Ana Clara Tito develops her artistic practice based on the body, its physical and mental states, and the relationships we establish with the spaces we build and inhabit. In objects, photographs, performances and installations, her work integrates elements that refer to architecture and archaeology with intimate items. Materials such as concrete debris, clay shards and oxidized metals are used in the development of a universe that reflects on limits, both carnal and of parity, proposing exercises of permission.

In 2023, Tito presented solo exhibitions at the Cavalo gallery in Rio de Janeiro and at Auroras in São Paulo. In 2021, he presented the solo exhibition “O que se degrada segue em frente” at MAM Rio. He was part of group exhibitions at the Rio Art Museum, Instituto Moreira Salles, Valongo International Image Festival, Galpão Bela Maré, among others. In recent years, he has participated in the FAAP (2023), Pivô (2022) and MAM Rio – Capacete (2020) residencies. He graduated in industrial design from Esdi-UERJ and has a master's degree in visual arts from PPGArtes UERJ. He participates in the 38th Panorama of Brazilian Art and is a co-founder and member of Nacional Trovoa.

Artist, choreographer and researcher. Graduated in Arts from Universidade Federal Fluminense and Master in Arts (Contemporary Arts Studies) from the same institution. He was awarded the ImPulsTanz – Young Choreographers Award 2022 and the Artlink Award – 100 artists from around the world, 2022. He participated as one of the artists in the 35th São Paulo Biennial. He choreographed the work “Variação” for the São Paulo City Ballet. Since 2011, he has presented his work in national and international art galleries and festivals, including the University of Pennsylvania (USA), My Wild Flag (Stockholm), Pivô (São Paulo), Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon), Rua das Gaivotas 6 (Porto), Sesc Dance Biennial, MITsp – São Paulo International Theater Festival, Les Urbaines Festival (Switzerland), Arsenic – Center for Contemporary Performing Art (Switzerland), Galeria Vermelho (São Paulo), Valongo International Festival of Imagem (São Paulo), Rio de Janeiro Museum of Art (Rio de Janeiro), Programa Rumos Itaú Cultural 2021, Festival Program Commun 2024, Arsenic (Switzerland), Sâlmon Festival d'arts vives de (Barcelona), Zodiak — Center for New Dance (Finland), Panorama Festival (Rio de Janeiro), 5th Itaú Cultural Dance Exhibition (São Paulo), Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, Toronto (Canada), Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo) and residency at ImPulsTanz 2022 [8 : tension] Young Choreographers Series (Austria), La Becque (Switzerland), Tanzhaus NRW (Germany), Pivô Art Research Program, MAM Rio Arts Research Residency Program and Escola Livre de Artes – ELÃ, among others . He directed the film “Delirar o racial” in partnership with the artist Wallace Ferreira, a work commissioned by the Pivô Satélite Program in 2021. Based on body research, his practice faces the constant challenge of positioning choreography and raciality to respond to the conditions surrounding -epistemological aspects of modern thought. Its main project consists of analyzing the circumstances in which violence occurs.

Dona Romana Pereira da Silva is a mystic and spiritual leader. He lives 3 km from the urban area of ​​the city, a place called Centro Bom Jesus de Nazaré, on the Jacuba site. Semi-literate, she learned the basics of reading and writing at home. She says she hears the voices of three curators who have guided her in what to say or do for more than 35 years. Romana lives on a farm, where she built sculptures made of tapiocanga stone and cement in the shape of humans and animals, birds, star and geometric figures, with several antennas intertwined by wires. Also stored are handwritten notebooks, drawings on cardboard, books, objects, clothes, food, grains and lots of water, which the mystic says will one day be used by people who will arrive in need in the region. In 2007, Romana was honored by the municipal government with the diploma and the “Pio Pinto de Cerqueira” medal of honor. With several daily activities, Romana develops beyond her spiritual/mystical side, revealing herself to be a great artist with her works.

Master in Visual Arts at the USP School of Communication and Arts. He works with a variety of media, interested in the border between the natural and the built, with special attention to the forest and the South American continent. He has been a collaborator for 8 years in the territory of BR 319 in Amazonas. Main exhibitions are the solo exhibitions Cobra Grande (Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2022), Terra de Nobody (Galeria Leme, 2020), Cobra Criada, (Galeria Athena, 2019), Próprio Impróprio (Galeria Leme, 2016), Fogo na Babilônia (Pivô, 2015), the collectives Obscura Luz, curated by Kiki Mazuchelli, Ecologias Radicales, BIENALSUR, With the air too heavy to breathe, curated by Lisette Lagnado, Caixa Preta (Fundação Iberê Camargo) curated by Fernanda Brenner, Eduardo Sterzi and Verônica Stigger, Brandt's Photo and Video Biennial (Denmark, 2016), Si no todos las armas, los cañones – Matadero Madrid, Until Aqui Tudo Bem (White Cube São Paulo). Residencies and scholarships: Despacio, Costa Rica (2018), PIMASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2016/17), Intervalo Escola, Amazonas (2017), KIOSKO, Bolivia (2015); El Ranchito – Matadero, Madrid (2014), 5th edition of Bolsa Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2013/14), Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas, Buenos Aires (2013), Ateliê Aberto #6, Casa Tomada (2012) and Red Bull House of Art, SP (2011).

Gabriel Massan is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Berlin. Combining “storytelling” and “worldbuilding”, the cosmos that Massan creates simulate and narrate situations of inequality.

Framed by a conceptual practice he calls fictional archeology and working with 3D animation, digital sculpture, games, sound and interactive installations, the artist challenges distorted conceptions of the so-called Third World while investigating possibilities of subversive otherness. Selected residencies and awards include the Arts Explora Program supported by Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris (2023), Dazed 100 (2022), Circa x Dazed (2021), Instituto Moreira Salles (2020) and ETOPIA – Center for Art & Technology ( 2019). He has participated in significant commissions with Serpentine Arts Technologies (2022-3), Bangkok Biennale (2022), The Photographers; Gallery (2022) and the X Museum (2022). Massan has presented talks and talks at institutions such as La Biennale di Venezia, Art Basel Miami, DLD Conference, University College London, Royal College Of Arts and Institut Français. His recent exhibitions include:
“WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age” (Julia Stoschek Collection, 2022; Center Pompidou-Metz, 2023); Canon (Frieze No.9 Cork Street, 2022) and Possible Agreements; (Mendes Wood DM, 2022). In 2023, Gabriel presented his first solo exhibitions, starting with the critically acclaimed multi-part project Third World: The Bottom Dimension; at the Serpentine Galleries, followed by; Continuity Flaws on Outernet London.

When he scribbled his drawings on cloth, sheets or napkins, whose engravings would be covered with paint by his mother, Dona Gercina Braga Campos, now deceased, a skilled seamstress and embroiderer, today's artist Ivan Campos Moreira, aged 62, had no idea who began his main profession and activity there as a distinguished artist and whose paintings currently adorn museums and collections around the world. He paints the nature and exuberance of the Amazon rainforest in great detail. His paintings are so detailed that some engravings, of animals and insects, can only be admired using magnifying glasses.

Juno B. Born in Ceará, currently lives in São Paulo. Non-binary transdisciplinary artist, incorporates video, photography, 3D, text and sculpture into immersive installations. In their work they propose experiments, fables and dialogues based on non-hegemonic discourses and hypotheses of mutual ways of being in the world. His practice moves between gender disobedience, transspecific mutations, toxic conflicts, climate migrations and adaptive landscapes; tensioning the visible notions of the human and the limits between aesthetics, ethics and politics. Participated in the Artistic Residencies: Hidden Crossings – Ballast in Campo Brazil-Bolivia (2017) / Materia Gris – La Paz, Bolivia (2017) / Litigation Zone – Ceará and Piauí, Brazil (2020), Belluard Bollwerk, Friboug, Switzerland and Program Pivô Pesquisa, São Paulo, Brazil (2021). Recently collaborated on projects: Itamar Assumpção Museum, Lastro platform.

Jonas Van He is a transnortheastern artist and cook. His practice is inscribed between the disobedience of gender, language and monstrous natures, through sound-video, ephemeral installations and text. His work proposes deeply intimate fictional narratives, linguistic and temporal fractures from an anti-colonial perspective. He has been in residence in Mexico, Bolivia, Portugal, Spain, Brazil and Switzerland. Master's student in visual arts – CCC (studies in Criticism, Curation and Cybernetics) at HEAD, Geneva, Switzerland.

Labô Young is an artist from Pará born in Icoaraci, a district of the city of Belém, who develops, within national and international visual arts/fashion, work that echoes his roots in the Brazilian Amazon. An intimate research that involves your experiences of living and everyday life in Icoaraci. His creations are driven by stories of Amazonian enchantment, the river and the organic materials that have inspired him since childhood, materials used to produce the pieces he builds to this day, thus understanding the importance of passing on ancestral knowledge and techniques in his culture. and family.

Rafael RG (1986) Lives and works between Guarulhos (SP), São Luís do Maranhão (MA) and Recife (PE). He has a degree in Visual Arts from Belas Artes de São Paulo. (PROUNI Scholarship – 2010). He participated in exhibitions and festivals in cities in Brazil and other countries. He received, among other awards, the 1st Foco ArtRio Prize, the Honor Award for Art and Heritage Merit/IPHAN, the Acquisition Prize from Centro Cultural São Paulo, Iberê Camargo Scholarship for residency at the Künstlerhaus Bremen (Germany), Pampulha Scholarship for residency at the Museum de Arte da Pampulha (MG), among his recent residencies are Gasworks in London (2018), Black Rock Senegal in Dakar (2019), Triangle France – Astérides in Marseile (2020) and YBYTU (2021) and FAAP artistic residency (2022) both in São Paulo, The 55 project, Miami (2022) and Palais do Tokyo in Paris (2023).

In his artistic practice, RG usually uses two sources to construct his works: one documentary and the other affective, generally through the use of documents collected from institutional or personal archives associated with narratives that may involve him or an alter ego. The interaction between these territorialities results in works that almost always come close to fiction, or a tense notion of fictionality. Affective and sexual relationships and their political implications, and issues of racial identity have been his current areas of interest. This research generally unfolds into workshops, installations, performative texts, publications and objects.

Rafaela Kennedy (Manaus, AM, 1994) is an Amazonian visual artist known for her approach to photography. Her poetic process flourishes in the attentive observation of her peers and in the transvestite ancestries that preceded her. Her photography invites immersion, where body, clothing and surroundings intertwine, cultivating a non-normative and abundant life. At the head of Ateliê TRANSmoras, she promotes the autonomy of trans artists and leaders in Brazil. The association was founded at Unicamp and today also has a physical location at Centro Cultural São Paulo. In 2022, Rafaela was awarded the “Women's in Residency Award” at the Zona Maco art fair and participated in an artistic residency at Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido, state of Oaxaca, Mexico. In 2023, she joined British magazine Dazed's global list as one of the 100 creative voices driving youth culture for the next generation.

Lucas Arruda's work obstinately focuses on a well-defined theme in the canon of art history to address complex contemporary mental states. His research is fundamentally developed around the manifestation of landscape, thinking about and experimenting with our ability to live through the mediation of light and gaze.

Through a powerful and cohesive series of oil paintings, as well as slide projections and light installations, his landscapes exist at the point of tension between abstraction and figuration, between apparition and emptiness. With each vision, experiences are demarcated in a process of construction and reconstruction of memory, as if the formulation of color fields groped the immaterial body of temporal passages and experienced sensations.

Moving us above and below horizon lines, the artist puts us in front of atmospheres charged with questions as visual as they are metaphysical. Between heaven and earth, the ethereal and the solid, imagination and the earthly, meditative contemplation finds its routine when following an endless, and not always clear, cycle of sublimation and deposition of matter.

Graduated from the UFMG School of Architecture and studying for a master's degree at FAUUSP, he works as a visual artist producing at the intersection between art, architecture and design. In his research, he explores possible distortions and aesthetic displacements of the codes of these fields from a black and peripheral perspective and the exercise of remixing in different languages.

The result of this investigation is | re-lab.xyz | digital and virtual shelter for experiments around this process. During his career, he participated in the 8th Bolsa Pampulha artistic residency, was awarded the 4th Décio Noviello Visual Arts Prize and participated in a series of group exhibitions in recent years. Currently, experiments have been developed between three-dimensional objects and digital media on different scales.

Daughter of a shoemaker and a washerwoman, she was born in Araçuaí, where she still lives today. She developed her interest in ceramics and various crafts since she was a child, watching her mother, Odília Borges Nogueira, build nativity scenes out of raw clay. Later, she learned from her neighbor, known as Joana Poteira, techniques for extracting and cooking clay.

He held his first exhibition in 1975 at Sesc Pompeia, in São Paulo and, since then, he has exhibited in several national and international institutions in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, France and the United States. His work is characterized by the integration of a graphic language resulting from natural pigments with the countryside landscape. Since the 1990s, he has dedicated himself to the body of work known as Bichos do Sertão, paintings of imaginary animals that make up a vast formal bestiary.

In her more than 40 years as an artist, Maria Lira also positions herself as a researcher, activist and promoter of artists and artisans from the Jequitinhonha Valley, on which she developed extensive work in collaboration with Frei Xico, a Dutch friar based in Brazil. With him, she was also at the head of the Coral Trovadores do Vale, whose repertoire was made up of the region's songbook. In 2010, they founded the Araçuaí Museum, created with the aim of housing a collection of objects and documents that record the religiosity, uses, customs and crafts that make up the history of Araçuaí.

His work was studied by researcher Lélia Coelho Frota, one of the main authorities on Brazilian popular art and, in 2007, his career was honored in a play named after him directed by João das Neves. She also held exhibitions at the Popular Artist Room Program and at the Casa do Pontal Museum, in Rio de Janeiro, and at the Popular Art Center, in Belo Horizonte. In 2021, she held the exhibition Maria Lira Marques: Recent works at Bergamin & Gomide, now Gomide & Co.

Marina Woisky uses images of decorative objects and ornaments with organic shapes as the substrate for her production. Distorted, displaced and compressed by successive material transpositions and the passage of time, such images are transformed by the artist into extraordinary and chimerical animals and landscapes, presented in works that are positioned on the threshold between two- and three-dimensionality. With this, the artist addresses representation, a fundamental problem of the arts and notions of taste, as well as the image status itself in contemporary society.

Melissa Martins has her eyes trained on what happens in groups, what happens around her, attentive to cultural expression, attentive to the aesthetic and recreational movements of Morro do Dendê, in Rio de Janeiro. MELISSA looks at the construction of identity and understands it there. What is peripheral for some is central for her.

Aguinaldo da Silva, known artistically as MESTRE NADO, was born in Olinda, Pernambuco, on May 08, 1945. From an early age his life was linked to clay, today he has dedicated more than 60 years to creating with this material. Mestre Nado, student and teacher in his profession, passes on the lesson assimilated over time as a life mission. At the age of ten, he was already working in a pottery factory, producing “quartinhas” (vases that kept water cool). Until the age of 17, he held many jobs: collector, clay beater, polisher of pieces and potter, an activity he began in the 60s. The decline in the use of small rooms indicated the time to use creativity to seek new knowledge and survive .

His creative ability with clay led him to cross paths with Thiago Amorim and Francisco Brennand, two renowned potters from Pernambuco, with whom he perfected the technique of firing at high temperatures and creating sculptures. Through years of study and creative experimentation, Mestre Nado discovered and developed sculptures that produced sounds when blown. He deepened research into musical techniques that took his work to other creative levels, developing harmonic wind instruments known as ocarinas and various percussion instruments. He became a musician and revealed himself as a composer, using the instruments he created as his artistic identity. His work gained notoriety and recognition beyond Pernambuco, even performing with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and recording his first CD in 2014, entitled The Sound of Clay. He had his instruments used in shows by renowned artists such as Naná Vasconcelos, Milton Nascimento, Ney Matogrosso, among others.

Taking regional rhythms and icons of our culture as his main inspiration, Mestre Nado manages to extract music, beauty and lightness using the four basic elements of nature: earth, fire, water and air. His three sons and one daughter work with him and form a musical group called The Sound of Clay, who performs in shows and ceramics and music workshops, using wind and percussion instruments made by him. Through his workshops to pass on his knowledge, Mestre Nado created the Mestre Nado Orchestra, made up of apprentices. These workshops have gained notoriety in the community where they live and surrounding areas for attracting the interest of children and adolescents in making instruments and creating music, in addition to serving as social technology for the work of the Olinda Social Assistance Reference Centers (CRAS) in project aimed at elderly people participating in the Coexistence and Strengthening of Bonds Service (SCFV), becoming an important social and cultural work. Due to the enormous relevance of his life and work, he received the title of Living Heritage of Pernambuco, in addition to the Notory Knowledge in Popular Culture. Currently, Mestre Nado and his family are dedicated to strengthening the INSTITUTO MESTRE NADO, created to preserve his legacy and offer workshops, show classes, soirées and concerts by the Mestre Nado Orchestra and where his production is also sold. The Institute also hosts cultural actions to promote other artists such as artisans and musicians, as well as other cultural languages, and provide the public with a showcase of the rich cultural diversity that identifies us as a people.

Noara Quintana is a visual artist, lives and works between Florianópolis, SC, and Los Angeles, USA. Her research focuses on the materiality of everyday objects and the indices of histories of the Global South they carry. Through installations and sculptures, her work points to economic exchanges, architectural forms and narratives contrary to the legacy of colonial imagery. 

He participated in several exhibitions and residencies, being in 2023 resident artist at the Delfina Foundation at the Inclusartiz Institute, London, UK, “Lauréate 2020” at the Institut Français at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, FR, and resident at Pivô Arte Pesquisa, São Paulo, SP, in 2021. And in recent years it has been part of exhibitions such as: Frestas – SESC Arts Triennial “The river is a snake”, Sorocaba, SP (2021); “For The Phoenix To Find Its Form In Us”, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, DE (2021); “Cultivo”, Galeria Marli Matsumoto, São Paulo, SP (2022); “From underwater mountains fire makes islands”, KADIST and PIVÔ, São Paulo, SP (2022); “The Children Have to Hear Another Story – Alanis Obomsawin”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, DE (2022), “Pays rêvé, pays reverse”, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, FR (2023), “ Contra-Flecha: Arches but does not break”, Galeria Almeida & Dale, São Paulo (2023), “No Song Unsung” Brea Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2023), and “Bubuia”, Bienal das Amazônias, Belém, PA (2023). She recently presented the solo exhibition “Futuro Fóssil” at the Lanterna Mágica space at Projeto Vênus, in São Paulo.

Paulo Nimer Pjota's work develops from the nature of collectively originated phenomena. His research and practice focus on an in-depth study of a type of popular iconography that can only develop through complex processes operated by countless hands. We can then think of its production as the representation of a plural and agitated dialogue, whose understandings are always changing, traveling through multiple streams of consciousness.

The artist usually uses large canvases, bags and metal sheets as support. Most of these materials are found in waste deposits and then undergo negotiation and displacement processes. The chosen pieces, naturally, arrive with inscriptions from other times and uses, in a way that creates a first terrain — graphic and spiritual — for what will take shape on these surfaces. From then on, he creates global fables in the tension between the freedom of random choice and the precision of a meticulous composition, combining representations in a constellation of suspended bodies. This is when art history goes hand in hand with mass culture; universal canons with everyday banalities; universal symbols with regional themes.

His interest is, above all, in the mechanisms and processes that produce, edit and disseminate human manifestations in an age of internet and ultra-communication. Through rhythm, rhyme and repetition, images emerge that index the common perceptions of a globalized planet and that, consequently, expose its deep inequalities. In effect, it becomes possible to question the way we formulate information and distribute our affections, reconfiguring our sensibilities towards what surrounds us and promoting previously unthinkable possibilities for social interaction.

Paulo Pires de Oliveira was born in Poxoréo, Mato Grosso, Brazil, 1972. A sculptor, draftsman and painter, he has lived in Rondonópolis, also in Mato Grosso, since 1990. From a humble family, the sculptor, at the age of eight, began in a playful way and self-taught how to make wooden toys, and at the age of 14 he started carving and selling small wooden pieces. “I lived in Rondônia in the Rolim de Moura region from 08 to 17 years old, it was nine years and as a child I started carving in wood”.

Paulo Pires produces works using sandstone stones collected in the valleys of the municipalities of Rondonópolis, Pedra Preta and the region, from where he brings the very hard ironstone. The colors of the sandstone vary between reddish brown, yellowish-red and white, with the ironstone being darker. He developed his own technique, in which the sandstone is carved to the millimeter.

Throughout his career, Paulo Pires has exhibited his works individually in thematic series: Desires, Soul, Age, Love and Stone Society. These are dense works, full of movement and volumes of rounded shapes that reveal baroque sensations. Figures that curl around each other, erotic, evocative, small fragments of temples that remind us of archaic ancestral memory.

“I consider it a necessity to have arrived at Pedra. It turns out that in Mato Grosso many sculptors work with wood and I was finding myself very repetitive and I said to myself: I have to get out of this, I need to create other things. As I really like writing, I went for a walk in the woods and while I was walking I found a beautiful waterfall that is close to Cuiabá in the District of Nossa Senhora Guia and so I decided that there would be a great stronghold for my writing and there are a lot of rocks there and I started having contact with beautiful stones and I started sculpting, I spent a year sculpting.”

Rebeca Carapiá, visual artist, master's student at the Federal University of Bahia, was born in Cidade Baixa, in Salvador. The artist is interested in the relationships produced between language, conflict, the body and territory, where she creates and organizes a set of practices and reflections through different platforms of exhibition, training and artistic experimentation. Through sculptures, covers on canvas, drawings, installations, engravings, texts and objects, his research seeks to create a cosmology around the conflicts of language and body norms, in addition to expanding a geopolitical debate that involves memory, environmental racism, economics of precariousness, ancestral technologies, sexual and gender dissent and the power relations between discourse and words.

Questioning how to talk about difference without explaining it and performing the deconstruction of the geographies of the feminine, in 2020 she opened her notebooks in her first solo exhibition,”How to put air in words”, which took place at Galeria Leme, in São Paulo. The artist, who works with everyday writing as a creative practice, had her texts published in 2022 by the French publisher Brook in “Textes à lire à voix haute” and in 2023 the artist book “Two months of permanence” organized by the Ybytu residency in São Paulo. Carapiá also coordinates the independent space and studio Irê Arte, praia e Pesquisa, where he welcomes artists with different interests, focused on the development of practices, research and training processes in contemporary art.

Photo: Adriano Machado

Solange Pessoa is from Minas Gerais, a high place in the colonial baroque that is now an industrial force 'thanks' to its iron extraction activities. The natural world, a central part of her prolific work, is found both in the themes represented and in the creative process, especially with materials found on her family's farm. Organic matter (earth, moss, leather, wax, feathers, hair, blood, fat…) becomes a medium whose natural evolution transforms the works they compose – full of life, they grow, and sometimes fall, dying at the rhythm of the human animal and plant kingdoms.

His work suggests a temporal collapse, between the present and a distant past, with in common the release of primordial energies. For Solange Pessoa, each material phenomenon has a form of agency, in an animistic reading of the world. His soapstone sculptures evoke ancestral forms (spirals, fossils) or corporeal interiors (uteruses, innards). They communicate with the monumental installation Catedral (1990-2003). Suspended and anchored to the ground, it evokes ghostly horses, distant memories of colonization.

The GURILOUKO Gorillas group emerged from the initiative of a group of friends from a local sub-neighborhood called Bairro Iracema located in the Campo Grande Zona Oeste neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Our motto is peace at Carnival, we dress up to bring joy to children and make that dream of going out in costume at street Carnival come true. We only have 2 years of existence and we will go on to the third next year, believing that better days will come. Our costumes are all handcrafted, created by the group using plastic ribbons and braided into the clothes, giving volume and magnitude to each gorilla. Every creation is its own, alluding to a real Gorilla.

Our first gorilla was black and the second one was yellow in honor of a friend who died of stomach cancer and as his last gorilla that he used at carnival was yellow, we paid this tribute to the friend nicknamed Urso. We made a mix between a gorilla and a bear and it was incredible. Our new theme will be in reference to the King Kong Movie for the year 2025. More good things are coming…

Zahy Tentehar is an indigenous woman and multi-artist, born in the village of Colônia, in the Cana Brava indigenous reserve, in Maranhão. She is the daughter of the shaman Elzira, and Seu Quinca, a mixed-race man. She is a member of the Tenetehara-Guajajara people, and speaks Ze'eng eté, a dialect of the Tupi-Guarani family, as her first language. In 2010, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she became an actress and activist. In the city, she was one of the leaders of the Maracanã village, occupied from 2006 to 2013 by indigenous people who demanded the revitalization and historical recognition of the building that had been the Museu do Índio.

On television, he worked on the miniseries “Dois Irmãos”, on TV Globo; in cinema, she participated in the film “Don’t devour my heart” and, in theater, she acted in “Macunaíma – A musical rhapsody”. Her most recent work as an actress was in “Guerra em Iperoig” (2020), by Companhia de Teatro Mundana. Today, she is in the process of serving as co-director on an adaptation of “Macunaíma” for the cinema.

Photo: Disclosure TV Globo/Manoella Mello

Euzimar Meireles Gomes was born on May 18, 1959, in Cutia, town of Matinha, in the interior of Maranhão. Son of Joana Meirelles and José Carneiro Gomes. He works as a farmer during the year and in June he plays Cazumba in João de Pixilau's group, called Turma da Sede, in the municipality of Matinha, in the lowlands of Maranhão. In addition to playing, he dedicates himself to creating masks, faces that he uses and makes for others. He also sells to orders to outsiders and his masks are part of collections and art museums. “I went to the herd and just looked at the Cazumba. Then I got involved with the Cazumbas and challenged myself to make a face at myself. Instead of doing one, I did two. From then on I didn’t stop.” Zimar is dedicated and careful. A restless spirit, he developed his own style, which makes his masks special, presenting great aesthetic quality and sophistication. Full of details, they are inspired by the features of hideous animals, which cause fear and admiration at the same time. The base of the mask is carved from wood. In the characterization he uses organic materials, to give more veracity to the character: if it is a horse, he uses mane; if it's a pig, use real teeth.