standing on the shoulders of giants: cur. raphael fonseca | roesler curatorial project

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants brings together artists whose production investigates the relations and tensions around time and memory. The plurality of the group of works displayed offers different languages and approaches to the subject, allowing for expanded perspectives. The exhibition presents contemporary visions which help us understand how familiar and ancestral narratives go hand in hand with the present in the elaboration of collective memories.

Nos trabalhos aqui mostrados, o artista dá continuidade às suas pesquisas sobre as relações entre as imagens e a invenção do Nordeste a partir de dois símbolos identitários relacionados à música: a sanfona e o triângulo. Narrativas relacionadas à migração, ao preconceito muitas vezes lançado pelo Sudeste e uma singela homenagem à música popular brasileira se misturam em seus trabalhos.

In Revizão, the artist takes note of words made up by her mother and shares them with the public. Accustomed to reviewing and editing the texts in publications with which she is involved, the artist sets out to review her mother's writing and the way she uses the Portuguese language in its oral and written form—leading us to reflect on what is considered right and wrong. In another work, Gosto do Deleuze, mas prefiro meu pai, the artist creates philosophical concepts and asks her father to read them out loud. The audio foregrounds the friction between the wisdom of 'academic' knowledge and that developed from daily work on the farm. Intertwined in these works, one can find the artist’s love and respect for her parents' trajectory.

Through drawing and painting, he proposes images where the human body is twisted, fragmented and transformed into several other elements. These narratives are permeated with transformations and tend to invite the public to reflect on their own ancestry. The title of the series on display notably evokes this aspect of the work—Onde estão os ossos dos seus parentes? [Where are the bones of your relatives?]—, as well as in the action of the figures in the paintings: bodies that are in 'handstand' position, that are upside down, connecting with the ground, with their roots.

The work included in this exhibition, is derived from an album from the artist's mother's graduation as a teacher—her lifelong career—from which she created a series called Pesquisa escolar [School Research]. Using labels easily found in stationery shops, the work presents an atlas of people who are essential for education, but often overlooked, including figures such as Martin Luther King, Carolina Maria de Jesus and Beyoncé. The assemblage also includes figures who have had a nefarious effect, and who were particularly important during the artist's primary education, notably presenting the figures related to the military dictatorship in Brazil.

Therefore, she conceived works that use their wooden surfaces as woodcut matrices, whereby its many layers of time apparent through the traces engraved onto them, are transposed onto paper. In dialogue with this series of works, the artist also presents a table that her mother used for decades, turning it into a small monument to education, teaching and the oral exchanges between teachers and students.

The works presented in this exhibition reveal the artist's perspective in a more abstract way, with one of the works having been made of fabric covered with cheap objects, while the other is a video made in partnership with Victor Galvão, where both collaborators share their anxieties about the future through a narrative mostly made with stop motion technique. 

Based on his great capacity to create imitations, the artist proposes new images drawn from this archive onto which he executes small interventions so as to pervert the initial documentary function of the photographs. New stories are therefore written, erased and exhibited to the public.

In the video displayed in the exhibition, a woman stares into the camera shrouded in smoke. The image—as informed by the title—is veiled in mystery: where is she? What is she doing? Who is she? What other figures can she represent? The ability to create images that invite the public to an array of possibilities of interpretation is an essential aspect of his production.

Depicting the simple act of being together, talking and transmitting knowledge through speech, Martins foregrounds before the public eye the political power of encounters.

Notably, the artist participated in the residency Ocupação Hotel Cambridge and joined the Movimento dos Sem-Teto do Centro [Downtown Homeless Movement] led by Carmen Silva Ferreira. With this, de Medeiros befriended the feminist leadership of the Frente de Luta por Moradia [Battle for Housing Front], following which the artist made a series of portraits of the women residing at Ocupação 9 de Julho. The last of these portraits is the one shown in the exhibition, where Carmen is depicted with her entire family. Their facial expressions show their confidence in the movement for housing and the permanence of this engagement in the family's next generations.

Often including the names of unknown individuals, the artist invites the audience to imagine who those people are, why their 'ideas' were not executed, and what their next steps might be or have been. In this exhibition, her work is displayed on the facade of the building, establishing friction between the lower class/popular character of the banner and the gallery's more austere architecture and its presence in the Jardim Europa, an upper class neighborhood of São Paulo.

As for their drawings, they bring together both what has already been presented as performance and what is yet to be performed—these images are therefore placed between the archive and the project, the past and the future.