Collective exhibition "Ecologies of the body"

“I always dreamed of this. To have the strength of caterpillars. To see wings sprouting from my worm-like body. To fly instead of crawling on the ground. To support myself in the air and not on stone. To pass from one existence to another without having to die and be reborn, and thus, to turn the world upside down without even touching it. The most dangerous form of magic. The existence closest to death. Metamorphosis.”
Emanuele Coccia (Metaformoses)

Shapeshifters are beings capable of assuming different forms through metamorphosis and transfiguration, whether that body is animal, vegetable, human, or supernatural. Such creatures inhabit a wide range of African, Indigenous, Nordic, and folk mythologies from different regions, connecting us to the thousands of vital possibilities of existence, so widely discussed throughout history. More than figures of the imagination, these forms echo cosmologies in which the body is not a fixed essence, but a transitory position—as proposed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, when considering Amerindian perspectivism, in which all beings share a condition of subjectivity, differing only in the bodies they inhabit. It is not about becoming someone else, but about revealing that one is already multiple.

The group exhibition “Body ecologiesThis project aims to reflect on and broaden our thinking and horizons regarding transhumanism and the possibilities of being, based on the work of contemporary Brazilian artists who discuss this theme in their respective productions, whether on paper, painting, sculpture, video, photography, or installation. These artists are: Alex Červený, Barrão, Caroline Ricca Lee, Davi de Jesus do Nascimento, Gabriel Massan, Gustavo Caboco, Juno B, Manuela Costa Silva, Marina Woisky, Josi, Saulo Szabó e Oak Forest.

Transhumanism permeates the way we communicate with the world. Because living requires experiencing the idea of ​​'contagion' as a measure of our relationships with other species, cultures, and technologies. In this sense, as Donna Haraway suggests, we do not exist as isolated entities, but as beings constituted in "doing-with"—in continuous alliances and contaminations with what surrounds us. We are permanently affected by different forms of existence: plant, animal, mineral, inorganic, and even artificial. This ecology of bodies and beings, which includes humans and non-humans, involves biological, political, and affective relationships that constantly contaminate and modify us, leading to countless changes in how we act, feel, and see the world around us. It is when transformation ceases to be a metaphor and begins to affect how the body positions itself in the world—opening fissures in what previously seemed stable. We are all capable of transfiguring ourselves. This is the beauty of shared vital experience. After all, who desires the terrible limitation of living only on what is capable of making sense? It is characteristic of living beings to seek out profound organic disorder which, nevertheless, suggests an underlying order.

Discussing transmorphism in art and life is also about freedom. Freedom to let oneself go outward, but mainly inward. A freedom that is not affirmed by autonomy, but by the capacity to traverse and be traversed—to recognize oneself as multiple, in relation, in constant metamorphosis. It is to sustain such transformation, even when it dissolves what we thought we were. In this gesture, there is an ethics of lack of control: allowing the other—human or not—to exist in their otherness, while accepting the risk of not coinciding with oneself. To be free, in this context, is to abdicate fixed form, to consent to the flow, to exist on the border between what has already been and what is yet to be named. As Clarice Lispector states in her classic JellyfishListen: I let you be, so I let myself be.

Service
Exhibition | Body ecologies
From July 4th to September 6th
Tuesday to Sunday, from 12pm to 18pm