Exhibition "A place to land", Juliana Maia

O lapa lapa, an independent space founded in 2024 in the Lapa neighborhood of São Paulo, opens A place to land, first solo exhibition of Juliana Maia (1980, Recife, PE, Brazil) in the capital of São Paulo. Curated by Sofia Steinvorth, it presents a set of works produced between 2022 and 2024.

Through imaginative exercises that do not lose their playful lightness, the exhibition Um lugar onde pouso proposes a critical revisitation of the domestic space. The artist, who has been following this line of research for over ten years, starts with objects typically associated with the home, such as cushions, curtains, bags and vases, seeking an engagement with the memory associated with History in the feminine. The works thus reveal themselves as possible historical reparations from a contemporary perspective in which the effects of gender inequality continue to be a lived reality.

The exhibition highlights two series of recently completed works, exhibited for the first time: Coisinhas (2023-2024) and Sacolas (2022-2024). Both follow an approach that could be called archaeological fiction. These works question History, traditionally narrated in the masculine sense, by imagining what traces associated with women’s experiences might be. The three Coisinhas, small sculptures made with cotton thread and copper wire, are reminiscent of vases or jars, of the kind normally found in ethnological museums, while Sacolas are made from scraps of fabric from unfinished bags. All of them were collected in a factory and kept in the state in which they arrived in the artist’s hands—some with stains, others with holes, but all of them embroidered with the aim of highlighting their original shapes and patched to match the marks that the fabrics already bore. This series of bags pays homage to a cultural object that, according to Elizabeth Fisher, may have been, rather than hunting tools, the first cultural device.

Juliana’s practice is linked to a lineage of artists (mostly women) who, driven by the desire for a different future, ask what constitutes a shelter and promote encounters between the body, the house, architecture and space. Examples of this relationship include Lygia Clark’s A casa é o corpo (1968) and Brígida Baltar’s “ações na casa” (Abrigo and Torre, both from 1996). But also the research of Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga, who has a drawing entitled Minha Primeira Casa foi uma Mulher (My First House was a Woman) (1975), in which we see a pregnant woman whose head is a house. It is no coincidence that Juliana Maia has a degree in Architecture. Her interest in architecture, however, seems never to have been the desire to build a materiality as such, but the beginning of a deeper search for what constitutes a shelter. This approach is especially evident in the panels respiro relieveda (2024) and todo dia uma insônia (2023), in which satin, a light and shiny fabric, is the basis for subtle interventions that refer, as the titles suggest, to parts and experiences of the body - breathing, lungs, insomnia, gestational sac. Thus, at the intersection of weaving, sewing, embroidery and crochet techniques, Juliana Maia's works, which sometimes resemble paintings, sometimes sculptures, materialize a profound search for a poetic shelter, a shelter that necessarily involves feeling.

Lapa Lapa acts as a connecting device between artists, projects and audiences to provide space for new proposals for exhibitions, courses, shows and debates, with the aim of expanding and integrating the different languages ​​and formats of action in independent production and collective constructions relevant in contemporary times.

Service
Exhibition | A place to land
From September 27th to October 18th
Tuesday to Friday, 14pm to 19pm, Saturday, 11am to 15pm