#desterrar

LS 30 | Archive SUBMISSION

Bia Monteiro - Desterrar

Porque si no estás aquí

Quererte no tiene sentido, mas que amar lo que no se puede tener.

LS 30 | Archive SUBMISSION

Bia Monteiro - Desterrar

LS 30 | Archive SUBMISSION

Bia Monteiro - Desterrar

LS 30 | Archive SUBMISSION

Bia Monteiro - Desterrar

LS 30 | Archive SUBMISSION

Bia Monteiro - Desterrar

LS 30 | Archive SUBMISSION 

Bia Monteiro - Desterrar 

magazine.landscapestories.net

The Desterrar series presents 14 photographic performance images with compositions that show natural fabrics raised by a female body surrounded by cultural landscapes. The performances took place in national parks, quilombos and places of exploitation of natural resources, such as farms. Bia Monteiro appropriates fragments of the Pau Brasil Manifesto to insert the work in the exhibition space (when possible/ digitally they come in form of captions), through the gesture of her own writing using charcoal. Writing outside the formal limits of work opens a dialogue between two times in Brazil and provides us with a reflection on where the work takes place: on the surface of the fabric, within the limits of the photograph or on the wall. Or in all these places? Or none of them.

Each work in the series has a composition, in which the fabric hoisted in the center of the image by a female body, reminds us of the visual code of a flag. Thus, the fabric of the flag, the place of performance and the female body that the stem is related through the resources of the earth impregnated in the natural fabric. A closer look allows us to experience the work itself, consisting of the fabric in the center and surrounded by the cultural landscape, also constituting another flag. Simultaneously the work contains and presents itself as a flag in its entirety. A third layer is added to the exhibition space, where fragments written outside the limits of the photograph, further expand the beginning and end of the flag in question.

What is exposed in the fabric, the content of the Flag, is entirely the responsibility of the observer.

If we consider the fabric as the flag, it can be populated for reasons of the female body, of which they are the mast. The women photographed live off the land, they are the land. Paradoxically these women have their faces hidden by the flag they carry. They do not seem to carry ideals, but themselves.

If we look at the fabric as part of a flag limited by the photograph itself, the cultural landscape seems to have a very strong role over what is not described or represented in the fabric.

If the work wins the architecture of the place, the fragments of the Pau Brasil Manifesto act on visual codes, potentially expanding the observer's possibilities of experience. The deconstruction of the national flag is a recurring theme in Bia Monteiro's work, as well as the insertion of color planes, which in previous works was done digitally in the image and, in Desterrar, is introduced in the composition of the performance through natural fabrics, manually dyed by the artist.

The conduct of the artist in relation to those who are being photographed is informed by interacting with semi-isolated indigenous people since 2009. The entry of her own body in the landscape of tribes has been a personal object of reflection for years. Whence an ethics of silent social activism emerged. In Desterrar, 14 flags are raised without shapes or sayings. None of them is empty.

Instagram: bmonteirop