Reopening the international Residency agenda, and two years later than planned, Surinamese artist and curator Miguel Keerveld is finally participating in our programme. During the month of May, Keerveld will advance his curatorial research that aims to contextualize experiences of her performative persona @tumpiflow, focusing on social urbanization and what is known (and recognized) as a “favela”. Keerveld is especially interested in knowledge distribution and social activities as political forces.

Wanja Kimani was the artist selected for the Plural Artists in Residence Programme, a project by the British Council Brazil in partnership with Despina.
Wanja Kimani was born in Kenya and lives in the UK. Her work flows between performance, film, text and textiles. Driven by stories about real and imaginary people and places, she inserts herself into narratives and uses her body to explore rituals, objects and the rural landscape.
Artists in Residence is an online artist residency program in the field of art and culture that aims to develop ideas, experiment with new practices and create connections.
The other selected artists for this first edition of the programme, and their respective Brazilian partner organizations, are: Susan Thompson – Instituto Mesa (RJ), Annabel McCourt – Diversa (SP) and Jelly Cleaver – PretaHub (SP).

Mayara Velozo lives and works in Morro do Salgueiro, north of Rio de Janeiro. Graduated in art history at UERJ, she is a farmer, visual artist and researcher. She works with performance, photoperformance, poems, video installation and, more recently, with sculptures in textiles and construction materials. Her poetics come from a constructive and subjective dimension of family relationships, approaching her home and places of conviviality. She talks about personal and collective construction, her family’s autonomous nature in building and rebuilding architectural dreams and how nature can be a sign of these events. The artist is a member of the Trovoa collective, and has gone through residencies at MAM Rio, Parque Lage, Paço Imperial, among others. Mayara participates in Despina Residency Program from March to April 2022.

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Stefanie Ferraz lives and works between Rio and London.

Having graduated in 2011 with a degree in Product Design from PUC-Rio, Stefanie moved to London to do her Masters in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (2016) and the Slade School of Fine Art (2018).

Her artistic practice explores how the process of painting can be used to tell strange stories that move seamlessly between excitement and discomfort, pleasure and pain.

This fluidity in the perception of image is informed by the means of applying the paint. For example, when using large amounts of solvent, the artist proposes a sort of ‘aquatic materiality’, wherein the image dissolves, revealing in its place layers of the process itself.

Stefanie’s research amalgamates a plethora of references, ranging from Renaissance paintings, through digital pornography to the tarot and the carioca carnival. These references are all linked by ideas around the body and sexuality.

At Despina, she will deepen her research into the tarot. For the first time, she will focus particularly on the suite of hearts through which she will tell the story of a troubled relationship.

Previous Exhibitions include: Care Don’t Care at Basis Projektraum, Frankfurt (2021), Unlocked at Candid Arts Trust, London (2020), The Land of No Evil at Offshoot Gallery, London (2019), NOMAD #1 Accidents Never Happen, Cluj (2018).

Trilha Sonora is an investigation into the relationship between sound and moving image, and explores the power of music and sound to convey and dictate narrative and emotion. Artist and composer Ania Reynolds has composed for art forms of every description, from circus to film to theatre to podcasts to performance art. In this work she explores the role of the soundtrack as a storyteller by creating one short video with three distinctly different soundtracks, which will be accessed via three sets of headphones. Audiences will have the chance to choose their own soundtrack adventure, or compare the different sonic narratives.

Originally planned as a follow-up residency to Ania’s 2019 Despina residency project Música de Coco, Trilha Sonora has evolved into a cross-cultural artistic collaboration due to the travel restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of travelling to Rio to make the work, Ania is collaborating remotely with Rio artist Anna Costa E Silva, who, on the ground in Rio de Janeiro, will gather video footage of Rio which she will send to Ania to create the video component of the work. Ania will then score the video from her home studio in Melbourne, Australia, and the final work is planned to be presented at Despina in Rio in early 2021.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.