Maria Gracia Ego-Aguirre

Maria Gracia Ego-Aguirre
01.04.2017 - 30.04.2017

Lives and works in Lima, Peru. Specialized in Sculpture from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, her practice exlores nature as a manifesting body and the human vulnerability intrinsic to its “immensity”.

Currently at Despina, Maria is working on a series of territorial bodies related to the disorderly geography of Rio de Janeiro and its connection with human presence. A personal view on the “cracks” and “breakdowns” of the landscapes and the uncontrollable ground.

Among her recent exhbitions, we highlight the collective show “Haciendo La Audicion” at Lima’s Museum Of Contemprary Art (MAC) in 2016.

More information
instagram: @mujernevado
gmail: mgegoaguirrealvarez@gmail.com

Paola Bascón

Paola Bascón
01.04.2017 - 30.04.2017

Lives and works in Berlin and La Paz. Graduated from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Paola has worked for several years as an assistant and producer in theater and performance projects in Germany.

Her work can be defined as a curatorial and artistic practice about syncretistic rituals. Using fieldwork as a starting point, she tries to portray the role and use of handcrafted objects and the relationship of rituals to personal and collective memory.

Recently, Paola has developed an artistic and curatorial project about Alasitas, a religious festivity that involves the production and trading of miniature objects – a representation of wishes – as well as their ritual practices. The gathered material is displayed in an exhibition combined with video, sound and installation.

During her residency at Despina, a complementary research will take place in order to deepen the understanding of “ex-votos” – a similar ritual and tradition in Brazil -, celebrated through the offering of objects that represent granted wishes. Taking video as the principal tool/medium, the result will try to create a dialog between these two rituals, between asking a wish and thanking for their accomplishment.

More information
instagram.com/paolabascon
paolabascon@gmail.com

Pictures Gallery

Ben Burgess

Ben Burgess
01.04.2017 - 30.04.2017

Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia, where he obtained his BFA (Photography) at RMIT University. His multidisciplinary work is a process of cultural understanding and uses the creation of objects as a way to visualise his relationship to people and place.

Since his first trip to Brazil in 2014, Ben has developed an eager curiosity of the Brazilian identity and how the arts have contributed to this sense of self.

Now in the midst of his fourth time visiting Rio, he is attempting to deeply understand his personal connection to this foreign land and his role as an unmistakable ‘gringo’.

The bedroom window in his Copacabana apartment inspired his project at Despina. This structure of solace has provided a contemplative space for which to better understand his relationship to Brazil and his Brazilian partner. The window thus became a portal of voyeurism: a space to peer out, access and retain information. Using photography and performative gesture as a method for self-education, he plays with wind and windows as poetic motifs for his personal exploration of the “Cidade Maravilhosa”.

More information
www.benburgess.com.au
www.instagram.com/_benburgess/

Pictures Gallery
To be posted soon

Daniel Gnattali

Daniel Gnattali
01.03.2017 - 30.04.2017

Carioca, vive e trabalha no Rio de Janeiro. Formado em Design Gráfico,  atua como ilustrador desde 2009.

Em 2015-2016, participou das exposições “Desdobramentos” e “Segmentos” (Centro Cultural Laurinda Santos Lobo e Sesc Engenho de Dentro, respectivamente), que abordaram a ilustração como obra de arte no mercado, estudando o impacto da arte como forma primordial de comunicação e como ela se faz presente e necessária em diversas camadas da sociedade, de vitrines de lojas a galerias de arte.

Atualmente, como monitor na Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage e residente na Despina, Daniel começa a observar, em facetas paralelas à sua produção artística, claros registros gráficos de uma transição – uma tomada de consciência do seu desenvolvimento como artista. Neste novo contexto, o artista caminha para uma nova fase de experimentações, que deixa sua pesquisa suspensa e não suspensa – a busca pela pesquisa torna-se a própria pesquisa.

O contraponto entre suas ilustrações de traço concreto – embora dançante – e suas pinturas de expressão dinâmicas e espontâneas deixa claro o extrapolar das linhas de contorno como uma metáfora para as limitações às quais o artista está sujeito no mercado de trabalho.

Natureza, arquétipos, ancestralidade e transmissão de sensações, temas presentes em seus trabalhos atuais como ilustrador, poderão, em contato com a infinitude de linguagens que a arte contemporânea oferece, desaguar em novas paragens.

Mais informações:
http://www.danielgnattali.com
instagram: @danielgnattali

Galeria de Fotos

 

Luisina Sosa Rey

Luisina Sosa Rey
03.01.2017 - 31.01.2017

Originary from Argentina, Luisina Sosa Rey lives and works in Montreal, Canada, where she obtained her BFA in Visual Arts with a major in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University.

Through drawing, installation, writing and various “infiltrations” in reality, her work is a mean to implement experiences which can regenerate the intimate and sensible attention we have towards the world around us.

During her participation in Despina Residency Programme, Sosa Rey intends to dedicate herself to a form of experimentation which reserves an important place to process-based ideas and a child-like playfullness freed from auto censorship: ordinary experience and its connection to quotidian time; situations of meditative solitude which will nourish the dialogue with oneself; a research through actions and stumblings on materials which can resonate in peculiar ways. Her research at Despina will focus on the notions of the self as a social construct, the permeability of our beings and our ways of being transformed through alterity and adversity.

This residency was partly supported by the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec (CALQ) and Les Offices jeunesse internationaux du Québec (LOJIQ).

Pictures Gallery


Romeo Gongora

Romeo Gongora
01.11.2016 - 30.11.2016

Romeo is a Canadian-Guatemalan visual artist. His participatory art works employs radical pedagogy to promote socio-political and human awareness. Romeo collaborated, amongst others, with the Rencontres de Bamako (Mali), CCA – Lagos (Nigeria), Centre of Art Torun (Poland), Festival Belluard (Switzerland), HISK (Belgium), The Office (Berlin) and Open School East (London). In 2007, he took up a two-year residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam). In 2009, he represented Canada as an artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin) and at the Acme Studios (London) in 2016.

What would identity look like in a utopian world? Awaken Dream. New Models of Identity is a grassroots community art research that harnesses the capacity of creativity to offer a space for imagination as a tool for self-empowerment. Romeo’s residency project consisted of engaging a group of people from the local community of Rio de Janeiro to imagine a clothing collection for a utopian society. The residency culminated in a fashion performance-installation about otherness, cross-culture/religion, which brought individuals and groups in contact.

More information about the artist:
www.romeogongora.com

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In partnership with Despina, Contemporary art center Diagonale (based in Montreal, Canada) and Le Conseil des arts de Montréal,  have selected artist Romeo Gongora to have a full grant to participate in our Residency Program in Rio de Janeiro during the month of November 2016.

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Andrea Ferrero

Andrea Ferrero
01.10.2016 - 31.10.2016

Visual artist based in Lima, Peru. She obtained a Bachelor in Fine Arts with a major in Sculpture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru and was awarded Honorable Mention in the Premio a la Crítica in 2015. Andrea has participated in several projects and group exhibitions such as the joint creation of the theatre piece Naked Eye for the York Theatre Festival in Toronto, Canada in 2013, Arte Laguna Prize exhibition in the Venice Arsennale, in Venice, Italy in 2016, the group show Error 404 | Not Found, in Galería Rottenslat, Lima Peru, among others. She is currently an artist in residence at Despina Residency Programme in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil  and some of her upcoming projects for 2017 include her first solo show at Galería Rottenslat, Lima, Peru, and MANA Residency | FUGAZ @ MANA in New Jersey, USA. She is represented by Galería Rottenslat, in Lima, Peru.

Andrea is particularly drawn to the human body; how its remains bound up with architectonic reality and how memories and history itself are permeated and materialised in the surfaces of inhabited spaces. Her ongoing body of work, Espacios Despellejados, seeks to explore the relationship between body, space and memory, as well as the juxtaposition between inhabited space and the bodies that inhabit it, allowing space to function as a memory map of our bodies: an (auto) biography – a patient mnemonist. She therefore explores the ways in which inhabited space bears a skin that carries the same marks, prints, scars, moles and memories than that of a body, proposing a hybrid skin between body and space and creating powerful large-scale installations that portray a fragile spatial memory of what once was a solid construction, rearranging space with ghost-like pieces that float and almost seem to linger between memory and reality itself.

More recently, Andrea has been drawn to abandoned sites and spaces; timeless spaces that are never truly dead, yet are never alive either, lurking between decay and growth; the past and the present. Her newest projects aim to explore current social and cultural issues, evidenced and highlighted by these places; poetical monuments to failure that  seem to have an almost ghostly, timeless and surreal beauty – “invaded” and re-inhabited by bodies that re-appropriate the space not only in terms of structure, but also in terms of history and memory. They are revitalised but still can’t seem escape their own spatial reality and timelessness. During her time at Despina Residency Programme, she will be studying Rio de Janeiro in terms of its abandoned buildings and the utopian modernist ideas for a city that have proved to be impossible to build, questioning what [and if ] these reflect not only about the city of Rio but also about Brazilian culture, history and society.

More information
www.andreaferreropizarro.com
aferrero.p@gmail.com

Pictures Gallery
To be posted soon

Caroline Thacke

Caroline Thacke
01.10.2016 - 31.10.2016

Caroline is a visual artist who lives and works in Northhampton, England.  She works primarily with the photographic image, her technique centres around the layering of imagery pushing the photographic film towards saturation and creating an abundance of information and depth within the flat photographic frame. This causes the slowing down of the reading of the images, pulling the eye around the various spacial and textural elements creating the illusion of a strange world.

Her work is driven by a fascination with dreamworlds, the imagination and their link to the unconscious. The intention is to explore the potential of imagery to act as a trigger or a gateway into these realms.

During her residency at Despina, Caroline intends to explore the rich and colourful tapestry of Rio de Janeiro, creating a fantastical mapping of this stunning cityscape. Using both photographic film and collage as well as incorporating found materials, she wishes to produce a body of work celebrating the energy and vibrancy of this culturally rich and beautiful city.

More information
www.carolinethacke.com

Pictures Gallery
To be posted soon

Adam Golub

Adam Golub
01.09.2016 - 30.11.2016

A video journalist, documentarian and storyteller living and working in New York City. His work seeks the intersection between journalism, art and academia by looking for those points where theory meets lived experience. He graduated from Columbia University’s School of Journalism and was a fellow at the UnionDocs center for documentary art. His work has been exhibited across the US in film festivals and educational screenings. His larger body of work focuses on the margins of society as a test of a society’s strength. More recently, his work focuses on non-central urban spaces in The Americas as societies of expanding consciousness in the wake of gentrification and flight from the largest capital cities.

In a complex context of post-Olympic Rio, a collectively agreed-upon rhetoric of economic and political crisis and municipal elections, how can this unique moment on Rio de Janeiro’s urban narrative be captured? Adam Golub’s project through Despina Residency Programme will create a portrait of this unique period. Looking to create an aesthetic portrait that is based in the context of the socio-political stories that emerge from within the city’s daily life, Adam’s work will scrape the margins and the mainstream and seek to bridge the gap between rhetorically-generated mythologies of Rio and lived experiences of its residents.

More information
http://www.megamotmedia.org

Pictures Gallery
to be posted soon

Liana Nigri

Liana Nigri
01.09.2016 - 30.11.2016

A Brazilian artist deeply interested in Bio Art, more specifically in the intersection of botany and art. For the past 11 year, Liana has been working as a surface designer – mastered in Textile Futures at Central Saint Martins, London – UK.

Being based in New York City for the past 4 years, she did her first art residency at SVA (School of Visual Arts) – BioArt From the Laboratory to the Studio – she used the laboratory and took advantage of its resources in order to broaden the “AfterLife” project, which consists so far in three series: Microscope Series, Rare Species, and Lasting Leaves.

Through microscope photographs, the artist exposes the transitions happening on the realm of flora while showing how qualities like radiance, softness and saturation could suddenly turn opaque, rigid and dull. This registration starts from fresh organic materials and follows its path through the process of withering, and capturing each step narrowly.

In her installations, Liana intends to test the fragility of flower’s surfaces. By using its carcass, she creates sculptures and mobiles that reminds the viewer of the ‘memento mori’. Her work intends to transform the sadness, grief and darkness of death into a new perception of beauty, attributing new elements and sensations to it. As this fragile structure could easily break, she uses botanical illustration, like in the old times, as an important tool to assist the registration and identification of new species.

As a surface designer, her first instinct is to produce a visual and tactile memories, so in 2015, Liana started to explore a new cellular material produced by harmless bacteria called “scoby”. This organic media gives her the opportunity to create a new tissue eternalizing textures and shape of the plants, making those attributes immortal.

Either if it is through photography, drawing, or installation, her work is all inspired by elements of nature versus the idea of time passing – and the notion of impermanence. Her research consists in observing the changes happening on the surface of flowers and plants throughout their various stages of life. Through this process, the artist invites everyone to take a closer look at flowers and plants in decay revealing beauty where many may not see it.

Pictures Gallery
To be posted soon