Daniel Santiso and Max Willa Morais

Daniel Santiso and Max Willa
11.02.2019 - 31.03.2019

This residence works as an experiment for a future fully funded programme, which aims to support the development of the practice and research of local artists. A big thanks to curators Bernardo Jose De Souza, Guilherme Altmayer, Leno Veras and Victor Gorgulho, who support and participate in this first experience.

Santiso and Willa Morais live and work in Rio de Janeiro. Their research starts from invisible narratives to affirm collective memories through photographs, texts and actions, dealing with representations in the social and aesthetic field. Throughout this residence at Despina, the duo will gather some material of their previous urban interventions, in order to bring to another scale the geographical, poetic and political situations that, in their processes, project better living and work conditions within the Brazilian colonial-structured society. Through the combination of past and future and starting from the relationship with people, territories and knowledge, the artists seek visual processes as tools to create shared practices.

Daniel Santiso (1993) is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Graduated in media studies from UFRJ – School of Communication (within an international agreement with the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle UFR Arts et Médias. His current works include a collaboration with the Anarca Films Residence (2018), at Espaço Saracvra; the production of the photo book “Livro-Poeira” (“Dust-Book”) (2018), as a result of the experimental documentary “A poeira não quer sair do esqueleto” (2018), directed by Max Willa Morais and funded by the Department of Culture of Rio de Janeiro and Fundação Cesgranrio; and also the action “13 + 17” (2018), which took place at Galpão Bela Maré in partnership with Felipe Ferreira, Guilherme Altmayer, Maíra Barillo, Pâmella Liz and Rodrigo D’Alcântara. Currently, Santiso is  researching elements of visual communication – in relation to the Brazilian black diaspora -, in public and private collections, and also developing actions around collective memories.

More information
http://cargocollective.com/danielsantiso
silvasantisodaniel@gmail.com

Max Willa Morais (1993) is an artist specialized in Visual Arts Languages and Education. He participates in the Projeto Experiências Indiciais (“Index Experiments Project”) at the State University of Rio de Janeiro – UERJ, for which he has worked as an executive producer for the seminar/show “Between nature and the artifice” (2017-2018). He has also worked as a researcher of education and cultures of the peripheries at the Maria and João Aleixo Institute (2018). Willa organized with Daniel Santiso and Lorran Dias the “Cinerama Week”, an independent film and video art show with collaborations from UFRJ, UERJ, Université Toulouse 2 and several cultural centers in Rio de Janeiro (2016 – 2017). His work investigates stories in archives,  geographical situations and material / immaterial relations with people and objects, especially the ones referring to diasporic and familiar memories.

More information
https://maxwillamorais.wixsite.com/portfolio
maxwillamorais@gmail.com

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Pictures Gallery
by Frederico Pellachin

Manuel La Rosa

Manuel La Rosa
01.02.2019 - 31.03.2019

Born in Lima, Peru. Lives and works in Santiago, Chile (since 2000). A visual artist and a photographer graduated from the University of Chile, La Rosa has participated in several collective and individual exhibitions in institutions  such as the Museu de Arte Contemporanea and Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, both in Chile. He is an assistant professor of the photographic department at Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile.

His work seeks to understand human processes and behaviors evoked through organic and inorganic elements, as well as philosophical conceptions of experimental or scientific work who are present in artistic practices in general. Recently, his interests are focused on his migration experience in Chile and its connection with his country of origin.

As an artist in residence at Depina, La Rosa intends to connect the different imaginaries that surround his current artistic research, either through the incidence of racial and socio-cultural miscegenation in Brazil, or by the allusion to his Peruvian origin and to his migratory and identity experience in Chile. Furthermore, he wants to approach the social reconfiguration that is currently taking place in Chile, based on what Brazil has lived in colonial times, linking a tripartite and timeless vision on the distinctions of what we conceive as “Latin American societies”, which are related through the same historical fate.

The idea is to transfer these problematizations to experimental processes, in which the artist intends to use vernacular elements (organic and inorganic) and to somehow poeticize conceptions of origin, reformulation and constant transformation.

More information
Web site: manuel-larosa.com
Instagram: @mnuelarosa

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by Frederico Pellachin

Adriana Nascimento

Adriana Nascimento
02.01.2019 - 31.01.2019

Lives and works in São João Del-Rei, Minas Gerais, where she is a professor at UFSJ (Federal University of São João Del-Rei). Her research investigates urban processes and it deals with topics such as drift, appropriation and an experience with a writing / narrative that requires to be authorial and therefore, partial. Simultaneously with her research, Nascimento also works as a tutor for the interdisciplinary Master’s Program at UFSJ, which is articulated to the project Ephemeral Interventions in Urban Contexts: cultural and artistic action in the transformation of the city’s image.

Her curatorial project for the residence at Despina will take a look on the urban. It will question the place of the urban in the contemporaneity and what is the urban, which is not necessarily the city. In addition to a curatorial practice, the proposal here is to create, with collaborative participation, a sort of inventory of urban readings in an inter- and transdisciplinary process of exhibition-archive-interviews on the theme: Latin American Urbanities . It proposes to list some possible ways on how Latin American urbanities are being expressed in different fields of knowledge, including the artistic and urban. Among the questions raised, the following stand out: Which languages ​​cover such complexities? What do they say about urbanity? What urban elements dignify the city? The presence of nature offers urbanity? And its absence? How are they represented, incorporated or even rejected in different disciplinary fields? Abstract, real, imaginary? What repertoires and references?

This residency is one of the moments (space-time) of this process of creation, of assembly-collage of excerpts raised, like notes in sheet music for a concert, still to be executed. The exposure-file-interviews that result from it is a later process: document, memory and record.

In addition to our website, you can check the process of the residency on the following links below:
Urbanidades Latinoamericanas (Facebook Page)
Instagram: @ adriana.nascimento.arq

This residence has the support of UFSJ / PROEX and the following students: Pedro Azalim, Nalu Carvalho, Alice Saute Leitão and Luciana Canavez.

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Andrew Opty

Andrew Opty
02.01.2019 - 31.03.2019

Lives and works in Amsterdan, Netherlands. Opty has come to Despina to develop on themes of learning, failure and success in art making. Experimentation and method itself act as the starting point for this exploration – often also showing the work behind the work in order to make the final realisation more accessible to the viewer. 

Deliberate iteration of both figurative and non-figurative subject matter are key motif within his work, acting to help organise the exploration process. Fast drying materials like acrylic and ink, as well as the paper and drawing materials for their traditional associations with preparatory sketches or studies, are also considered mediums that align with this exploration.

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About: Abstract Works

In this series of work Andrew Opty explores his interest in generative design, technique innovation, and the materiality of paint itself as an artifact. By using acrylic paint skins lifted from older palettes, Opty reforms ‘left over’ paint into abstract collages.

As a side-effect of this approach, paint left on palettes from previous paintings is often recycled into subsequent works. In Untitled # 4 for example, these left over pallet artifacts become a key subject matter, while Untitled # 6 is formed entirely from artifacts generated from the palettes of either failed technical experiments or a series of portraits.

Chart is a form of catalogue for a number of these technique experiments. It works as a practical record as well as a reference for the generation of larger compositions such as Untitled # 1-4.

About: Ongoing Portraits

In this ongoing and unfinished group of portraits, Andrew Opty looks at the ever evolving role of technology and our response as humans and artists.

The portraits use as a starting point a recent academic research into Generative Adversarial Networks (a technique in AI) and its ability to synthesis entirely fictitious but convincing photorealistic human faces. Opty then uses this subject matter as a kind of machine assisted creativity to support his own learning and exploration into the age-old act of portrait painting.

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by Frederico Pellachin and Andrew Opty

Amina McConvell

Amina McConvell
01.11.2018 - 30.11.2018

Lives and works in Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia. She is a visual artist, creative producer and a community arts worker.

In her practice, Amina works predominantly within a geometric conceptual framework through the mediums of mural painting, wall drawing and installation. She makes large-scale works, often using these mediums in combination to create site-specific works, either directly onto the walls or by installing pieces developed for the specifics of a gallery or alternative spaces.

Amina has exhibited extensively across Australia and in Southeast Asia, including at Watch This Space (Alice Springs, 2010), Jogja Gallery (Yogyakarta, Indonesia 2012), Sangkring Project Space (Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2013), KRACK! STUDIO (Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2014), Griffith University Art Gallery (Brisbane, 2015), Verge Gallery, University of Sydney (2015), Firstdraft (Sydney, 2015) Sydney Non Objective (2016), J-Studio (Manila, Philippines, 2016) and 98B COLLABoratory (Manila, Philippines, 2018). Amina has been included in the Gertrude Contemporary Studio 18 Residency Program and has received numerous prestigious grants and awards for her work as a visual artist, including through the Australia Council for The Arts, The National Association of the Visual Arts (NAVA) and the Ian Potter Foundation and the Northern Territory Government.

A Combinatorial Explosion (work in progress)

Amina is currently developing a new body of work under the auspices of the Australia Council for the Arts. Her residency at Despina was dedicated to the research and development phase of her ongoing project titled “A Combinatorial Explosion”, in which she looks at the exponential cascading chain reactions that occur in nuclear explosions. At the moment, she is exploring a visual mash-up of diagrammatic representations of nuclear reactions and imagery from the history of nuclear technology, which is referenced as source material, informing the form and composition of the mural.

Amina is currently working with geometric conceptualism to create a progressive composition whereby one abstract form triggers another, and another and another, etc. The progression of forms makes its way around the gallery walls and other atypical aspects of the space(s), so that the space becomes enveloped by the composition. The artist composes her works from abstract forms which are stylised, cartoon-graphic – and are situated in a shifting spatial landscape. The composition is dense in form, colour and pattern and the aesthetic sense references to the Neo-Geo Conceptual Movement, Atomic Age Design and Neo-Concrete Abstraction.

More information
https://aminamcconvell.blogspot.com/


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by Frederico Pellachin

Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau

Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau
01.11.2018 - 30.11.2018

Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau are multidisciplinary visual artists based in Montreal, Canada. Their work focuses on theatricality and the choreographic; in their performance work but also in their interest in staging tableaus and working with ephemeral materials that can be said to perform through redeployment and decay. The duo’s recent works investigate the agency of objects, the material condition of the body, and the transformative potential that bodies and objects exert upon each other. These interests are informed by Chloë’s experience with chronic illness and its effect on their collaboration as well the duo’s exploration of narrative tropes from literature, theatre and television.

Recently, their work has taken an autobiographical twist, dealing with chronic disease, and how it alters the materiality of the body and affects its communication with the external world. It is important for them to show the body in action, in order to illustrate the haptic discomforts and discoveries during a first contact between two bodies ; this is why performance and video have become two of our favourite mediums, in transition from their installation works.

In partnership with Despina, the contemporary art center Diagonale (based in Montreal, Canada) and Le Conseil des arts de Montréal, have awarded Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau with a full grant to participate in our residency programme in November 2018. The research of the duo in Rio de Janeiro focused on Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s letter archives and also on the experimentation with costumes and accessories, which will be used in a future video performance.  While continuing on the theme of chronic disease, Chloë and Yannick want to approach it from the transformation angle – a sensorial and physical phenomenon that they want to illustrate by the phenomenon of the « second skin ». Thus, the duo is interested in deepening their investigation on the elasticity of fabrics and their capacity to give the impression of transforming the body shape by these properties – until perhaps prolonging it.

Lum & Desranleau have exhibited widely, notably at the Center for Books and Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Kunsthalle Wien; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Whitechapel Project Space, London; the University of Texas, Austin; the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown; the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto; and the Darling Foundry, Montreal. The duo is also known on the international music scene as co-founders of the avant‐rock group AIDS Wolf, for whom they also produced award-winning concert posters under the name Séripop. Their work is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

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Stephanie Black-Daniels

Stephanie Black-Daniels
01.09.2018 - 30.09.2018

Lives and works in Glasgow, having spent most of her early years and education in the Middle East. Most recently she has completed her Phd in Fine Art practice, with a specialism in performance at The Glasgow School of Art.  Since 2010 she has toured her work nationally and internationally to festivals and galleries in the UK, Berlin, Lithuania, Finland and Chicago. In 2011, she received the Athena Award by New Moves International and National Review of Live Art, Glasgow. Stephanie was also mentored by the late drag King pioneer Diane Torr.

She has a well-established facilitation practice, which is vital to the way she makes, researches and produces new work. Her most recent workshop was at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, looking at the ‘Body as Sculpture’. Stephanie is interested how an object can change her interaction and intimacy with others, creating visual and poetic scores to act as a dramaturgical key to unlocking subject-matter or narratives for performance. Her work situates between a physical and sculptural practice, developing live and documented performative outcomes where sound, movement, image, object, light and costume intersect. Stephanie engages with performance as a way to explore the relationship between body and space, especially around gender and sexuality. She uses the body as a tool for measurement and is interested in the ‘extended body’ and ‘body as object’ to consider questions around ‘the self’, ‘the other’ and ‘the theatrical’.

Stephanie Black Daniel’s residency was commissioned by the British Council and Creative Scotland under the Open Bodies Residency programme, designed jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery. More information here.

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Curatorial statement, by Guilherme Altmayer

Stephanie Black-Daniels has been investigating ways to extend the female body through fabricated, sculptural garments and wearable forms. Through actions made with these creations, the artist explores the limits of her own body’s capability so as to think about the relationship between all of our bodies and the spaces they present in. Her work approaches a discussion of gender and sexuality in performance shot through with connotations of chastity, sensuality and savagery. For her first visit to Brazil, and Despina residency, the artist voiced her intention to note respectfully the territory she would be operating in. She arranged one-on-one workshops called “In the City, Performing Women” with four female-identified individuals she connected to through an open call. Working through conceptions of rituals and savagery, identity and surface, rhythms and sexuality, the seven-hour long encounters held the possibility of intense exchange: of experiences, of knowledge of the local terrain, and of each participant’s performance practice. The artist and collaborators negotiated the dissimilarities and affinities of their bodies, their aesthetic and/or political distance, and through these transatlantic encounters that they enacted, expanded territory has been claimed.

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by Frederico Pellachin

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Vinícius Pinto Rosa

Vinícius Pinto Rosa
01.09.2018 - 30.09.2018

Lives and works in Niterói (RJ). He currently holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and works as an assistant to Rio-based artist Laura Lima. His practice incorporates issues that cross identities and subjectivities in the production of objects and installations, with the body itself as a power of image and action, which, in turn, establishes new forms of relations, access and images of the world and of the other. His practice is very influenced by the universe of  a carpentry (where his father works and where much of his experience within the studio space takes place).

His works reach both performance and design fields and question constructions, polarizations and binary lines already established. They also reveal a hybridism and a multiplicity of activations and accesses that the body can create from a direct relation with the object. Vinicius has been developing the projects “Devices” and “Baseline” since 2014 and they have already been presented in several Brazilian galleries and art spaces.

Vinicius Pinto Rosa’s residence was commissioned by the British Council and Creative Scotland under the Open Bodies Residency programme, designed jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery. More information here.

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Curatorial statement by Raphael Fonseca

In Vinícius Pinto Rosa’s recent work, sculptural practice that connects to the human body is of central interest. Drawing from their family’s expertise in crafting jewellery and fashion accessories, Pinto Rosa constructs adornments that both decorate the body and disrupt the normative dressing of it. For Open Bodies, Pinto Rosa created an ensemble of wearable works made from paper. They initially were fitted to the artists’ body to be photographed, then suspended from the ceiling at heights that related which parts of the body’s anatomy had held them. The effect is to summon a presence fluctuating between human and post-human, born in the experimental conflux of materials and the material of life itself.

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by Frederico Pellachin

 

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Henry McPherson

Henry McPherson
01.09.2018 - 30.09.2018

Lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. His practice in composition, improvisation and performance is embedded in mixed-media score-production, devised performance, present-time composition, cross and inter-disciplinary practice, through which he explores personal and collective identities, musical and otherwise performative traditions. Henry’s inter-media work centres around the body-mind, score-object as mediator, the subject of invocation, impulse-led generation, queer and sustainable art practices, and meanings of ownership in collectively-generated improvisation. He is a founding member of Glasgow’s mixed-arts collective EAST (Experimental Artists Social Theatre), KUI piano duo, and the chamber trio Savage Parade.

In recent years, Henry has collaborated with groups and individuals such as the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scotland, Martyn Brabbins, RedNote ensemble, The Glasgow New Music Expedition, Garth Knox, Zilan Liao and Germany’s Ensemble Modern. He is a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland composition dept., and is an award holder of the Dinah Wolfe Memorial Prize for Composition (2014); Scottish Opera’s Opera Sparks Competition (2016); the Patron’s Prize for Composition (2017); the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Composition Club Prize (2017); the Harriet Cohen Memorial Music Award (2018); and was a nominee for the inaugural Scottish Awards for New Music (2017).

He has been awarded residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativiy (CA, Alberta, The Creative Gesture: Collective Composition Lab for Music and Dance), Despina (Open Bodies Residency, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, with the Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh) and Skammdegi Residency and Festival (IS, Olafsfjördur).

Henry McPherson’s residency was commissioned by the British Council and Creative Scotland under the Open Bodies Residency programme, designed jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery. More information here.

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Curatorial statement, by Raphael Fonseca

Artist Henry McPherson trained as a musician and his expressions in visual art frequently take sound as their point of departure. The artist has followed interests in experimental ways of using classical instruments, in durational sound pieces, and in the cross-currents between the concert hall and white cube gallery. During Open Bodies, Henry recorded sound from different Rio locations, each with its own particular queer cultural importance. Bars, cruising spots, places of shelter and the streets of the city inform his practice. Different routes have been assembled in sound, and during the presentation the artist plays these tracks to individuals at their request in the upstairs bathroom, one of Despina’s most intimate spaces.

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Miro Spinelli

Miro Spinelli
01.09.2018 - 30.09.2018

Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a Master’s Degree in Performance from the Performing Arts PhD Programme at UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). Currently, Spinelli is investigating how performance and its radical connection with materiality, writing and dissent can generate forces on the subjects, creating possible counter-ontologies. Since 2014, he has been developing  the continuous project and series “Gordura Trans” (“Trans Fat”), mixing performance, photographs, texts and installations.

This project has been presented in several Brazilian cities and abroad with the collaboration of artists such as Fernanda Magalhães, Jota Mombasa and Jup Pires. In 2017, he was awarded a scholarship (along with artist Luisa Marinho) to take part in a residence programme at the Andreas Züst Library, in Switzerland, where they developed together the “Chupim Papers”, which shed light on themes such as precariousness, abjection, decoloniality, politics of affection and transgenderism, focusing on the body and its poetics and political potencial.

Miro Spinelli’s residence was commissioned by the British Council and Creative Scotland under the Open Bodies Residency programme, designed jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery. More information here.

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Curatorial statement by Guilherme Altmayer

Miro Spinelli develops his artistic research from his own body and from the traces left by it, to think about states such as abjection and precariousness. In the “Gordura Trans” (Fat Trans) series, composed of performance actions (seventeen performed to date), Miro presents his naked body in contact with various types of media such as soybean oil, grease, butter and palm oil. The particular material for each action is chosen with political consideration for the geographical and social context in which the action is presented. While smeared in oily, greasy, sticky substances, the artist moves in an unpredictable way, with care and difficulty, dissolving the boundary between his body and the space and simultaneously establishing a relationship with the public by making eye contact. In the Open Bodies residency at Despina, Spinelli broadened his field of investigation from the Gordura Trans series to explore substances changing in chemical reaction, and made traces beyond, but still inseparable from, his body. Using as a base many litres of recycled cooking oil, caustic soda and water, he produced soap in large quantities. Common sense makes us think of soap as a symbol of cleanliness and hygiene. However, here with soap the artist invades the gallery space to spoil, a stain soiling the white cube in a spread from one of its corners. The stain makes reference to the colour of skin, visually presenting many different shades. These are imagined skins that live as part of diverse bodies, which provoke a rethink of polarising description, they blur categories (as well as corners), and open up cracks onto many other places that there might be to situate oneself in the world.

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