Uncategorized | Despina

Ania Reynolds

01.08.2021 - 31.01.2022

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.

Compa – Women’s Archive

2020 - 2021

Compa – Women’s Archive is the first Brazilian digital archive totally dedicated to the memory, herstories, struggles, achievements, initiatives, micropolitics and daily revolutions of women and the feminist movement in the country.

The archive aims to map, retrieve and make publicly available collections of t-shirts, zines, pamphlets, flags, posters, chants, poetry, bottoms, scarves, manifestos and other objects and memorabilia that document, articulate and elaborate transdisciplinarily the ongoing narratives and struggles.

The archive collection is built on two fronts:

Research and curatorial work in which we invite women and initiatives that operate in different fields of action to participate in the effort to document these memories.
Collective construction based on the autonomous engagement of organisations, collectives, women’s movements, activists and independent feminists who want to collaborate, making their collections and materials available directly in the archive.
Compa is a project by Despina in collaboration with Lanchonete Lanchonete and its implementation (phase I) was funded by the International Relief Fund of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut and other partners: www.goethe.de/relieffund.

Pillars
Compa (short for “companheira”, an affectionate term used between allies in activism) was conceived following three conceptual pillars:

1 – The concept of “history from below”, that looks at history through the perspective of ordinary, oppressed, non-conformist people and marginalized groups, recognizing and recording reports and conflicts that escape the hegemonic narrative of dominant groups;

2 – The intersectional feminism perspective, which understands oppressions through layers that include gender, race, class, age, religion and other issues;

3 – The recognition of collectivity as a revolutionary and necessary field of action to imagine other possible worlds and to redefine the dominant excludenting logic.

Crossing Walls: Performance between residencies

On March 16, halfway through the artist Marcela Cavallini’s residency, Despina closed on recess due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Following up the initial proposal of conducting residencies within the residency, and in dialogue with six other artists – Edzita Sigo Viva, Clarice Rito, Tuk Melo, Ara Nogueira, Dulce Lysyj and Anna Cecilia Cabral – the exchanges continued remotely and the developments are a document of this difficult time in which we isolated ourselves in the face of an unprecedented crisis.

The results can be seen in Àquelas que Intentam Atravessar Paredes: Performance entre Residências, and also in O que é necessário à residência agora?, both works produced collaboratively by the artists.

Daniela Vasconcellos

Formada em economia, psicopedagogia e arte educação com pós graduação em Filosofia pela PUC-RJ, trabalha com artes visuais desde 2017.

Fez acompanhamento de projeto com Denise Cathilina na EVA Parque Lage e na Escola sem Sítio com Marcelo Campos, Cadu e Pollyana Quintella.

Utiliza o macramê (técnica de tecelagem) com diferentes materiais, mas principalmente com a fotografia, que possui um papel importante como coadjuvante de todo processo.

Seu interesse recai sobre a memória e o sentido das relações do indivíduo com sua própria história e com o mundo em um diálogo sem fim.

Instagram: @danigv

Seleção de trabalhos

Adrien Pelletier

01.02.2020 - 31.03.2020

Born in France in 1981, lives and works in Paris. Adrien studied Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins (BA) and at the Royal College of Art (MA) in London, UK. For many years, he has been an art director for fashion magazines in London and Paris. He is also a painter and collaborates regularly with the Villa Noailles in Hyères. His paintings tend to be naive, intimate portraits of friends, lovers and strangers. They can be goofy, sexy or innocent. Lately his work has taken a more journalistic approach and his practice is drifting towards documentary, combining interviews with painted portraits.

In 2017, Adrien was invited by Jean Pierre Blanc, head of La Villa Noailles, to an Art Residency on the “Ile du Levant” in France. He painted 45 portraits of people who resided on this tiny island, a naturist village perched on a rock in the mediterranean sea. The series depicts a small community of strong-willed individuals who choose to live life their way, with no clothes, no cars, at a different pace.

The focus of his Despina residency project is to portray the cultural resistance to the far right and the possible interactions between communities. Adrien will paint portraits and do interviews with activists, artists, intellectuals, free spirits, people working on the environment, women’s right, afro-American rights, LGBTQ rights and the protection of the Amazonian populations.

More information
Instagram: @atelieradrienp

Pictures Gallery
to be posted soon

Senado Tomado #12

Quinta, 28.11.2019

Convidamos todxs para a nossa última noite de ateliês abertos de 2019 – SENADO TOMADO #12 – que acontece na próxima quinta-feira, dia 28 de novembro, a partir das 19 horas.

Para esta edição festiva, preparamos uma mostra especial que marca o encerramento da residência dos artistas Mark Hilton, Matei Vogel, Mégane Voghell e Stine Kvam.

Reunindo pinturas, desenhos, objetos e vídeo, a mostra apresenta o resultado de um processo de imersão na prática em ateliê, que contou com o suporte curatorial de Dani Mattos, Keyna Eleison, Raphael Fonseca, Victor Gorgulho; e acompanhamento do artista Pablo Ferretti.

Além da mostra, destacamos a fala do curador Per Brunskog, que também participou do nosso programa de residências. Brunskog irá conversar com o público sobre a sua trajetória e apresentar suas pesquisas mais recentes.

No térreo, os ateliês dxs artistas associadxs à Despina estarão abertos à visitação pública – venha conhecer os trabalhos mais recentes de Ana Clara Mattoso, Carol Medeiros, Daniela Vasconcellos, Lara Lima, Laura Lydia, Luiz Arthur Ribeiro, Pablo Ferretti, Paula Santos e Sarah Knill-jones.

E nas carrapetas, os dj’s Carol Medeiros e Frederico Pellachin trazem uma seleção fina, provocativa e dançante.

Esperamos vocês!

Estamos na Rua do Senado, 271 – Centro.

Entrada gratuita

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A residência de Mégane Voghell contou com o suporte do Conseil des arts de Montréal, e é fruto de uma parceria entre a Despina e o centro canadense de arte Diagonale.

Mark Hilton

01.10.2019 - 30.11.2019

Born in Australia, lives and works in New York (USA). Hilton draws on diverse inspirations from his interaction within the world, filtering and processing aspects of contemporary life that fascinate him into scenes of abstract figuration.

He harnesses the restraints of the picture plane to activate a freedom from within, playing with this energy, constantly pushing and pulling forms, twisting positive and negative spaces with convulsing shapes and lines to engage a visual language that weaves genre within a sexualized dark humor.

Although displaying an outward looking vitality, the works are entrenched within the development of an intimate, interior language that tends to cross-pollinate, exchanging mannerisms, habits and turns of phrase.

More information
https://www.markhilton.co/

Pictures Gallery
by Frederico Pellachin

Gabriela Noujaim

Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 36 years old. Artist represented by Galeria Simone Cadinelli Arte Contemporânea

Gabriela is inserted in a tradition of exploring the limits and possibility of engraving, with names like Fayga Ostrower, Anna Letycia, Anna Maria Maiolino, Anna Bella Geiger and Leya Mira Brander, to name a few. Graduated in Printmaking from the School of Fine Arts of UFRJ in 2007, the artist has been structuring her poetics from the interest in the technical image constructed from videos, photographs and, more initially, the engraving, and by the idea to fix an image in time

Important exhibitions

Verbo 2018 – Gallery Vermelho – Sp, Launch of the book “Gift 2016” International Art Festival – Sp Arte 2017, Anima Auction at Gallery Luisa Strina 2016 -Sp. In 2015 she took part at the group show “Se Liga” at CCBB RJ and the “Technô” project Oi Futuro Flamengo RJ; was a finalist in the 3m Love Songs Festival at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in 2014, SP; participated in the Electronic Language International Festival (FILE) 2013; in 2012 was nominated for Pipa Award; took part at the 64th Salon Paranaense and the exhibition “Young Masters Prize Rupert Cavendish”, London, England; in 2011, she received the Honorable Mention in the video art festival “Lumen EX”, Badajoz, Spain; and received the Acquisition Prize on the 39th Exhibition of Contemporary Art of Saint Andrea, SP.

More information
Website: http://gabinoujaim.blogspot.com.br

Selection of works (horizontal scrolling)

Ben Gooding

01.07.2019 - 31.07.2019

Lives and works in London, UK, where he teaches Printmaking at Camberwell College of Art with the University of the Arts London and practices as a Fine Artist. Having achieved a 1st class degree in Fine Art (Printmaking) from the Cambridge School of Art, he completed his Masters Degree at Central St. Martin’s School of Art and Design in London in 2008. He is a contributing member of “Saturation Point Projects”, an editorial & curatorial collective of reductive, geometric and systems based artists where he continues an on-going series of published artist interviews.

His work is primarily grounded in a systems based drawing practice which explores how a very simple set of initial rules can generate highly complex structures & compositions. Often he uses the iteration of an identical line as a starting point but the final outcome is always based on certain mathematical principles that underpin each piece.

His residency at Despina is a continuation of a body of work he developed on the Tasarim Bakkali artist residency in Istanbul in 2018, in which he sort to “explode” his drawing practice into 3 dimensions. Here in Brazil, the intention is to create a number of installational works using coloured thread to connect a series of predetermined geometric wall based drawings. The Istanbul works were all realised in black thread, but the structures that emerge at Despina will be rendered in a movement of 3 colours, each blending and merging into the others.

On his return to London he will be curating a large group exhibition at Arthouse1 gallery entitled “Iterations”, further exploring the manifold ways in which artists use repetition of form to generate elegant and beguiling works of art.

He has recently had solo exhibitions in Istanbul, Vancouver and London and has been in numerous group shows including “8 Lines” at Platform A Gallery in Middlesborough, “Momentum” at Angus-Hughes gallery London, “In Line” at the Griffin Gallery London, “Static/Kinetic” at Alice Black Gallery London, and “From Centre” at the Loud & Western Building, London.

This residency was made possible by the generous support of a Staff Development Fund from the University of the Arts London.

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Pictures Gallery (horizontal scrolling)
by Frederico Pellachin

Maga Berr

16.05.2019 - 31.07.2019

Born in Lima (Peru), lives and works in Amsterdam (Netherlands). Witnessing diverse power struggles for emancipation in her country of origin has influenced her practice. Her goal at the moment is to carry out the project “A house for the un-known”, which will be developed within the Despina Residency Programme and in the city where she lives, Amsterdam (within the residency context of CBK Zuidoost).

In this project, Berr is interested to observe the social inequalities within the urban systems of housing, urban planning and design. How do people get excluded or included? And why? Part of the problem is due gentrification, mostly a consequence of our unequal societies. In her artistic practice, she usually explores and challenges social or historical inequalities through a sculptural process. To develop her project in Rio, she connected with people who were positively or negatively affected by this situation of urban inequality. During the process, she used found materials in combination with her own constructions. Berr also coordinated a sculpture workshop with residents of vulnerable areas of the city, the result of which was shared at Despina’s space along with the final showcase of residences.

More information
Website: https://magaberr.net/

This residency project is financially supported by the Mondriaan Fonds and the Stichting Stokroos Foundation.

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Pictures Gallery (horizontal scrolling)
by Frederico Pellachin