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MAP collaborates with the Crafts Council

MAP collaborates with the Crafts Council

The Crafts Council Collection was initiated in 1972 to document trends and innovation in the materials, processes, skills and technologies of contemporary craft and is now the UK’s foremost collection of contemporary craft, embracing all disciplines and featuring the most important makers of the last 40 years. In this episode, Shubhasree Purkayastha and Annabelle Campbell look at the works of Jivya Soma Mashe and Tadek Beutlich exploring their trajectories as artists, engagement with natural materials, and themes of community.

Duration : 8m
Maturity Level : all

MAP collaborates with the Peabody Essex Museum

MAP collaborates with the Peabody Essex Museum

The roots of the Peabody Essex Museum date to the 1799 founding of the East India Marine Society, an organization of Salem captains and supercargoes who had sailed beyond either the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. The society’s charter included a provision for the establishment of a “cabinet of natural and artificial curiosities,” which is what we today would call a museum. Society members brought to Salem a diverse collection of objects from the northwest coast of America, Asia, Africa, Oceania, India and elsewhere. By 1825, the society moved into its own building, East India Marine Hall. In collaboration with the Peabody Essex Museum, this episode looks at a photograph by Jyoti Bhatt from MAP’s collection and a painting by Ram Kumar from the Peabody Essex Museum, their juxtaposition bringing forth an exploration of modernity and post-colonial identity in urban and rural India.

Duration : 7m
Maturity Level : all

MAP collaborates with the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Museum

MAP collaborates with the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Museum

Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Museum is a museum of Indian sculptures, bronzes, manuscripts, paintings, drawings, miniature paintings, woodwork, bead work and ancient and contemporary coins in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. In this episode, Sujata Parsai and Riya Kumar look at a Jain pata and a work by Syed Haider Raza exploring their symbolic meaning and concepts of sacred geometry across time and space.

Duration : 8m
Maturity Level : all

MAP collaborates with the Detroit Institute of Arts

MAP collaborates with the Detroit Institute of Arts

The Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection located in Michigan, USA is regarded as among the top six museums in the United States with an encyclopedic collection that spans the globe from ancient Egyptian and European works to contemporary art.Katherine Kasdorf, Associate Curator at the DIA, traces the journey and history of two powerful South Indian goddesses: a brahmani in MAP’s collection and a yogini currently housed at the DIA.

Duration : 10m
Maturity Level : all

MAP collaborates with the Rhode Island School of Design

MAP collaborates with the Rhode Island School of Design

The Rhode Island School of Design is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase the accessibility of design education to women. . Jan Howard and Shilpa Vijayakrishnan trace the trajectories, painting styles and subjects of two pioneering artists: Kenojuak Ashevak and Jangarh Singh Shyam.

Duration : 10m
Maturity Level : all

MAP collaborates with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston

MAP collaborates with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Laura Weinstein and Shubhasree Purkayastha trace the journey and making of two popular prints from the nineteenth century—a Battala woodcut print from MAP’s collection and a chromolithograph from the Oriental Art Studio housed at the MFA, Boston. Despite variances in style and technique, both prints feature the iconography of Krishna and Radha—the divine lovers that have captured the imagination of artists and writers for centuries.

Duration : 7m
Maturity Level : all

MAP collaborates with the Victoria & Albert Museum

MAP collaborates with the Victoria & Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is the world’s largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts, and design. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Susan Stronge and Kamini Sawhney look at the popular Tipu’s Tiger and a textile souvenir from MAP’s collection, unearthing the symbolism and hidden meaning behind both objects and shedding light on the convergence and conflict between two cultures.

Duration : 9m
Maturity Level : all

Bruna and Ricardo Pessôa de Queiroz

Bruna and Ricardo Pessôa de Queiroz

Rooted in a cultural philanthropic tradition, the Pessôa de Queiroz family has been supporting and leading the Usina de Arte project since 2015, transforming a former sugar cane factory into an Anthropocene art-botanical park, near Recife in the northeastern Brazilian region of Pernambuco. Proud of the thirty or so works already produced, Bruna Pessôa de Queiroz, its president tells us about this ambitious project.

Duration : 9m
Maturity Level : all

Ricardo Pessôa de Queiroz, Founder

Ricardo Pessôa de Queiroz, Founder

Rooted in a cultural philanthropic tradition, the Pessôa de Queiroz family has been supporting and leading the Usina de Arte project since 2015, transforming a former sugar cane factory into an Anthropocene art-botanical park, near Recife in the northeastern Brazilian region of Pernambuco. Proud of the thirty or so works already produced, Ricardo Pessôa de Queiroz, the founder of the project, tells us about it.

Duration : 6m
Maturity Level : all

Marc Pottier, curator

Marc Pottier, curator

Marc Pottier, a French curator based in Brasil have been appointed in 2021 as the new curator of Usina de Arte. He told us about the project and its future, the importance of creating site-specific works according to the local History, including exchanges with the local community, and how to open it to an international scale. Marc has these words: "To be part of the Usina de Arte adventure is, above all, to understand the importance of a project designed for the community of Santa Terezinha, a cultural project that must integrate the memory of the place and the history of this historical part of Brazil. Here, bridges must be created between the public and the art world, as education is a fundamental part of the project. With more than 40 works installed, those involved are responsible for making the Usina a reference in art in the public space. And the idea of ​​inviting foreign artists aims, in addition to provoking a fruitful dialogue with national artists, to present an exciting and inspiring region to be transposed into their works. We are just at the beginning of something very promising. The first steps already speak for us!"

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Artur Lescher

Artur Lescher

“Your Eyes”, 2012, 3 meter high, is part of the Elipse series (started in 2000) showing how a certain geometric shape that links the body issue and the eye, in particular, is capable of acting on the environment in which it is inserted. These ellipses have a shiny, reflective surface that captured and reflected the surrounding landscape, creating a hole and cut like a passage in the landscape. This work establishes a dynamic relationship with the place, sometimes borrowing images from the surrounding landscape, sometimes reflecting unexpected views. The presence of the audience completes the work, as the shapes that are produced by the geometric form are continually redrawn by the viewer and their visual perception of the work. The shape is also how our eye sees the world, a cone of vision, the ellipse is for Arthur the place where reality meets fiction. Artur Lescher stands out in the current panorama of Brazilian contemporary art for his three-dimensional works. For over thirty years, he has been presenting the result of research on the articulation between matter, form, and thought. These are works that go beyond the character of sculpture and cross the languages ​​of the installation and the object, to modify the understanding of these and the space in which they are inserted. Lescher suggests narratives, sometimes contradictory or provocative, that make room for myth and imagination. Born in 1962 in São Paulo where he lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Bene Fonteles

Bene Fonteles

Activist, plastic artist, writer, art curator, poet, shaman, and Brazilian composer, Bene Fonteles also produces works linked to mail art and research into new artistic expressions. Ecological militancy is a striking feature in his work, being the creator of the "Artist Movement for Nature", which since 1986 promotes ecological awareness and environmental education through art. Much of his work dialogues with the aesthetics and poetics of indigenous cultures. Tempo Templo’, 2018. is a round installation with six 19th-century English iron columns topped with stones found on the property. They themselves support iron sculptures symbols of African culture, seven baobabs, and various medicinal and aromatic plants... the work must be regularly activated by performances involving the neighbors of the Usina and visitors. It is a tribute to the African people who were humiliated and enslaved in the sugar cane mills during colonization. Now the symbols of their Orixás triumph in the capital-stones over the English iron columns of a country that both enslaved and “colonized” cultures. They triumph like samba and other arts not only in the so-called Brazilian popular culture, through the voice of its Afro-descendants and the mestizo people from Brazil. Bené Fonteles, 1953, Born in Bragança/ Pará, lives and works in the country in Minas Gerais.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Carlos Vergara

Carlos Vergara

‘Natureza como Matéria’ 2013, three sculptures in Corten steel. (2,50m, 1,50x1,50 each), are born from the interest that Vergara has in nature; in the sculptures in cut steel, the passage that this material undergoes over time conveys the idea of ​​a living and pulsating organism to the sculpture. All sculptures have a mutability character, as they share a continuous transformation. Like nature, steel is an index of time. They are like the organic and, symbolically, almost vegetal form of the sculptures. They are shadows or projections of a place that can be directly associated with the transitory instance of nature itself. Carlos Vergara, 1941, born in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, lives, and works in Rio de Janeiro) engraver, photographer and painter, known as one of the main representatives of the New Figuration artistic movement in Brazil.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Claudia Jaguaribe

Claudia Jaguaribe

Claudia Jaguaribe is a photographer who develops work focused on the issue of urban landscape, the environment, and especially issues on the representation of the real as a conceptual record, mixing reality and subjectivity. The materiality of her works questions the very nature of photography. It expands the traditional formats of photography, transforms images into photo-sculptures, and integrates and uses video and the internet in her installations. Her work presented is a creation of the public benches (2022), each one in tiles of a different model using images of references from the culture of Pernambuco. Different sizes. “Since I was a child, I have lived with tiles as a strong expression of art. In my house there was a wall right at the entrance with modernist tiles and every time I traveled to the Northeast, I visited relatives’ houses, churches, and squares where I saw all kinds of tiles. It always fascinated me to see symbols, drawings, and stories in this format. Today contemporary photography includes several forms of printing, among them on the tile. In this project, I continue this visual research with tiles, proposing dialogues between contemporary and a traditional support. To dialogue with Usina de Arte, I proposed the project of a set of tile benches, in an appropriation of the traditional Portuguese tile art that so influenced Brazilian art from the colonial period, through the baroque to the contemporary. The work is composed of a body of images that range from references to local popular art to historical images, maps, and photographs, images of the sugarcane culture, composing a visual narrative of the history of the Usina region and the city of Recife.” CJ Claudia Jaguaribe, 1955, born in Rio de Janeiro, lives and works in São Paulo.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Denise Milan

Denise Milan

Banquete da Terra, 2021, is like a telluric feast, resulting from millions of years of Earth formation and invites us to contemplate our origins. Composed of of Brazilian stones, table, and mirrors… into a container. Stones are in different stages of transformation, which the artist collected and cooked, the banquet emerges, a metaphor for an art and its processes, a representation of nature in its becoming. In the installation, set up around a table – a space for everyday meals and affective dynamics – dishes made from “earthly” ingredients are served, such as crystal, pyrite, ammonite, gold, silver and bronze, presented in different textures. . “It is a planetary table, which evokes the Earth. It is a space-time open to conviviality, where dialogue is still possible, and inspired by the mysteries and knowledge of nature”. Denise Milan, 1954, born in São Paulo where she lives and works, uses different media, and collaborates with specialists in science and technology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, and music.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Flavio Cerqueira

Flavio Cerqueira

Cerqueira uniquely explores personal, historical, and sometimes fictional narratives to problematize issues of class, identity, race, and gender. The presence of everyday objects creates tension with the off-scale bronze human figures to blur the boundaries between the sculpture, the architectural space, and the viewer. "Tinha Que Acontecer" (Cabeça de Bandeirante), a 2016 sculpture in bronze weighing 800 kilos, 25 meters in diameter. Flavio decided to turn the founders of São Paulo into anti-heroes. Here he “decapitated” the pioneers from the body of history and one of the heads of São Paulo fell. “It is necessary to analyze the story and tell it again”, observes the sculptor. “Despite the monuments that exist in the city in honor of the pioneers, they were barbarians. They exterminated, enslaved the Indians, and annihilated the quilombos.” Born in 1983 in São Paulo where he lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Frida Baranek

Frida Baranek

Frida Baranek has a background in Architecture and Industrial Design. Since the beginning of her career, the relationship the artist has established with the materials she uses in her works has been to challenge her resistance to achieve her metamorphosis: to build with and against herself. “Unclassified”, the sculpture approaches nature as a forest of industrial debris with its strength, fragility and uncertainty. It was created in the USA for the exhibition “The Latin American Artists of the 20th Century” at MOMA in NY. The piece is made of industrial waste stainless steel, which supports and interacts with aircraft parts, leftovers from the American military industry. At the time, there was a lot of talk about the excess that existed in the American military industry. The artist asked the US State Department for permission and provided these airplane parts to be used in the work. Frida Baranek, 1961, born in Rio de Janeiro, works and lives between Rio, Brazil and Lisbon, Portugal.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Georgia Kyriakakis

Georgia Kyriakakis

In her work, Georgia seeks to explore situations of strength and fragility, balance, and instability, present in nature, politics, social relations, and the world of work. Such relationships arise from visual poetic approximations with Geography - a wide and comprehensive area of ​​knowledge that animates the artist’s creative impulse and determines the choice and variety of means and materials used in her works. Objects, materials, words, spaces, and the meticulous articulation between the elements of the work are ways of highlighting the relationships between the virtuality of the image and the concreteness of the world. "Gaza Strip" is a set of rows of rounded stones on which a red line is drawn. It can be said that the Gaza Strip is a drawing on stone. But the title, the (military?) arrangement of the stones, the circular shape of the design and the same height at which it is made on the stones, suggest an articulation. It stimulates the mark left by a red liquid (blood?) on the surface of the stone. As the title itself indicates, the work refers to the violence and the historic war waged between Palestinians and Israelis in this small region of the Middle East. Just like the memory of historical facts and the conflict itself, the red line drawn on the stone, exposed to the weather and the passage of time, gradually fades, becomes almost imperceptible, but never completely disappears. Periodically it reappears, just like the conflict that seems to never end... It reappears strong and forcefully to remind us above all that the marks of violence are always indelible. Geórgia Kyriakakis,1961, born in Ilheús, lives and works in São Paulo.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Hugo França

Hugo França

Hugo França is a self-taught artist designer, who speaks about his furniture-sculptures coming from the forest waste. He has been the first who encouraged the creation of the Usina de Arte Art project and to have organized creative and artistic workshops and environmental education with the neighboring community. Hugo França’s work is to transform trunks, roots and parts of trees that are usually rejected. With this raw material, he draws directly on the wood following the paths that were created by nature. In production, he reframes the use of the chainsaw by carving trunks and roots and giving the works a sustainable and sculptural content. It is very represented at Usina by numerous Mobiliarios 2016-2019, a series of around 30 benches in jackfruit that one can easily find around which are scattered throughout the park. Arvore geometrizada, 2016, is a different sculpture he created and installed in one of the little lakes representing the structure of a tree. Hugo França, 1954, born in Porto Algre, works and lives between São Paulo and Trancoso.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Iole de Freitas

Iole de Freitas

Iole de Freitas immediately absorbs the transformative urgency of the environment to which she reacts in her films, Photographs, performances, and sculptures. For this ex-dancer (during 25 years), all her creations are about movement, enlarging the area of the body, speaking of light and shadow, lightness and weight. “O Peso de Cada Um”, 2015 (The weight of each one): sculpture in stainless-steel sheet, was part of the MAM exhibition in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. Despite the specificities of the material, however, some sculptures have been suspended in the air (like the one which is presented today on the ground at Usina de Arte), evolving in space like an imponderable aerial dance, opposing the idea of ​​lightness and movement to their original weight with a tenuous line between the gestural and the geometric, or between expressiveness and formal precision. Between the cloudy mirroring on one side of the plate and the concrete opacity on the other, the very materiality of this steel sheet is outlined as a simultaneously rigid and fluid body, which at times absorbs and reflects the exterior, at times asserts itself as a radical obstacle to the eye. The work of Iole de Freitas implies, at the same time, line and volume, body and membrane, tension and distension, wall, and air. Her sculptures seem to want to constantly go beyond their perimeter, go further, leave their borders, and evolve towards other spaces, dialoguing with the architecture and the landscape. Today at the Usina Iole also loves the way her sculpture dialogue with the other of the collection. Iole de Freitas (1945) born in Belo Horizonte, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Jose Spaniol

Jose Spaniol

Jose Spaniol uses everyday objects, and establishes an exchange between utilitarian and poetic functions. Since the 1990s, he has explored the relationship between his works with architecture and exhibition spaces. "Tiummmmtichamm", 2018, is a flat sculpture, built in marquetry of granite and marble. On its surface we see, on the one hand, a thin layer of water flowing over the stone, on the other hand, the representations of this movement are translated by the contrast between the white of the marble and the black of the granite. As in a mirror, the work creates a bridge between real and virtual space, bringing these two dimensions together. Its flatness contradicts the idea of ​​volume linked to sculpture, which is why the whole aesthetic experience linked to the work takes place while the observer wanders around or even above the object, starting from the image of water movement and sound. José Spaniol 1960, born in São Luiz Gonzaga, RS, works and lives in São Paulo

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Juliana Notari

Juliana Notari

In her visual and theoretical research, Juliana Notari has created a body of works that face their singularities, moving between biography, the confessional, catharsis, or relational practices. With a multidisciplinary approach, she works with the most diverse languages: performance, installation, intervention, video, photography, drawing, and object. For years, the artist has been conducting research on gender and sexism. Questions regarding the presence of the female body as opposed to a society that prides itself on virility and phallocentrism have always been part of his poetics. However, in addition to issues related to the feminine and feminism, her work also encompasses issues related to certain important themes: birth and death, sexuality, the relationship between fiction and confession, trauma, relationships of complicity/testimony and encounters between animality and humanity. In his work, these themes are always crossed by the question of sexuality and death. “Diva”, 2020. vulva wound Intervention in the landscape, Reinforced concrete, resin, and pigment. It is a “prospecting-hole-sculpture” embedded in a land devastated by sugarcane monoculture and its social traumas. A deep abscess, the work reveals the historical violence on female bodies that continue to be daily injured in many – and, depending on their color or gender, in different and asymmetrical ways – just like Gaya’s body, our Mother Earth. In addition to these bodies, Diva brings to light the immeasurable colonial traumas that, against invisibility, continue to fight for reparation. While wounded, the Diva herself continues to re-enact – since she turns over open wounds – the racial inequalities on which Brazil is based. Juliana Notari,1975, born in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil where she lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Julio Villani

Julio Villani

Julio Villani was formed between São Paulo, where he grew up, and Paris, where he forged his identity as an artist. His deliberate choice for this unfolding and the constructive form he imprinted on it give his work a dynamic dimension, which is determined, paradoxically, by unity. Where others would be affected by division and dispersion, Villani finds material and reason for concentration and reunion, opening a path that strictly follows the obsession of a look that seeks to reveal the secret face of things. Thread, line, net, knot... Julio Villani’s art is inhabited by the idea of ​​bonding, counterpoint, sometimes opposition; it is built from the organization of a coming and going, of an exchange — and it is at the heart of this, in that “between-two”, that everything happens. The problem of identity, underlying his procedure, is apprehended by a whole work around memory. The recovery process adopted by the artist and the type of recycling to which he submits the objects he integrates is his way of bringing together two temporalities with the aim of constituting a new one. "Trois Échaffaudages pour un Portrait" consists of questioning who one is at an exact moment – ​​the exercise to which Julio Villani commits himself in his Scaffoldings for a portrait – his own – consists of trying to understand how the subject became the one he became. The self-referential piece, the foundation of the project – the conical shape, the two circles of different diameters connected by three rods – resembles a popular coffee strainer holder, on which the artist coupled various elements. The first construction was quickly followed by a second, to finally become a trilogy. Nothing prevents him from adding a fourth, a fifth, an nth scaffold to the set in the future. After all, the work of the self-portrait artist has no end; there is no definitive answer to the question "Who am I?" – and the search for oneself is likely to be always prolonged. Julio Villani, 1956 born in Marilia, São Paulo, lives and works between Paris and São Paulo.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Liliane Dardot

Liliane Dardot

Lilian Dardot is a Brazilian artist, graphic designer, teacher, and political activist, mostly known for her drawings in colored pencils, her works of lithography, and book illustrations. She resumes the emphasis on painting, developing research focused on plant elements of the local flora. At the same time, he works with drawing and with new exhibition spaces, creating works in situ. “Cabanos em matas de água preta”. 2019 is an installation of three glass slides with designs printed with ceramic ink. Drawings are showing people who live in Água Preta, combined with the details of the vegetation of the Atlantic Forest, an ecosystem where the ‘Cabanos’ dwelt and hid. The artist discovered signs of what occurred during the Cabana revolt from 1832 to 1836 in the Regency period where blacks escaped and freed poor whites and small landowners Indians from the villages of Jacuípe. In the Temoratas Woods, on the banks of the dark waters of the river, between the coast and the hinterland. The blades were installed in the chosen location in the Botanical Garden of Usina de Arte, in positions oriented towards the east and west of the sun. Lilian Dardot,1946, born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais where she lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all