Studio Visits

When I meet Anaisa Franco at her studio, which is situated near the cemetery of the Consolação neighbourhood, it is almost empty. I arrive two days before she is leaving São Paulo for a residency at the art and technology lab Mediaestruch in Sabadell, a city 20 km north-west of Barcelona. There, she will have the opportunity to further develop her projects linking art and technology. Due to the large amounts of time, research and multiple expertise needed for these artworks, Anaisa is used to collaborating. She explains that she usually conceptualises a piece and creates a prototype in her studio, which she then sends to a media lab for finalisation: programming, animations, sound, music etc. This way of working is quite common in the field of the so-called new media arts, since they depend on the media labs‘ and centres‘ equipment, resources and know-how. Thus, Anaisa has already won scholarships and residency opportunities to develop her work before going to L‘Estruch, for example in Taipei, Taiwan in 2008 or at the renowned MECAD/ESDi school in Barcelona in 2007.





Whereas she studied Visual Arts at the FAAP programme in São Paulo, Anaisa would soon discover that she was more interested in media and technologies than pursuing a fine art path. This led her to studying a Master in Digital Art and Technology in Plymouth, England. With this background, she links poetic language and imagery to technology and digital media in her works, an apparent contrast she bridges extremely well. In her work “Controlled Dream Machine“ (2007), Anaisa shows the connection of the conscious with the unconscious, the body as outside of the human with the mind as hidden and obscure inside. She explains that she wanted to build a machine that can feel and think like humans. In the piece, two robot legs hang from a ceiling and their dreams are expressed by an animation on a screen that is part of the installation. The legs move according to the motor activities of a human person sleeping, with small light bulbs inside of them representing neural activity. The legs thus refer to the conscious or physical part of a human, however, they are only fragments of the body as a whole. Whereas dreaming is the processing of stimuli and impressions of the day in our unconsciousness at nighttime, the legs seem to be in search for the body‘s identity. They react with the animation, thus visualising the tension between the conscious and the unconscious, body and mind. The work has been shown at several institutions and festivals, such as Media Lab Madrid in 2007 and the CologneOFF Festival in Germany in the same year.


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My interest in Monica Rizzolli‘s work stems from when I learned about various performance projects she was involved in. One of those is her work for In.CoRpo.Ro (2004-2007), an artistic event organised in São Paulo, consisting of three editions and fourth one in form of a magazine, and dealing with issues of performance art and practice as well as integrating seminars and theoretic debates. Monica works with topics evolving around the body, gender, human relations, and their role in society. One of her performances, “Lição de Afeto“ (Lesson of Affect - 2003/2004) included asking people on the São Paulo subway for hugs. In a place that is usually crowded, but where people rarely interact and may even feel isolated, the artist put the frontiers between private and public space, approximation and separation into question and challenged notions of accepted and normal behaviour. Coming from a performance background and with an art education from the university UNESP, Monica still engages with those topics in the paintings she produces today.

I am visiting her studio in Santo Amaro. It is a two-storey house that belongs to a photographer and which allows for a lot of space for her to work. On the second floor of the building, Monica has set up her easel. At the moment I visit her, she is just finishing works for her exhibition at the newly opening Central Galeria de Arte in Pinheiros in November 2010.

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