Studio Visits

My studio visit with Elaine Tedesco is strictly speaking not a real visit. Since she lives in Porto Alegre, a city in the South of Brazil, we decide to use technology and have a meeting on Skype. Elaine explains that she enjoys living in Porto Alegre, where not everything feels like it has been done before. She does not need any larger infrastructure or facilities for her artistic practice, but puts emphasis on the importance of an atmosphere shaped by the people who live in a place. And with 1.5 million inhabitants, the capital of the state Rio Grande do Sul is not that small - even if measured by Brazilian standards. The city‘s location is quite convenient for Elaine, who has participated twice in the Bienal do Mercosul (1999 and 2005), the well-known biennial event focussing on artists from the countries of the Southern Common Market economic and political agreement, taking place in Porto Alegre.



Elaine‘s work is highly influenced by photography. She explains that she got her first Leica camera when she was only 15 years old. Her work today can roughly be described as an entanglement of photography and participation. Starting point of her practice is the body and our physical relation with the world. With her works “Cabines para Isolamento“ (Cabins for Isolation - 1999) and “Camas Públicas“ (Public Beds - 1999), she proposed contrary behavioural options to the audience in the Mercado Público de Porto Alegre, the large commercial market hall with more than 100 stands, where the work was exhibited on the 2nd floor: One could decide to enter the wooden cabins and close the doors, leaving the outside world with all of its stress behind, or lie down on the large scale bed conceived for six people, and by exposing oneself share the intimate experience of being in a bed with the public passing through the market.



In 2007, Elaine was invited to participate in the 52nd Venice Biennial, where she showed her work “Guaritas“ (Sentry Boxes - 2005/2007). The piece is a series of photographs of the tiny guarding stations found throughout Brazilian cities. Elaine explains that as a child, she used to go inside similar sentry cabins located on the beach to look out on the sea. In the 1990s, she realised that these cabins moved more and more into the cities. They can be interpreted as sign of the economic gap in the country, where one small group feels they need to protect their belongings against an exterior threat, and who thus hire guards who watch and protect their houses - usually in gated communities - day and night. Due to the size of the cabins, the guards can‘t lie down to sleep and thus stay alert, watching from their cabins that so immensely differ from the houses of their employers they protect.


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It is a hot São Paulo spring day when I visit Flora Assumpção in her studio. I had seen her work in August 2010 at Galeria Emma Thomas and Baró in São Paulo, where I went for an event titled “The Creators Project“. In the midst of the flurry of open bar, concerts and new media projects, during a calm moment outside in the patio, I saw her giant silver snake on the wall surrounding the outside of the gallery space. From inside the gallery, visitors could already see it through the large glass facade opening up to the patio of the industrial building. During my research, I found out that Flora was the artist behind this piece and I wanted to meet her to know more about her work. So here I am at her studio, which smells of the delicious cake Flora is baking.



She explains how she came to working with the snakes as one of her major visual forms and distinctive mark and how this reptile‘s symbolic and mythological attributions are connected with that decision. Flora used to draw the hand rails of São Paulo busses and how they wind like snakes through the public transport systems of this city and any other city in the world. The serpent is perceived as the sinful creature who offered Eve the forbidden fruit and led to mankind‘s expulsion from paradise, but also as mythological being. It was held sacred in the ancient world and believed to be immortal due to its moulting and the capacity to regrow its skin, making it the sign of pharmacies and healing today, and perceived as a clever, ambiguous, deceitful creature. Flora explains that her use of this imagery is as rich and pointing to several subjects and topics that are as multifaceted as the meanings and significations this reptile stands for.



She uses this metaphor to conceive intriguing photographs that leave the viewer in the uncertain of whether they have been digitally altered and how the pictures come into being. I am puzzled and amazed when Flora pulls out some old necklaces she has inherited from her grandmother or bought on flea markets and explains that these are the originals for the photographs she takes. I marvel at these common and quite plain objects, that obviously open up for a much greater visual potential than it may seem. Between a shiny consumer object and containing a supernatural and phantasmatic twist, they are intriguing visual expressions between the abstract and the very concrete.


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Camila Sposati works in a beautiful house designed in modernist tradition, which transmits a certain tranquility and calmness. Its large open passageways and clear-cut layout communicate order and tidiness in the best sense of their meanings.


Camila makes coffee and we start talking about her photographs of crystals and her smoke experiments. An artist with quite unusual working methods, Camila tells me about her research and that she spends more time in laboratories than at the easel whose cliché image still adheres to artists today. Camila talks about atoms, chemical compositions, different colours, and seven different shapes according to the material she uses to grow her crystals. Her work also alludes to buildings and construction, since architects were often inspired by the flawless shapes of crystals and the way they grow, such as Joseph Paxton who built the Victorian style Crystal Palace for the first World Exhibition in London in 1851.


















The enlarged photographs of Camila‘s crystals nevertheless reveal the defects and not at all perfect surfaces that are concealed by the images of crystals we have in mind, such as “Sculpture of Sodium Chlorate“ (2007).

Camila talks about artificially grown nature and its flaws, and transfers this to a more abstract level of city structures like São Paulo, which grow in a not as organised and rather chaotic way, as well as to science, its representation systems, and concepts that seem infallible, but maybe aren‘t always as perfect as we think. Camila‘s quest is to look into the origins and etymology of things, find new representational systems of science, natural history and our established simplifying schemata. She explains that due to her time spent in laboratories and talking with scientists, she has learned a lot about this area of work, research, and a totally different way of thinking. While she is interested in the artistic aspect of it, she nevertheless finds it fascinating to enter new perspectives and modes of thinking.

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I visit Fabio Okamoto at his place in Brooklin. After a rather rough bus ride, I arrive and we start chatting about living in São Paulo and the cultural diversity between its population. Fabio has an education from the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Universidade de São Paulo. During the week, he works as graphic designer. He has set up his works on the dining table and we start looking at his photographs, which he neatly keeps in cardboard cases.



Fabio explains that he started working with black and white photography and analogue cameras. He tried to find forms and details in the city that the not so attendant viewer would not even notice. His images of São Paulo from the series Hidden City (2001/2003) were taken from one of the high buildings in the city centre and show the typical skyline of never ending concrete. Due to the multiple exposure Fabio employs in surrealist tradition, there seems to be a motion that opens a view on the city the naked eye cannot see. These photographs reveal the feeling of movement that is so typical for this metropolis. In some of the images, the architecture is covered by a veil, a piece of cloth the wind blows into a certain form, which repeats itself in other parts of Fabio’s work. Then, there is a series of spaces that most paulistanos usually would not know themselves, demolished buildings in the city centre, that Fabio prefers to depict at night when there is less activity and a more interesting lighting to capture.

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