Paula Nishijima
Biography
Júlia Frate Bolliger
Harum Marcio
Felicitas Rohden
Vinicius Spricigo
Beto Shwafaty
Stefanie Hessler
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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