TRANSPOSING ELEMENTS

curated by Raphael Daibert

 

The open studio exhibition Transposing Elements of Brazilian artist Nathalia Favaro marks the end of the three months residency Hier und Jetz: Connections at B.L.O. Ateliers, in Berlin. In a process of reencountering the clay, a material Favaro has intimacy with, the artist delves deeper on its different uses, forms and consistency, taking inspiration from a longer research entitled “patterns of extraction”. This phase of her practice does not limit itself to only using ceramics as a medium, but has it mostly as part of a larger investigation, along with drawings, paintings and video, about the artificial remodeling of landscapes by human action.

 

Transposing Elements came up as a title from a conversation and visit to Favaro’s atelier towards the end of her residency time, noticing that the subtle gestures present in her pieces are felt as movements of displacement where different components (idea or matter) are detached from an origin and placed/used somewhere else. Her own physical move away from Brazil is felt through her work and interest in revealing the long-lasting relation to colonial residues of interference to the soil and to the land. 

In a poetic conversation held between Martinique-born philosopher Édouard Glissant and the Malian filmmaker Manthia Diawara in his film One World in Relation (2009), Glissant talks about this new vision of difference as an assemblage of “dissimilars”, drawn from his concept of relation. In regards to it, Diawara writes that “a relation between different people and places, animate and inanimate objects, visible and invisible forces” is enabled through this “dissimilarity”. Transposing Elements intends to enact through the work of Nathalia Favaro this relationship, where her different pieces perform her own language of comprehension of the world and translations of the multiplicity of landscapes she deals with.