Newsletter 196
January 2021
We are preparing for the residency season of 2021, that starts in April. This newsletter tells about the residents in October, November 2020. See residents 2020 for an impression of earlier residencies.
Covid hit us in 2020 (40 % of the residencies had to be canceled) but we nevertheless hosted many beautiful residencies. More info on the current situation and our policy concerning Covid is on this page. Nazaré Soares (Spain) was working on I am Half Sick of Shadows: an audio-visual composition based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Bells. She defines her work as a “Cinematic Ceremony”: abstract in image, sounds and narratives, but with lots of associations for those who are open for them.
A young woman walks quietly through a constantly vibrating cave, on music related to the seven tantric chakras. The cave can be seen as womb, a shelter and a space where one feels the feminine energy of origins. The walk is an immersion of body and senses, and may symbolize processes of mourning, searching for vital cycles and a navigation to an unknown future. It bears a transformation, but towards where?, towards what? Nazaré was deeply inspired by Pego do Sino, also known as the Canyon of the Bells. It is a biodiversity hotspot, but also a place full of history and legends. Nazaré is looking for ways to include it in her Cinematic Ceremony. Monica de Miranda (Portugal) had residencies at OBRAS for almost 10 years. This year she visited us in June and for a short period in August, and she intends to return in November. Her art work generally takes the form of videos incorporated in installations. Her current two focal points in her residency are violence against women and the impact that slavery still has nowadays. In her June residency she was considering whether she could use the destruction of the landscape by marble quarrying as a metaphor for violence against women. And in her August residency she did research on the history of slavery in the Alentejo in the 16th-19th century. Her artist talk was informal but impressive and made us very curious to next steps.
Veridiana Leite (Brazil, currently living in Lisbon) is a landscape painter. But her landscapes are abstract in composition and color. They are collages of impressions: objects sometimes floating through a hallucinating sky, sometimes quietly resting in a dreamy atmosphere. Veridiana was very productive, but also took time to experiment with small drawings, transparent plastic sheets and an xx-size canvas.
In the last week of November she had exhibition entitled Habitat, in Zaratan, Lisbon. She showed work that she made during her residency. Elly Heisse (Canada) came to prepare an installation for her next exhibition. She made photos and drawings and designed a set up. Elly tries to visualize blurring borders between the human body and nature. She made, for instance, small drawings of creatures that are partly tree and partly human limps. Another fascination is to play with dimensions and sizes. She combined landscape photos with the blood veins network of the retina of her own eyes. And she was deeply impressed by the inhuman dimensions of abandoned marble quarries.
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