| Project title: | 21 Houses and Other Stories |
| Location: | Krowji, Redruth, Cornwall, UK |
| Date(s): | 24-29 June 2024 |
Artist Statement
Inspired by my personal experience as an immigrant and my Brazilian cultural background, I am fascinated by gathering, assembling and creating narratives, reflecting on identity and belonging.
I work through autoethnography to explore the connections and common meanings among people’s unique journeys, recognising and claiming that everything produced is a result of specificities of our own lived, embodied experience in a particular place and time.
Connected with my lived experience, my practice explores themes linked with borders and border-crossers and the consequences in terms of multiple belonging. I am interested in investigating how people translate their own identity through things that we carry in our journeys and things we make and exchange, creating room for interconnection. I am also curious to explore objects’ embedded narratives correlating with cultural background explored through the lenses of folklore, sacred spaces and spiritual syncretism.
My artwork responses are mostly drawing with fibres and textiles, establishing a deep emotional connection with my long line of matriarchs, related to my memories of growing up around women and their full basket of ongoing yarn projects. But lately, I am also expanding and establishing the role of writing and the text more firmly in my work, and exploring different materials.
Contextual Statement
The 21 Houses and Other Stories is a project developed and realised at Krowji, Redruth, involving the exchanges of my artworks, based on the 21 houses that I have lived in, for participants’ artworks and personal letters.
The project investigates the idea that connectedness can be experienced through the process of making art and the exchanging of produced things, as outlined by the question:
How does sharing interpersonal narratives through writing and art practice, centred on my 21 Houses and involving audience participation, facilitate meaningful conversations and foster social connections?
Framed by the concepts of Materiality focused on the things we make, Autoethnography and Gift-giving as a social practice, this project is inspired by my lived experiences as a Brazilian immigrant and reflections on “multiple belonging” (Boym 2001:336), moving from house to house, town to town and country to country.
Our sense of self is intertwined with the objects we create, use and exchange, whether consciously or not (Tilley et al. 2006; Miller 2008), and our connections with people tend to be correlated with our relationships with material things (Miller 2008).
Based on my living experiences of moving houses and embodying homes, my body of work explored the relationship between line drawings and memories, translating them into yarn, fabric and objects.
The houses are not just about the places I have lived. Nor a statement qualifying the number 21 as big or small. It is about the moving; the movement embedded in the migration journey and the ever-changing perspectives (hooks 2015). It is about the inevitable thoughts connected to belonging and border-crossing, embodying my autoethnographic journey.
The houses are about the things that I chose to bring with me and the things that I decided to leave behind. The silly-precious life treasures that I carried to build my shrines, and the fabric scraps and yarn that always find their way into my luggage and moving boxes.
The houses hold fragments of memories potentially recreated while moving (hooks 2015) and in the movement, translated by line drawing to tell stories (Ingold 2015), investigating the relationship between the lines, the memory of moving, and the movement of my hands.
Once the body of work was completed, more than an exhibition, the public-facing outcome presented an invitation for artwork exchanges, or gift-giving, considering the absence of clear comparable value between the given and received artworks, fostering social interactions (Sansi-Roca 2015) and connections.
Krowji, Redruth was selected to host this project considering its status as the biggest creative hub in Cornwall, enhancing engagement with other artists. The space embraced a different exhibition every day (sometimes every few minutes), framed by the exchanges within the local and wider communities between professional artists and self-proclaimed makers and crafters. All the things exchanged, their embedded narratives and how the exhibition transformed itself during the process were documented.
Project Documentation
21 Houses
Improv Quilts
After producing the Tufted 21 Houses, I wanted to explore the theme in a different medium and style. I chose to create Improv Quilts, resulting in four quilts contemplating the 21 houses in total. Although the uniqueness of the line drawings from each building was lost, each house maintained its singularity through its shapes and the characteristics of the improv quilting. They were made with fabric scraps, some recycled from old projects, some I have kept for 15 years.
Shrines
The Shrines were a way to contemplate and represent the objects that have special meaning in our homes and our lives. They are a mix of found objects in nature and charity shops or lost in a corner of my own house. The joy of finding and selecting these objects is as important a part of the process as putting them together while creating their narratives.
Newspaper/monoprints
The Making Station
Since the beginning, the MS had the purpose of potentializing the participation of a diverse audience and being inclusive, allowing people to make something on the spot and exchange with me. The MS was partially funded by the Creative Kernow.
Artwork Exchanges and Transformation of the Space
Website and Social Media