A project inspired by a spiritual journey I had with a shaman. I’ve seen myself being with my ancestors inside the woods, dancing around the fire. While participating at their rituals, I became a female tree, and later I was the forest. Everything felt connected, and in process of changing. After this experience my artistic research has been taking a different path, looking for a symbiosis between the figure and the natural environment.
I have dedicated this painting “Metamorphosis” to my mother and to all people who had a very difficult time by doing chemotherapy, fighting for life. This painting is about healing, when your body changes, adapting itself in order to survive, like a plant.
This sculpture “Rebirth” , which you can see below, is in constant change since 2020. After I saw a stranger dying in the subway and everyone ignoring it, I decided to dedicate to this event a serie of work (https://araikedasilva.com/portfolio/u-topia/”). However, after 3 years showing the sculpture covered with a bandage and exhibiting it in different contexts, I have decided to reveal it by removing the textile, and dismantling the face, opening the head, letting the earth and the rain enter in it. I have decided to give to the sculpture a new life by covering it with bio-concrete and burying it in the garden of the Art Academy, letting nature do the rest of the job…
I have realized the current version of the sculpture “Rebirth” thanks to the collaboration with a startup called EcoLocked , I have been given the opportunity to use a special concrete, partly composed of biomass, derived from organic waste. Interestigly this material is a good example of a symbiotic relationship between two very different materials: wood and concrete.
“Cupid and Psyche” is a tribute to the homonymous sculpture from Canova. However this installation is not only a representation of Ovid´s Metamorphoses, but an example of how the feminine and the masculine are not just two binary elements, but different expressions of the same thing, mutually holding and supporting each other in order to exist. The work became part of the surrounding, in symbiosis with the vegetation, giving shelter to a family of earwigs for copule of months.
“My Mother, My Father And I ” is an activation of a wood sculpture I did. While hugging the sculpture in public, I have realized that those two figures where my parents and my heart started beating really fast… so I have followed the rhythm of my heart by knocking, playing and dancing with the sculpture as if she would be alive. The sculpture started moving and twisting because of my interaction , vibrating and emitting sounds. The animism behind this performance reminds the Myth of Pygmalion from Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses, in which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved… after making a wish to Aphrodite, and kissing the sculpture on her lips, he realizes that the sculpture was not cold and hard as Ivory anymore, she was alive.
A Poem I wrote for the Painting ” A Midsummer night´s Dream”:
(english follows Italian)
Pigmenti e polvere di ferro
A volte basta poco
per sognare
Un immagine naturale
Di un paesaggio interiore
Come diceva Leonardo
La pittura è cosa mentale.
Pigments and iron powder
Sometimes very little is enough
to dream
A natural image
Of an inner landscape
As Leonardo said
Painting is a mental thing.
„Meta-Roda“ is a performance inspired by the Afro-Brazilian martial dance capoeira and memories of ritual indigenous chants. The performance lasts about 30 minutes and is divided into 4 phases: Birth / Discovery / Rebirth / Encounter.
The sound of the berimbau and the voices of the chants enter into a dialogue with each other and become a mantra that accompanies the entire performance. Under the veil moves a single organism in synergy, a body that is at the same time a non-place, constantly changing. The invisible is a space of intimacy, protection, security, like the prenatal state. Slowly, the veiled body transforms into two beings that become more and more distant from each other, and the dance becomes a struggle for life that tears the veil and so the performers enter the world, the roda (the circle) . It is not easy to enter the world, to adapt to the environment, but the music lulls them and releases axê, energy. The dance and song of their ancestors are a means with which they move through the world in search of harmony. When they step out of their comfort zone to rediscover the world and see it from a different perspective, it is a form of resilience and growth. After they have had their experience, they return to the roda, giving back their energy and experience to meet and rediscover themselves in something new.
Teaser (3 min) https://youtu.be/bD3rTSxgfCA