Solo Exhibition: Symbiotic Places, Via Dei Giustiniani 37/39 r, 16123 Genova (Italy) 16.03.2024-12.04.2024

Symbiotic places arrives on show in Genoa, a collection of sculpture, engraving and painting by the Italo-Brazilian artist Araiké Treccani Da Silva, who was born in Genoa and now works in Berlin.

At first glance, Araiké Treccani Da Silva’s works evoke abandoned landscapes, where vegetation has taken over, creating an atmosphere of solitude and desolation. Despite their apparent abandonment, the architectural structures do not show any clear signs of the passage of time; instead, they appear as elementary geometric shapes that dialogue with nature. The concept of mutualistic symbiosis is further explored in the work ‘Amore e Psiche’ (Cupid and Psyche): this sculpture, besides being a homage to Canova and Ovid’s metamorphoses, shows how feminine and masculine must support each other in order to coexist.

In different ecosystems, seemingly antithetical elements encounter each other, reconciling in a dance and sometimes on a fight. Araiké reflects on the meaning of existence in relation to the environment, projecting the gaze into the future.

“Prometheus gave us fire, but we remain monkeys.” The volcanic stone used for the head is called Canga, it is about 3 million years old, and it is still alive. Its color is due to the concentration of iron oxides and other minerals including copper, aluminum, quartz, silver, and sometimes even gold. Scientists are studying it because every time it gets wet, it releases essential mineral salts for other organisms: insects and even plants can grow and live within it, exploiting its cavities and its nutritional properties. Primitive man used this stone, which is abundant in the Mato Grosso region, to create various rock paintings including the “Chapada dos Guimarães”. The settlers, on the other hand, dug wherever they found Canga stone in abundance, creating real quarries in search of gold. Fire is a fundamental element.

The discovery and mastery of fire marked a crucial moment in evolution, a primordial incursion of humanity into controlling nature to favor its needs. However, poor management of this element can cause substantial damage to our ecosystem. In Brazil, there are biomes that depend on fires to regenerate. Plants that need to burn in order to bloom: plant species that have evolved to resist and survive fires.

This resilience of nature is truly fascinating and reveals its ability to adapt amid extreme conditions. Since the dictatorship in the ’70s, a Zero Fire Policy has been in place, prohibiting fires altogether. This has led to plants belonging to the “Cerrado” ecosystems, which depend on fires, accumulating instead of regenerating, causing devastating fires. Due to climate change, humid ecosystems, which are sensitive to fire, like the Amazon rainforest, have become even more vulnerable due to drought and are therefore attacked by the Cerrado, coexisting in a sort of imbalance. A clear and comprehensive strategy for fire management on private lands, allowing for controlled and beneficial use of fire while avoiding scenarios where negative impacts outweigh the benefits, has yet to be formulated. This strategy should aim to balance conservation efforts, sustainable land use, and the livelihoods of local communities.

“Ritual” is a painting 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 human 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.

“Cupid and Psyche” is not just a tribute to the homonymous sculpture from Canova or Ovid´s Metamorphoses. This installation is an example of how the feminine and the masculine are in a mutualistic symbiotic relationship mutually holding and supporting each other in order to co-exist. The work became part of the surrounding, in symbiosis with the vegetation, giving shelter to a family of insects for copule of months.

“My Mother, My Father And I ” is a performance 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.

Video Documentaton ( teaser):
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DccrB6uwVAI

Teaser (3 min) https://youtu.be/bD3rTSxgfCA

Performance Video-Documentation by Giosué Ausonio: https://youtu.be/d5l2281V2wI

„Meta-Roda. The Body as a Garden is a performance inspired by capoeira and ritual chants. As a ‘ballet’, different individuals dance and play inside an imaginary garden woven from fabric, slowly turning themselves into a collective moving organism. Invoking Lygia Pape’s practice of creating organic group performances, the audience is invited under the round cloth and into the garden, to experience different sets of body and sound practices from within and without. There, under the skin of earth, bodies become a landscape, part of an ecosystem. Introducing the idea of the body as an instrument, a body percussion workshop led by Araiké da Silva, the son of a capoeira master takes place prior to the performance, on 7 th of June. The participants of the workshop can take part in the performance.“

– Daniel Neugebauer

The garden, according to Michelle Foucault, is the very first heterotopia. A place where different cultures that do not belong together find a space to coexist. Music, dance, play, are the means by which different bodies meet pacifically. The garden is a flying carpet travelling through the world… our garden is round, warm and welcoming like a yellow sun but also fluid and wavy like the sea.  Meta-Roda means „Beyond the Circle“ because it is an open circle, a circle in which the energy is projected not only inside but also outside. The audience is invited to be part of the performance, and part of the audience will already be familiar with the performance beacuse partcipated at the workshops, using the body as an instrument to play music collectively. The rythms and the songs which are played during the performance are the motor that activates the flying carpet, like a snake being enchanted by the music of a snake charmer.

This Performance is not Capoeira but some rhytms, movements and dynamics that are emerging in the Performance are consiously and unconsciously inspired by it.

The Roda is usually the circle in which the game of Capoeira occurs, but usually is a closed circle, only the people that are practicing it, and are familiar with it, can participate. 

Capoeira is an art form, a fight, a dance, a game created in Brazil 400 years ago by enslaved people from Africa, who were deported to the ocean from the Portuguese colonies. Capoeira was banned until 1940 as any other form of afro-diasporic culture. Capoeira has survived untill now because was practiced in secret, hiding the fight inside the dance, thanks to the music, playing with ambiguity between these different elements. Capoeira is considered a game because the purpose of practicing it was not to harm each other but to rather keep the Africans in good health and defend themselves from the violence of the colonizers. It also survived thanks to the „Quilombos“, invisible villages founded by the slaves that escaped, where they created their own society, hidden in the forest and survived for Centuries.

„Quilombismo“ was also a term used by the Anthropologist Abdias Nascimento to define the resilience of a culture, the capability to reist and adapt to different contexts, like the intersection of african, indigenous and european culture.

Meta-Roda is not only a sculpture or a performance but an intersectional space that offers people even children, to partcipate to this Project. Workshops have been given before the Performance in order to make most of the people familiar with body and sound practice, after being told about the story and the origins of this project.

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 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.

Ecolocked recycles wood by slowly burning it in a chamber with very little amount of oxygen (Pyrolysis ) in order that no extra fuels are needed. Thorough this process you hace produced ashes which are carbon negativ, and by mixing them with a certain ratio with less cement and sand as usual you get a carbon neutral concrete.

„Symbiotic Landscape“ is a manifestation of different stages of wood in coexistence with concrete: I am interested not just about the contrast between organic and anthropic materials but about the interactions between this two different elements which are part of our landscape, constantly changing. The Branches represent the wood in his raw shape, the cardboard, is an organic and delicate metamorphosis of wood, and the geometric basement as well as the dark block, are made of Bio concrete (ashes and Cement).

Cement has been used as a binder since ancient times. Unfortunately, as a result of global industrialization, concrete is now responsible for 8% of the world´s CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. This is largely due to the energy and resources used in the production of concrete and its components, in particular clinker cement.

In Post-Anthropocene depicts a dystopian landscape where nature is reclaiming its space. She is emerging from the concrete ruins of a past civilisation. In the desert landscape, human figures appear in the foreground, evanescent as memories.

However, the work intends to go beyond the simple depiction of an antithetical relationship between man and nature. With a closer look, we discover that a symbiosis, a mutual relationship, is taking place, in which vegetation supports the ruins and becomes an integral part of them; reconstituting their architecture.

 “Years ago I visited the Barbican in London, a brutalist architecture with a magnificent botanical garden inside which inspired a lot my actual artistic research. It was fascinating watching the vegetation overtaking the architecture, the vines climbing over the walls to reach the light, reclaiming their own space. A symbolic dialogue that often occurs even while walking along a paved road… when suddenly a root or a flower emerges from the cemented city.”

Painting and sculpting with wood and concrete becomes a metaphor for a dialogue between architecture and nature.  An Oxymoron, an ambiguous conflict or dance between organic and geometric forms, between ruins and prosperity.

“In Captivity” is a painting made with leaves I have been collecting since I was a child. The action of collecting leaves and putting them between books is an innocent action but symbolizes how humans instinctively put nature in captivity by serving its own needs.

I found a piece of wood in a garden… I have tried to transform it into one of my sculptures but it was rotten and not possible to use it. Thanks to the fire it became much more solid and I was able to sculpt it and created “Treating sculpture as a landscape”: a sort of burned landscape in a small scale, similar to a diorama. However, the interesting and beautiful thing is that after I have left the sculpture outside for couple of months, even though the wood was burned, it gave life to some mushrooms that grew on the surface.