Jeane Terra: Territories, ruptures and their memories - Janaina Torres

Sao Paulo Brazil

Jeane Terra: Territories, ruptures and their memories

23 de July de 2024 | 11:26
Patrícia Toscano

Honoring the last name she carries through the paths of destiny, Jeane Terra guards and goes through the past, transposing the present with the body-time that inhabits her memories. She perceives and pursues the ruins as an alchemical dance that survives the storms of life. She makes them her friend/family, apprehends, listens to the sound of her time and feels, learns from them in company, embraces the debris in a paradoxical physiological game of death, life, and transcendence. Jeane is “body-[Physis]” and her work is “[Anemo]-Soul”. An created neologism composed of terminology, meaning air, breath, breath of soul in a gulp of life as the vital principle and seat of human affective thought of the atavistic forces of the temples of life.

Paraphrasing musical verses eternalized by Bethânia: “Inside the sea there is river, inside me there is what?”, there is terra, by Jeane Terra that inspires me to write. One cannot write little about that which is great, without prose, rhyme, and verse, otherwise there is certainly no beginning, no space, no plot, for the secret wisdom of the ruins to teach us.

Known for her artistic expeditions, the Rio-based artist from Minas Gerais investigates memory, displacement, and urban erasure, presenting her latest set of unpublished work produced after her immersion in late 2021 in the submerged cities of the backlands of Bahia, in the Sobradinho dam, Casa Nova, Remanso, Sento Sé, and Pilão Arcado. Places that were flooded by the construction of the Sobradinho dam and the Luiz Gonzaga Dam in the 1970s, and become visible from time to time, post-drought of the São Francisco River. Thousands of people, forced without choice to leave their homeland, moved to other territories taking only their belongings and parts of the buildings of their homes.

Thus, churches, hospitals, boats, houses, and a large water tank, captured by the insight and sensitivity of his gaze, give form and origin to works that inhabit the imaginary in an intimate-public dialogue about belonging, affectivity, environmentalism, territorialism and humanity.

His research seeks the anthropological core of the daily relationships of a resilient people. With his poetic constructive documentary language, he proposes a paradoxical game between the oneiric-real, whose works reconstruct a bias on the threshold of fable vs. reality.

Elements such as glass, debris, and liquids from an old river whose name is born “sane”, flood his studio, where he processes the resignification that, posed to posterity, slowly transgresses death. Her working nook where she decants and enchants with art, alchemy, and ingenuity, where the secret wisdom of the artist-alchemist aims to unveil the hidden bonds that tie beings, things, and scenarios of the mystery of matter, time, creation, and memories.

As an artist-chemist and keeper of memories, prose and transmute matter in these artistic experiments encapsulating the cyclical times of the earth. Immanent germinal territory where everything is born, sprouts hot, blooms, dies, re-signifies, evolves, and is reborn stronger, more

beautiful, more vivid, and more permanent.

As an artist-[art]ivist who also inhabits it, I produce works-voices to observe and absorb as the wisest path to follow, transforming pain into poetry. By treading, he discovers and rescues traces that emerge from historical pillars, architects and rebuilds submerged scenarios of a fascinating mythical “Atlantis” from the backlands of Bahia, from Velho Chico and all the saints, from an ancestral Brazil shipwrecked in civilizational oblivion, broken by the ethical drowning coming from a savage capitalism.

Besides his recognized alchemical research with “ink skin”, resulting in monotypic paintings reconstructed with an unusual patented technique that looks like “analog pixels”, pieces also made with branches and vines from Bahia and Minas that remind us of “stick-by-stick paintings” emerge from this narrative, as well as new works that oxygenate the series “Cápsulas de Memórias” (Memories Capsules). Sculptural discourses of glass blowings in which monotypes loaded with memories submerged “in vitro”, transfer living landscapes of a sertão that clamors for its remembrance. Some objects couple fragments of the places visited and contain water from the immense Velho Chico.

The artist emerges and displaces scenarios, overflows her studio with records, and unleashes an invitation to reflection with works that occupy two large rooms and two exclusive environments for the video installations, giving an immersive documental and experiential tone to the exhibition.

This elemental transduction of poetic fruition and communion takes place between artist-work-public-exhibition, between water, earth, and ground, between clay, brick, ruin, people, and construction. Memory is not about not forgetting, it is about never ceasing to remember this green planet where there is life. Paraphrasing Sá e Guarabyra, if “the sertão will turn into the sea”, I say that with “Territories, ruptures and their Memories” by Jeane Terra, the Centro Cultural Correios RJ institution will turn the sertão.

Rio de Janeiro, September 26, 2022

Patrícia Toscano is an art critic and curator.

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