Visual Narratives of Artistic Resistance

Marise Maués - Loess

Presented by the Brazilian partner MITsp, Marise Maués hails from Pará, Amazon, Brazil. Her work focuses on political and social relations in the Amazon, examining memory, heritage, and environmental issues. Her visual narratives have been presented in numerous exhibitions across Latin America and Europe, and she was an award-winner at the 2015 Diário Contemporâneo de Photography Award.
 
At PROXIMAMENTE will be featured her work Loess, which consists of a video-oriented performance produced on the river island of Maracapucu-Miri, in the municipality of Abaetetuba, located in the state of Pará, where she holds strong emotional ties. The performative action lasted just over seven uninterrupted hours, during which Marise stood on a platform in the bed of a small river (igarapé) while receiving the flow of water from two tides, one rising and one ebbing. Loess aims to provoke the interpretation of contemporary man as a Loess being—an entity capable of multiple identities, a being formed of layers that overlap over time. Entering the igarapé and elevating her body to an analogous condition to Loess sediment, subject to the action of natural agents, allowed the imagistic materialization of having a body woven in layers, which accumulated over the hours through the deposition of sediments carried by the water.
 

Masi Mamani - CRUDO 

Masi Mamani is an artisan of realities and a potter of rough edges, whose creative work began in 2016 as a reaction against the white colonial LGBT world with the creation of their Drag persona, "Bartolina Xixa." Through this character, they denounce colonial forms of understanding diversity while opening a dialogue towards ancestry and expanding horizons of cultural transformation. Their work arises from the peripheries, addressing ethnic and sexual diversity and the injustices these communities face. Rather than seeking comfort, their work invites critical reflection and action, moving away from aesthetically pleasing and conciliatory spectacles to provoke a visceral reaction from the audience. Their dance criticizes Western aesthetic norms, focusing on what they call "ugly dances," those rejected by colonial spaces. In this edition of PROXIMAMENTE, their video installation "Crudo" will be presented, a work that denounces the oppressions marking our marginalized bodies, exposing "the raw" as a metaphor for what has not been consumed or digested by the artistic extractivism that exploits peripheral stories.