What happened during Pivô Research's first cycle

As we near the end of Cycle I of Pivô Research 2024, and with the Open Field Week coming up, Mônica Hoff, the curator and coordinator of the residency program at Pivô, has written curatorial texts about the work and research of each resident.

Read the curatorial texts for the participants of the short-term residency below:

MARÍA CARRI

For María Carri, curatorial practice is a space of tension between the political, educational, and curatorial fields. As a curator, political scientist, and educator, Carri proposes an interdisciplinary exercise focused on processes and forms that promote critical thinking and collaborative work, viewing curating as a form of listening, and listening as an active state of attention to voices, stories, and modes of organization that we may not necessarily have the tools to access.

In “Silät,” an exhibition and publication project developed with Thañi, an organization of Indigenous Wichí women weavers from the Santa Victoria Este community in Salta province, Argentina, Carri engaged in active listening to the individual and collective memories of hundreds of members. She focused on the significance of weaving for them and its function as a form of communication and resistance. The project, through textiles and texts produced by the women of Thañi, reveals “the Wichí people’s connection with their origins and the surrounding world, and how their worldview defines their sovereignty and historical claims over their territory.” “Silät” in Wichí means “warning,” “information,” and also “alert.”

According to María, “the formation of Thañí marked new forms of collective organization among its members, bringing economic recognition of their work and highlighting the role of women in the distribution of financial resources and the sustenance of their cultures.”

As someone who studies organizations and their political, cultural, territorial, and pedagogical behaviors, Carri’s curatorial thinking primarily focuses on how productive relationships translate into the art field and what collaborative methodologies can be created for this. Her practice, partly anthropological and partly rooted in popular education, develops primarily as an act of weaving together.

SERGIO CHAVARRÍA

How does the documentary transform into fiction? How does a personal question gain meaning as a language? What exists between memory and imagination? Is the narrator an incomparable listener, as Benjamin suggested, or a double agent, as Bolaño portrayed? How far can an image take us?

In his work, Sergio Chavarría acts as a storyteller of language, creating visual and installation narratives through a calculated yet non-linear combination of documentary elements, gathered during truck journeys on Mexican highways, with fictional codes derived from art and literature.

Like the character in the beautiful “Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo,” Sergio invites us into his travel diary, making it, as an installation, a meeting between the personal and the inventive. By juxtaposing documentary and fictional images of external, domestic, and intimate landscapes from his travels with texts, forms, and contextual materialities, his work plays with the figure of the oxymoron, which exists by combining two opposing concepts, creating a kind of perfect paradox.

In his pieces, the artist doesn’t work with truth; he knows that offers few possibilities. First, because the documentary doesn’t convey truths; second, because truths are always filtered through a body and an experience, as Lina Meruane teaches. Thus, they are closer to fiction.

Gathering, allowing things to happen, intensifying—these are the artist’s methodological acts. His measures of proportion are impact, eloquence, and elegance.

SOÑ GWEHA

Soñ Gweha’s artistic practice mobilizes various modes of expression. From music to video, through performance, archival conversations, poetic readings, installation, ceramics, and collective practices, the Franco-Cameroonian artist seeks to liberate herself from linear time and imposed social norms through different imaginaries—erotic, utopian, spiritual—in favor of a harmonious relationship between humans and non-humans, living and non-living, visible and invisible.

Drawing from her Cameroonian and Afrodiasporic cultural heritage and an Afro-feminist and queer intellectual environment, Gweha uses these tools and materials to explore mechanisms of healing and survival, notions of intimacy and joy, from which she creates encounters and immersive experiences. In a profound process of eroticizing life, guided by the forces of nature and art as a space of imagination, Gweha turns her artistic work into a kind of tool for ancestral rebirth.

During her residency at Pivô, the artist explored sounds, space-times, healing plants, memories, and spiritual knowledge, in a journey through an Atlantic triangle connecting France, Cameroon, and Brazil, linked by the Achatina snail, known in Brazil as the African giant snail (considered an “invasive” and harmful species to the environment and agriculture) and called Kôô by the Bassa people, a Bantu-origin group in Cameroon, for whom it is significant both musically and spiritually.

As Gweha points out, in her work, the artist reclaims and repositions “the memories of declining knowledge and the dangerous strategies of creation that persist in traces, gestures, oralities, sounds, and dissident and liberating vibrations.”