This proposal aims to gather pre-selected artworks from Brazilian artists that revolve water as a main curatorial axis. Amidst urgent themes related to global issues such as climate change, politics tensions and defense of cultural heritage, the serie of artworks compreehends points of view from different artists regarding their own perspectives, experiences and memories from the Amazon river to the Atlantic Ocean.
In ancient times, societies tended to fixate their lands around rivers, such as the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates or the Tiber, as it offered not only water per se, but also an easier and faster way for transportation, allowing commerce to flourish. More recent in history, technology made it possible for societies to travel between oceans, allowing the global commerce to establish, encapturing the white-european spirit of conquest and domination. This tension between rivers and oceans is very much mentioned in Brazil's ancestral culture heritage, as in a way that "one begins and the other ends": the river is this mytical place where life starts, as it flows in direction to the ocean, that is considered the largest cemetery on Earth (Kalunga) - the ocean is this place not only where the river dies, but also a territory where many Africans died inside European embarcations.
Bringing these topics to surface, this proposal comprehends an exhibition composed by artworks around painting, photography, and other physical medias of artists natural from different places of Brazil, that delves in this endless field of research that is the water. Topics such as memories from childhood experiences living in one of the main port cities of the Amazon river, myths and stories around rivers or oceans entities, decolonial perspectives around ancestral narratives and finally climate changes and disasters caused by unrestrained expansion of commerce and globalization are summed in a potent manifestation about preservation of life.
The exhibition is intended to be held at the Angels Gate Cultural Center, in Los Angeles, California, as an institution dedicated to promoting the arts and supporting the development of emerging and established artists and also in dialog with cultural and turistic venues in the surroundings, such as the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium.
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