[WHO]
For more than a decade, Ginevra Bria has been researcher and curator of Isisuf – International Institute of Futurism Studies in Milan, from Fall 2020 she’s Phd researcher at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. Bria has long been involved in the Belloli-Vieira Archive, following the organization of the personal fund of the Milanese poet and art critic Carlo Belloli, as well as the cataloguing of the docu mentary legacy of the Brazilian sculptor Mary Vieira, which is preserved in Basel and on which its doctoral project is based. Focused on the enhancement of a still little-known aspect of the sculpture of Mary Vieira, the procedural aspect, the research project of the candidate, entitled Proposal for the deve lopment of a research training plan on Mary Vieira (San Paolo, 1927 – Basel, 2001) follows the in-depth analysis studies that she herself did during the preparation of O Tempo do Movimento, the monographic exhibition dedi cated to the artist held at the CCBB – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, first in San Paolo and then in Rio de Janeiro in 2005. More recently, between 2014 and 2017, Bria also dealt with the restoration of the sculpture Polivolume: ponto de encontro (1970) of the Vieira, preserved in Basel, and of her public intervention in the entrance hall of the Palacio Itamaraty by Oscar Niemeyer at Brasilia. Bria can therefore be considered a careful connoisseur of Mary Vieira’s work, whose first-hand documents she has at her disposal for research, and on which she has studied the creative process on several occasions, both from a historical-critical perspective, both from the point of view of the preparation and restoration of the works. The candidate has also already tried to compare the proce dural aspect in Vieira’s work with the practice of other artists, collaborating in a series of international exhibitions, including After Uto pia (Centro Pecci, Prato, 2009); Dynamo. A century of light and motion in art, 1913-2013 (Grand Palais, Paris, 2013); Designing Modern Women 1890-1990 (MoMA, New York, 2014); Spielobjekte (Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2014); Negative Space (ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2018). Her research project is unique for complete ness within, studies on Mary Vieira also for the ability to highlight, through documentary sources never made public, the precursor thrust of the Brazilian artist’s work, closely interconnected with art Italian of the Second World War. His role as a cultural link between Europe and Brazil will then become definiti vely evident during the participation of Vieira, together with Burle Marx, at the Venice Bien nale, in 1970, for the Brazilian Pavilion. Her experience as a researcher, speaker and lecturer in various international universities and institutes, such as the Politecnico Univer sity of Milan, Bocconi University and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and Bria has supported several collaborations in curation projects for exhibitions such as Armenity (Armenian Pavilion, winner of the Golden Lion at the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015), Africa Telling a World (PAC, Milan, 2017); X Berlin Biennale (Berlin, 2018). Furthermore, her commitment to contempo rary art led her to promote the foundation of FuturDome, an organization founded in Milan in 2016 to present international artists such as Guido van der Werve, Adam Christensen, Christine Sun Kim, Andrè Komatsu, Gianni Pettena, Ricardo Carioba and Lea Porsager with monographic exhibitions. She collaborated with prestigious magazines, including Flash Art, Flash Art International, Aesthetica, Rolling Stone Italia, VICE, Nero, ICON Design, Alfabeta2 and Mousse Magazine. She is currently contribu tor of Domus Web and Domus Magazine.
[WHAT]
#1
Mary Vieira’s oeuvre may be classified as belonging to soaring vectors summarized as concrete aesthetics. In such aesthetic direction, the challenge of plastic expression is tackled by representing the idea of a new reality, born out of free balance among primary elements in the sequences in time of the three plastic dimensions, replacing abstraction, including total abstraction of everyday reality itself, Mary Vieira translates a polyphonic side of her sculpture towards spatial-volumetric achievements.
Mary Vieira, O Tempo do Movimento, in Mary Vieira O Tempo do Movimento, a catalogue by CCBB, Centro Cultural, Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, 2004-2005
#2
Reconsidering the modernist declinations, then, the artists replicate, in the more articulated differences of their individual practices, the process of localization of parallel territories according to the dictates of a utopia that today can generate a more mature detachment free from the now impalpable contradictions of the movement. In this exhibition the role of utopia, both in the form of conceptual anamorphosis of the present and in the form of an acquiescent and accelerated present, is to fail.
After Utopia, in After Utopia. A view on Brazilian Contemporary Art, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, 2009
#3
The collective encounter between the various narrative and formal fabrics presupposes not just a spatial condition, but also a shared sensitivity enabling the Armenian artists to (re)discover their own land as an intangible heritage, which has always been familiar to them. The aesthetics connected to the Armenian diaspora, moreover, necessarily transcends the binary thought made up of contingent limitations and categories, setting one’s own visual culture in given terres du milieu, and bringing out interstitial elements through which to re-interpret the present.
Neither Victory or Defeat, essay for Armenity, a catalogue edited by Skira, in 2015, for the Armenian Pavilion, winner of the 56th Art Venice Biennale Golden Lion award
#4
The practice of Hélio Oiticica (1937, Rio de Janeiro – 1980, Rio de Janeiro) is a paraphrase that measures the processes of a dispossession, the drive for a liberation from individuality that is at the same time a revealing of uniqueness within a process whose very title, experimental practice of freedom, represents a complete understanding of the original quotation in all its interpretive references, but extended here to encompass a plurality, an allegorical multiplicity, and the collectivisation of the historical and formal aspects of various interventions.
Hélio Oiticica: Experimental Practice of Freedom, an essay for Hélio Oiticica: Barracão, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, 2016
#5
Those selected artists have embodied, represented and defended liberty, heteronomies, community approaches, experiences, and aesthetics by participating directly in the reality of the contemporary world. Cultural diversity, through the production and the realization of their works, has been protected by ART for The World from the beginning, where basic human rights, freedom of communication, as well as the ability of each individual to choose different methods of cultural expression has been guaranteed.
Artists and Civil Society, in Participation, Mousse Publishing, Milan, 2016
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