"CURARE"

Curare.

Etymologically, the word “curatorship” comes from the Latin curare, which literally means “to care”, and, at the same time, curare is a potent paralysing poison… Women have always been associated with the role of caregivers, but in private contexts, such as caring for children, parents, or sick relatives, that is, unpaid work that sustains the invisible economy. The presence of women in the public space is a recent achievement, and far from concluded. That is why so many artists take on curatorship as an extension of their practice: a gesture of claiming a space that has always been denied to them.

As a curator, I am interested in creating a tessitura — calling upon different works to dialogue with one another. This gesture of montage, historically associated with the feminine, especially in cinema, serves as the starting point for this program.

“De la femme” is a visual essay by Caterina Cucinotta and Jesús López, which calls upon the Russian editor Elizaveta Svilova (1900–1975) to establish a connection between fashion and cinema, bringing the profession of seamstress closer to that of film editor. In doing so, it also rescues a time in which many women played a central role in film editing. The second video maintains a strong relationship with fashion and with the clothes we accumulate. Estefânia Almeida presents the performance‑manifesto “I Am Not for Sale”. From the organisation of the pieces to their performative deconstruction, this action claims freedom and rejects fixed identities.

In this flow emerges the third video, “Intrusa[s]”, by Cristina Cavalcanti, inspired by the story of Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon, who was violently threatened by the race director. This work reflects not only this episode, but all those in which women were accused of invading spaces considered exclusively masculine — often with their bodies also invaded by male hands.

The fourth video is authored by me, it emerges through the hand and the gesture, “Electromagnetic Spectres #1”, it is a video that calls upon images of various artists, mediated by the light of a screen. These women cross a portal to the sound of Maya Deren (1917–1961). And in an implicit homage in the title “Ashes of the Afternoon (134 deaths)”, the artists Marcia Bellotti and Luiza Porto also call upon the experimental filmmaker to approach, in a surrealist manner, the gesture and the violence present in the daily life of trans people in Brazil.

“Quebrando o Cobrão”, by Maria Inês Gomes presents a Maria who almost seems like the figure of “death” in Maya Deren, in an attempt to undo an old spell. Fiction and belief intertwine in a journey through the ancestral “corners” of the mountain range, where
tradition and intimacy intersect.

Finally, in an encounter between science fiction and reality, Ana Vilela presents “Clitorian Space Travel”, a homage to the clitoris, a historically neglected organ — whose real extension was only described in 1998, based on the work of urologist Helen O’Conor.

Just like an Ouroboros, this looped cycle of videos functions as an eternal return, establishing a continuous connection between all the works — from the first to the last video.