Maria Thereza Alves
As part of the conference cycle In Situ & In Vivo – Entretiens sur l’art
Pascal Beausse receives Maria Thereza Alves
Relations between art and ecology constitute the foundations of Maria Thereza Alves’s investigations. A Brazilian artist now living in Europe, she has developed different investigative procedures on contemporary realities located very precisely on human, social, and environmental levels. Approaching artistic activity as a research on life, working on what one doesn’t know yet involve following an unpredictable path. During such a journey, which consists in experiencing the world, encounters guide the artist. The question of identity is always at the heart of her preoccupations.
Politically active, the founder of the Brazilian Partido Verdo (green party) in São Paulo, and a former representative of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (“the workers’ party”), Maria Thereza Alves has developed a critique of the enslavement of native peoples and the violence inflicted on them by institutions and the wealthy as they deprived them of land and of the means to survive.
Alves has turned back the investigative methods of ethnography and anthropology against the western cultures that formalized them. The aberrations of Eurocentrism are highlighted on the basis of a critique of imperialism – its history and consequences as well as its remanence.
For the past several years Alves has been working on the project Seeds of Change with the tools of archeology in order to bring out a secret history and geography of plants. In several ports, her research has led her to draw a cognitive cartography of globalization through the seeds transported in the ballast after its removal from merchant ships. Bringing these “dormant seeds” back to life after several hundred years (in some cases), Maria Thereza Alves recounts an alternative history of migrations.
During the conversation, she will more particularly focus on her recent projects, Seeds of Change and Wake in Guangzhou.
Maria Thereza Alves recently took part in the Manifesta in Trentino and in the Guangzhou Biennale.
An exhibit will be devoted to her work at the Michel Rein gallery in Paris, February 7 – 28.