2024
Marli Matsumoto Gallery, São Paulo, BR
The exhibition brings together a collection of drawings, serigraphs, and mural works inspired by images and metaphors of language, taken from various authors. A series of serigraphs, printed on silkscreen fabric, shows variations on a drawing made by the 19th-century German polymath Alexander von Humboldt, each work differing from the others through subtle shifts in the “translation” of the original image. The titles are quotes from a text by Dante Alighieri’s on his search for the identity of the Italian language within the forest of its various dialects. A mural work, created with powdered pigment, reinterprets the illustration from the 17th-century book The Man in the Moon, one of the earliest science fiction books, whose description of the lunar world is based on accounts of Amerindian cultures and languages by the first European travelers.
The constellation of references, materials, and techniques in this exhibition reveals the allegorical dimension of the artist’s practice, where any aspect, even the most mundane, can convey different meanings.
Language has always been a central theme in the artist’s practice, leading him to collaborate with linguists and anthropologists in Brazil on a series of projects specifically related to Indigenous languages and their documentation, preservation, and revitalization. The video The Language of Languages, an interview with linguist and anthropologist Bruna Franchetto, unfolds into a reflection on translation, linguistics, and the threats faced by Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Through its political, critical, and human perspective, the video proposes a dialogue between realities separated by distances that only the uncertain art of translation can navigate.