ANA DE ALMEIDA
“Ficou
a ver
passar
navios.”
#ARTS-BASED RESEARCH #ARCHITECTURE #COMMONS #INSTALLATION #SPACE #MULTIMEDIA #IDENTITY #PERFORMANCE
#NEO-COLONIAL #VIDEO #GENDER
BIO. Ana de Almeida (b.1987) is an artist and author from Lisbon, currently based in Vienna. She is a member of the artists’
collective dienstag abendof
of VBKÖ and of the Interndinner collective against precarization of work in the cultural field. Her artistic practice addresses memory and remembering processes, narrative constructions that connect space and subject, and plurispatial and multilayered narratives in general.
Ana de Almeida is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna, pursuing a doctoral thesis about the production of images in the 1974—1989 inter-revolutionary space between the Carnation and the Velvet Revolutions.
Ana de Almeida is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna, pursuing a doctoral thesis about the production of images in the 1974—1989 inter-revolutionary space between the Carnation and the Velvet Revolutions.
Ana de Almeida, Alicja Rogalskaand & Vanja Smiljanic
NOVA. Future thoughts on surviving together (2020 AT)
Live Action Role Play
In the future, gender inequality was erased. Nova is a multitude of newly born, radically inclusive and self-managed communities. Heterogeneous in their forms of commoning and social organization, Nova share a vow to never let oppression in any form rise again. Nova. Future thoughts on surviving together is a feminist futurist LARP - Live Action Role Play by Ana de Almeida, Alicja Rogalska and Vanja Smiljanić; directed towards feminist and queer-feminist activists based in Vienna. NOVA is a day of speculative gaming aimed at sharing survival strategies, exercising solidarity and intersectionality, creating solidarity networks and forming new alliances between different emancipatory movements. Together, we created a piece of feminist political fiction - a work in progress and a world free of patriarchal oppression in the making.
With: VBKÖ, Saloon Wien, Kunst & Kind, Latinxs Unidxs, Kültür Gemma, Cine Collective, Mala Sirena, female:pressure.
A Casa / The House The flat / Die Fläche (2018 PT)
MDF, stucco-lustro, stereo sound 42'5'' looped
Likewise a sculpture, A Casa (The House) shares the aesthetic and architectonic language of the House Wittgenstein in Vienna. The two volumes are a transposition and folding down of two of its architectonic elements: a window and the vestibule door. They serve as display for documental material such as letters and photos and incorporate an audio piece with interviews led by the artist. The surface is covered by stucco-lustro, a coating technique proliferating in Vienna on the turn to the 20th century, similar to how could the original coating of the walls of the House Wittgenstein have looked like before they were painted white after World War II. The highlighting of the stucco-lustro architectonic detail points out to a fundamental discovery for the understanding of the house as aesthetic experiment in which the house interiors, composed by materials which evoke extreme hardness, seem to dematerialize through the highly reflecting properties of the stucco walls.
Photos: © Ana de Almeida & Stephanie Misa
Untitled (Yellow) (2017 PT)
Wall, yellow paint, memorabilia, diashow, stereo sound
A cooperation between Ana de Almeida (PT/AT) and Stephanie Misa (PH/AT) . This is a project about landscape as formal and informal disposition of elements. Coordinates. An arrangement, a hierarchy: borders and de-limitations, transpositions and transgressions, frames and their inside-outside, margins, and of course landscape — of the geographical, political, personal, and emotional nature. Edouard Glissant’s Traité du Tout-Monde. (Poétique IV), calls it archipelagic thinking, a group of islands that lends its topography to an alternative imaginary: a reassessment of the insularity of bound cultures, of nation-states, and the heaviness of “continental thought”. The archipelago is an alternative imaginary, one that posits that identity could be as a conglomeration of islands (composed of many, yet is one). Identity formation, embodiment, complex colonial histories, evolution, interconnectedness, diaspora and change — Oh to dispell the oppressive idea of nationalistic wholeness!
CLAUDIA LARCHER
“Stay
positive
and
be your
own boss!”
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#ANIMATION #COLLAGE #BODY #INSTALLATION #PHOTOGRAPHY #MULTIMEDIA #VIDEO #ECOLOGY #PERCEPTION
BIO. Claudia Larcher is a visual artist with a focus in (site specific) video animation, collage, photography and installation. From 2001 to 2008 she studied « Transmedia Art » at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 2005 she has participated in various group exhibitions and festivals in Austria and abroad and presented her work in solo and group exhibitions: f.e. Tokyo Wonder Site Japan, Slought Foundation Philadelphia, Weimar Art Festival, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art/ Roskilde, steirischer Herbst in Graz, Manifesta 13 and Anthology Film Archives in NYC. In 2019, a monograph with Claudia Larcher‘s work has been published by deGruyter.
Photos: © Claudia Larcher
face2face (2019)
Installation
Claudia Larcher’s face2face project is based on a selection of eight popular emoji variants, as we probably all use them in chats: a laughing tearful, a stirred, a lovingly thoughtful, a smiling, a neutral looking, a happy-cheeky, an unhappy and one in love. In November 2019, Larcher had these digital pictograms translated into analogs by Sinhala mask carvers as part of an artist-in-residence program in cooperation with the one world foundation in Sri Lanka. The town of Ambalangoda on the western south coast of Sri Lanka is famous for its traditional mask carving. The masks produced there were originally used by the population for dance rituals to drive away evil demons, but today they are used more for tourist purposes. Larcher had the eight emoticons carved as masks in a traditional way and therefore associated them with signs and rituals that – actually – could not be more different. And yet there is a common link: the reference to the mask as a symbol for the loss of the (natural)
Ore (2018)
Video animation, video installation
ORE is an experimental film about the appropriation of the planet by humans. Using the example of large mining areas, such as the Styrian ore mine (Erzberg) and the Japanese sulphur mine in the Hakone region, the film aims to make the transformation of nature and the process of mining work tangible. The British philosopher Timothy Morton coined the term "hyper-objects "* to describe things that survive space and time, such as climate change, capitalism, a black hole or an oil field. Hyperobjects explore the commonalities of entities that are characterized by large spatial and temporal dimensions.ORE is an approach to such a hyperobject that goes beyond all calculations. The effects of mineral extraction on ecosystems and the human body are still very unclear scientifically, which led me to consider mining as a kind of hyper-object that defies the limits of our traditional thinking. ORE explores relationships between minerals, the miners, the human body, the landscape, noise, rare earths, the economy, consumer forces, territorial and technical desires, and the products of our digital age.
Self (2015)
Video animation
The skin is the body´s largest sense organ: delicate and at the same time extremely robust, it has to fulfill various functions, from excretion through to storage of nutrients. Although one hopes to shed it at a metaphorical level, it simultaneously serves as the bearer of our identity, which can be written on, marked, and changed. It is more than simply a shell, more than a border between inside and outside, it is the self, (not only) in Larcher´s video.
A laconic-analytical camera pan shows a close-up of it at the beginning: pores, fine hairs, a mesh of blue veins that shine through the delicate membrane. In what follows, details yield a whole, and one seems to recognize neck, armpit, and upper arm. Suggested here is an interior that this skin stretches around. But suddenly there are "wrong" extensions, "impossible" elongations and overlaps. The border between inside and outside is successively dissolved and flows into a "liquefaction" of the image in whose blurriness, pink masses multiply and caverns protrude until the camera returns to the start again.