Brazilian artist Juliana Freire focusses on Amerindian Cosmovisions, and the need for actual encounters with the Native ‘other’. This interest resulted in expeditions to Brazil’s inner lands and to the remote villages of Native tribes in the Xingu region. This call is the artist’s way to find personal and symbolic pathways to ‘de-Christianization’, and ‘de-Personification’ (i.e.: with the notion of Persona as the mask we all wear to fit the societal prescriptions of the West).
Freire’s pilgrimages are journeys towards an individual understanding of Native epistemology that allows her to encounter ‘hidden internal territories’, which lay dormant within all of us for being part of so-called civilised, industrial and capitalist societies.
Her work goes beyond that, as Freire's PANGEIA series aims to stitch mankind together so to join forces toward a unified and all-comprehensive notion of Humanity. Drawings are made through watercolours and sewing practice on the pages of a catalogue from 1941 of the German Auction House Hans W. Lange. By reading this catalogue, Freire discovered about one of the several aberrations of violence, greed and selfishness that radicalised individualism can generate: How, during World War II, 5 million artworks were stolen from the oppressed Jewish community in Europe to supply the legal and illegal art market of the period. And this points out to the barbarianism that an exacerbated notion of ‘individualism’ can generate.
This adversity to separateness and its hideous implications was absorbed by Freire during her stays among the Native communities of Brazil. Under the influence of the Amerindian Cosmovision, Freire encountered ‘hidden internal territories’, which lay dormant within all of us for being part of the so-called civilised, industrial and capitalist societies.
Juliana Freire was born in Belo Horizonte and lives in São Paulo. She had solo exhibitions at the Casa do Olhar Luiz Sacilotto, Santo André, São Paulo, SP (2019) and the Centro Cultural da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, MG (2001). She has has several performances in her career, such as 'Deserto é Nascente | Ação Sintrópica', performance with Amanda Melo da Mota, which took place at the world renowned Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo (2020); and ‘Ativismo Cósmico’, Casa Modernista, São Paulo, Brazil. She has curated exhibitions at major international art fairs and in New York.
By Kalinca Costa Söderlund
