ELLES DISENT
Since I started dancing, my drawing practice vanished. I had to focus on learning something entirely new, and already at a late stage, considering the conventional path of a professional dancer. Now I was drawing only at very sporadic, rarefied, stray and even arbitrary moments. In 2021, while we were making the film MINA, Carlota got me moving, but also drawing. In Alfafar, with 12 women sitting around a table, among food, books and conversations, she gave me a bird. And there I was. Slowly testing pencils, reviving this magical connection between seeing and putting down on paper, with mixed feelings of fear and excitement. Returning to something that had belonged to me, not knowing whether it still did, whether I still had it in me. Recently, Carlota challenged me once more: to exhibit some of my drawings, here at the EVC. I would say that this is someone’s gesture who indeed sees the other, beyond what is obvious, beyond what is known. Who gives that little push which helps us see the different facets we all hold within, at any risk. And looking, or taking the time to see, is truly what drawing gives me. A fullness of being, a profound presence and connection, which is something I find extremely necessary in these times, be it only for some minutes.
With this in mind, this exhibition includes drawings from different time periods, thus marking diverse occupations and moods, but also photographs, because they were conceived in Alfafar. And because they, too – the photographs –, got me handling materials of various kinds, other materialities. Making things with my hands again. And how happy that made me. Knowing that there’s still this world for me to be busy with if ever dance fails me or I fail it. This world of the hands that drag everything else along. — Elizabete Francisca
*The photographs were conceived in collaboration with artist Larissa Lewandowski and feature Wicca Magda Ferreira/ PWUD activist.
cérebro, olhos, mãos e papel (“brain, eyes, hands and paper”)
What’s this capacity of the body to take what we observe and encase it in a sheet of paper? I am speaking of the body transmuting itself into a drawing, in an intricate fusion of eyes, hands and paper. It is like the development of a mental muscle that mysteriously extends down the arm, reaches the hand and travels across the paper. It turns into movement and dynamic. There are performance artists who draw even before using their bodies as instruments. Luís Guerra, João Galante and Elizabete Francisca are some of these artists. These exhibitions reveal three different ways of using the mental musculature, each with its own identity and beauty. Drawing is a physical act that requires time, memory, focus, practice, will, endurance and freedom. Just like dance. ― Carlota Lagido
OPENING