A FEW WORDS ABOUT HER
When we talk about performance art, we could assimilate some movements, concepts, strategies and also references of artists located in a very established organization. Immediately, we could evoke in our memory the plurality of discourses and creative practices related to this expression, because it is almost immediately that we turn to movements with gesture painting (better known as action painting), to anti-art strategies, to body art and the exploration of the limits of the body, because these allusions are inseparable from performance art. But there is an exercise to be done so as not to assimilate in such an immediate way what is circumscribed in this artistic language.
It is necessary to deconstruct the outdated historiographies so centered on masculinist narratives that are extremely restricted to a hegemonic point of view located in Western culture, which insists on skidding on its delusional colonial, racializing, capitalist and phallocentric vices.
Undoubtedly, Letícia Maia has the performance art as the basis for her creations, but she is not limited to live frisson. And she brings in her artistic repertoire a historiography distinct from the orthodox and inflexible ones, where we can see allusions more coherent with her own existence, where her body (her flesh) is clearly presented as a provisional state of a complex collection of information from the environment in which it operates. She highlights how her way of making art is to try to hear the effect of the forces of the present in her own body; she struggles to interpret the causes of these forces and the state these forces promote in her body. We see this – without major difficulties – in the way the artist denounces abuses of power with enough courage to ridicule the rigidly labeled roles to be fulfilled.
Through Letícia Maia’s sarcastic and decisively subversive propositions, we can easily recognize what she ridicules by exposing in an extrapolated way in solutions, sometimes impregnated with a kitsch aesthetic, sometimes completely simple. She resorts to the visual repertoire of our consumer society to prove and denounce what is invoked in the word “woman” by a white cisheteronormative medium, which infantilizes (while sexualizing) this woman reduced to a generic category, constructed by patterns taxes, which confer factory models of beautiful, dreamy, delicate, fragile, sensitive, housewives, romantic and docile women.
The manipulation of some of the central icons of the visual and symbolic imagination of our western culture results in humorous compositions, ironic and satirical creations at once, serious, and profound at the same time, where subversion insistently emerges as a denunciation of abuses of power, identifying their tricks so that we can build alternative futures.
Tales Frey
Curator
ARTWORKS
1) Letícia Maia, Untitled, 2021. Installation w/ caramel, 250 cm;
2) Letícia Maia, On the Dynamics of Obedience _ Exercise Book, 2021. Watercolor, graphite and acrylic on paper, 21 x 29,7 cm each;
3) Letícia Maia, On the Dynamics of Obedience, 2021. Video, 14’23”;
4) Letícia Maia, D O C I L E _ Candy, Brazilian Candy, 2020. Performative object, 13 x 27 x 4,5 cm;
5) Letícia Maia, D O C I L E _ Candy, Brazilian Candy, 2020. Video performance, 26’21’’ each;
6) Letícia Maia, Performance Observatory Or I Am A Meme, 2021. Video projection, 15’;
7) Letícia Maia, Very Little Girl _ Score I, 2021. Object, 89 x 60 cm approx.;
8) Letícia Maia, Very Little Girl_ Score I, 2021. Photographys, 7 x 7 cm each.
Details of some works shown in the Docile Meat exhibition at Sput&Nik the Window. September and November 2021, Porto, Portugal
Parallel Program of the Docile Meat Exhibition
15 October 2021 at 5:30pm | Talk between Letícia Maia and Tales Frey
13 November 2021 at 4:30 pm to 8:30 pm | Performance art On the Dynamics of Obedience
Credits
Letícia Maia: Decile Meat | Curatorship: Tales Frey | Exhibition Montage: Ivan Borges | Sput&Nik the Window | 25 September to 13 November 2021