Published August 04, 2022
The non-static, ever-evolving nature of the SCENORAMA curatorial project, currently at the Javett-UP Bridge Gallery, allows for moments of continuous conversation with artists and their collaborators. Luana Vitra, an artist from Brazil living and working between Belo Horizonte and Contagem, visited the Javett-UP for a short residency (26 June – 10 July). During this time Luana created a work that forms part of the growing series titled A TRANSFORMACAO É UMA ESQUIVA (Transformation is a Dodge), a work that responds to Brazilian history of miscegenation, the state policy established to racially whiten black and indigenous populations.
Luana grew up in an industrial city full of iron and soot located on the periphery of the metropolis in Contagem. She is currently investigating the relationship between iron and the black body through the process of electrolysis. Electrolysis transfers rust from one object to another through a shared energy source within an aqueous environment. Usually, this process is used to remove rust from one of the objects. However, Luana has been working with interrupted electrolysis. In other words, object one shares its rust with object two, but before object one loses all its rust, the process is stopped. Iron is industrially galvanized, which she understands as a way of whitening the material.
On her first day at the Javett-UP, she became quite emotive and fascinated by an installation titled MAIZE (2021) a work by Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth, who is an exhibiting artist for SCENORAMA. She mentioned how life is layered and peculiar, having travelled all this way only to find herself in the presence of one of her favourite artists – feeling a sense of a home away from home.
Luana was allocated a studio at the School of Arts at the University of Pretoria where she also got a glimpse of student life accompanied by curiosity and walks through the green campus-scape. The first phase of her work commenced at a welding studio in Silverton, where conversations and construction-like noise competed for attention. With the smell of iron and welding sparks in the atmosphere, ‘touching the iron, cutting the iron, assembling of the iron’, were topics at the heart of conversations accompanied by curious small talk which created a bond between the artist and the fellow specialists.
In these fleeting moments of car rides, she was exposed to the different spaces, cultures, and mannerisms that make up Pretoria, and was amused by the number of languages spoken in the area. It was quite interesting to hear Luana identify certain languages towards the end of her stay. The weekend was a moment for the artist to feed her curious mind and to immerse herself within the city of Johannesburg, its art, culture, and nightlife as she met various artists and popular figures, unknowingly so. Navigating these cities and making work in such a short space of time would not have been possible without Siwa Mgoboza and Lebo Mashifane, two of Business and Arts South Africa’s Cultural Producers for 2022 who were placed at Javett-UP. Siwa helped with translating for Luana, who is currently learning to speak English. Having grown up in Peru, Siwa was able to converse in Portuñol, a simplified mixture of Portuguese and Spanish. Lebo was able to follow and document some of Luana’s activities in the studio and was able to capture the processes her work goes through, from planning, the scientific, the practical and the artistic.
A TRANSFORMACAO É UMA ESQUIVA (Transformation is a Dodge) version 6-12 is now installed as part of SCENORAMA currently on show at the Javett-UP until March 2023.
Written by Gillian Fleischmann, Javett-UP Curatorial Assistant