Zielinsky Barcelona is pleased to present Tras la piel del mapa, the first solo exhibition by Marina Camargo (1980, Maceió, Brazil) in the gallery.
The interest in understanding and distorting the established order of the world drives Marina Camargo’s work towards an expanded notion of displacement, both at a physical level—marked by the relationship with spaces and places—and at a conceptual level—the idea of moving perception beyond codes and conventions. The exhibition focuses on her recent works and includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and video.
From the beginning, Camargo’s research has been marked by an expanded notion of drawing, in which image and thought are reciprocally constituted and, from there, structure the work process itself. Issues related to cartography began to interest her during the period she lived in Barcelona (where she studied Visual Culture at the University of Barcelona), and since then, issues related to various notions of displacement have become recurrent in her practice. Returning to Barcelona after twenty years is like returning to the references that have structured her pieces over the subsequent years.
A mirrored, floating, cut world; a soft and permeable border. The works by Camargo in the exhibition suggest other conceptions of territory. Maps, conceived as graphic representations of control and power, are twisted or redrawn by the artist in a flow that takes various directions, shaping continents, inverting scales, trembling the edges. A gesture that occupies the scale of poetry, imagination, and desire.
“Songlines” is a compilation of five books with drawings of the land borders of all continents developed by the artist since 2019. Camargo invited double bassist Marcelo Cabral to perform the sequence of borderlines, turning geopolitical boundaries into a kind of experimental sound. The title “Songlines” refers to the sound maps created by the indigenous peoples of Australia: instead of drawing maps, they are sung, and through the songs, physical spaces, displacements, and routes are described.
The photo-drawings from the series “Atlas de dentro para fora” reveal the cartographies of parts of Catalonia and the Iberian Peninsula seen from the inside out, so the cities are read backward, presenting a world from a new perspective. The borders disperse towards an endless sky.
In the video “Cidade Planejada,” the artist works from the urban planning of Berlin, the city where she currently lives. The city map gradually transforms into another map that no longer corresponds to the previous design or planning. Without the need for rationalist organization or a defense of a utopian city, Camargo seeks in the video to create a play between experimentation and uncertainty.
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Marina Camargo (1980, Maceió, Brazil) lives and works between Berlin, Germany, and Porto Alegre, Brazil. She has held numerous exhibitions in different contexts and countries, including: 14th Shanghai Biennale, China; A Certa Sombra, Instituto Ling, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Cartografías fluidas y otras metamorfosis del espacio, Fundación Giménez Lorente/Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain; Shifting: Displaced, Warehouse, Interloper, Seattle, USA; 37th Panorama da Arte Brasileira: sob as cinzas, brasa, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil; EXiS Experimental Film & Video Festival, Seoul, South Korea; Mapping the cartographic: contemporary approaches to planetarization, Drugo More, Rijeka, Croatia.
Her works can be found in numerous public and private collections: Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul (MARGS), Centro Cultural São Paulo (CCSP), Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul (MAC-RS), Museu de Arte Aloísio Magalhães (Recife), Casa de Cultura Mário Quintana (Porto Alegre), among others.