10 Questions with Letícia Larín

LLetícia Larín was born in Sao Paulo (1982). From 2012 to 2016, she was based in Lima and, since 2017, she lives and works in Lisbon. Visual artist and researcher, she has a bachelor's degree in Visual Arts (FAAP, Sao Paulo, Brazil) and attended a master's in Art History (PUCP, Lima, Peru). Nowadays, she is developing her Ph.D. project in Fine Arts (FBAUL, Lisbon, Portugal). Larín won an investigation scholarship from Latin American Council for the Social Sciences (CLACSO), participated in artistic residencies in the USA (St. Louis, MO), Portugal (Lousal and Almodôvar), Brazil (Dourados, MS), and Mexico (Mexico City), and presented performances in Portugal (Lisbon, Aveiro, and Almodôvar), USA (515 Gallery, Los Angeles, 2018), Peru (as in ABLI-Lima Art Biennial, 2016, and in Gallery NNM, Lima, 2015) and Brazil (Sao Paulo and Dourados) and large installations in Portugal (Ílhavo and Braga). Her main individual exhibitions were presented in Lima (Centro Cultural Ricardo Palma, 2018, and Socorro Espacio Polivalente, 2015) and she took part in more than fifty collective shows in Portugal, Peru and Brazil (as in Loops – 4ª edição, MNAC, Lisbon, 2018, Concurso de Arte Contemporâneo Joven, CCRP, Lima, 2014, X Bienal do Recôncavo, CC Dannemann, BA, 2010, and Paradoxos Brasil – Rumos Artes Visuais 2005/2006, CDMAC, Fortaleza; Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro; Instituto Itaú Cultural, Sao Paulo).

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ARTIST STATEMENT

Larín's creative process is guided by art's transformative power, which implies an effort to address existence's materiality with honesty and conscience to generate artworks able to accomplish non-arbitrary roles in reality. Concerned with the consequences of humans' interventions, this political attitude isn't a way of excluding diversity. Its aim is, in fact, that of considering typologies by their specificities. Thereby, even constituting a trajectory very open to experimentation, the artist's pieces express certain choices. They, for example, use to recall organic notions, either through a pulsating body or a conceptual system. This attention to the role, which forms and materials perform in subjectivities and social collectives, is manifested in the varied use of techniques and styles. Her artistic projects are usually developed around socio-political issues and materialized under symbolic elements, which result in installations, performances, or hybrid sets of pieces – drawing, painting, assembly, sculpture, audio, video, workshop. These combinations of elements establish reflections around certain ideas, essaying means of disentangling subjectivity from automatic and disciplinary patterns. 

In her plastic experiments that relate corporal gestures with graphic, repetitive dynamics exercise the liberation of the body's action from controlled movement. In this way, the act of production itself becomes a ritual, evoking forms that connect existence with primordial meanings. These procedures propagate forms of empathy with subaltern realities and neglected entities, as a cricket that's seen as a plague or even a coin that symbolizes capitalism. When selecting themes to work with, the lack of prejudice relates to a holistic projection to construct utopian instances. These ideal states are achieved through transcendence, which can be obtained with any element that composes reality. That's why a critical background remains in the artworks, despite the idealist character. In the artist's work, the release from norms that unify behaviors and affections is achieved through non-alienation. In the last years, Larín has been focusing on Kaiowa and Guarani Amerindians, the originary peoples who most experience violence in Brazil. In the artwork "The wrath of Tupã (indigenous body)", a painting of a one hundred dollars bill seems to cover, hide and smother an indigenous body. Generating a coincident narrative, an image of Benjamin Franklin is accompanied by the phrases "the inventor of the lightning rod" and "the wrath of Tupã", an Amerindian god that manifests itself by the lightning. So, the silence required when veiling a body alludes to Tupã's silencing, with its power canceled by the lightning rod. On the other hand, this contemplative attitude is reinforced while observing the one hundred dollars bill painted details. Thereby, the various types of elements that compose the piece, instead of generating a conflictual relation, amalgamate a common flow.

INTERVIEW

Could you tell us a little more about your background? When and how did you start experimenting with art?

My mom is a craftswoman and, because of it, I grew up experimenting with art materials such as graphite, colored pencils, charcoal, dry and oil pastels, watercolor, and ceramic. Despite the pleasure I used to feel when dealing with artistic techniques, I never thought about being an artist, as I had a clear intention of working in the real world, as a professional, in an objective way. That’s why I started my graduate studies in Design but, during my first year of the degree, three professors encouraged me to change to Visual Arts because in Design I’d be frustrated when obeying norms, indispensables in this kind of production. Studying art, I soon gained awareness of the integral way artworks reveal specific historical contexts in their rational and sensitive dimensions. This understanding of art’s practical and complex meanings in humanity’s factual sphere, attached with the development of dynamics for conceiving original art pieces, automatically engaged an inner sure that art was what I should do.

What is your personal aim as an artist?

My keynote aim as an artist is to develop a trajectory able to access the core of my specific plastic and critical positioning in reality, which I see as composed by the crossing of historical context and the existential universe, in other words, by a path culturally defined and a path marked by timeless dynamics. I deal with artistic production as a means to, at the same time, gain awareness on the aspects that determine my existence and exercise ways of compelling it to alternative states. This purpose is self-centered so far as it intends to manifest an artistic discourse with authority since I consider honesty what empowers art's significance. This perspective justifies my interest in ascertaining styles' meanings rather than in discerning certain styles as successful. I used to see anything in its "successful" combination of form and content, which offered me understanding of things' interpretation and ways to address, by art, certain ideas, concepts, sensations, or situations, depending on the interest's theme.

Nevertheless, I'm conscious that this kind of analytical procedure, on artistic conjunctions, is limited by worldviews, that different people can understand the same artwork in different ways. So, I choose to express my ongoing provisory states' coherent structures to reveal an artistic trajectory in tune with a life's meaning. There's a risk in doing it, which I see as a form of scrutinizing relations between life and destiny. In sum, producing art is how I manage my own reflections on life, and I hope this process can reveal a life's essence in its connection with another person's experiences. Therefore, my artistic production is guided by an attempt to interact with reality autonomously and put these formalizations into humanity.

Your work deals with important socio-political issues. What are the most important causes for you?

I'm developing my Ph.D. on Kaiowá and Guaraní groups from the Mato Grosso do Sul state in Brazil, so I can say that at the moment, Amerindians' causes are the most important for me. But the election of these original peoples is due to two spheres, one in which a conflicted social reality is engendered by specific politics and another that presents, to the system that prevails on the globe, alternatives ways of living. With it, I can empathize with any situation that incorporates a kind of deep substantiality, be a subject, even an animal or a plant, be a material element, etc. That's why I'm very sensitive to the life posture of activists' death sworn, as those persons guide their existence by autonomous reasoning, and why I frequently accomplish reflections on capitalism and feminism. Even so, these interests emerge from volitions to conceive living autonomously and holistically, to conceive an environment where each being is respected in its right to exist. In this way, the focus isn't on privileging specific themes but on appreciating the coexistence of diverse forms. The defiance, in fact, is how to deal with these problematic conditions by which existence occurs, being a great socio-political issue for me.

How do you incorporate such themes in your work?

The processes of finding the issues to deal with in my artworks are entailed to the specific experiences I develop, and it can happen from a macro or a micro perspective. For example, the attention upon indigenous is connected to a personal investigation on the roots that form my own worldview, as I'm metropolitan and Brazilian. I always tried to envision what in me was Indian, and even being hard to answer this question clearly. I'm interested in plunging into this Indian soul that conforms, in some way, to my existence. On the other hand, as now I'm living in Lisbon, I can say the same about Portuguese culture, the one that colonized the territory of my country of origin and formation. Besides, sometimes there's something that "gives me a click", which starts the trigger of a series of works. For example, Bruce Nauman's phrase "Make me think me" gave rise to the articulations that set an individual exhibition (Socorro Espacio Polivante, Lima) around submission and insubmission to systems. Or a photo of a black man with a coin in his ear that I saw in a museum helped me develop a series around the Great Depression in an artistic residence (Paul Artspace, St. Louis).   

You use many different mediums in your work; how do you choose the best one to represent your idea and to match with the concept of the specific work?

I think that my overture concerning mediums, techniques, and materials echoes that related to thematic and, also, to diversity's forms of living. I treat each artistic project as individuality, and, accordingly, I'm aware of finding its own form rather than, in some way, circumscribing these objects in focus into a personal preconception. I try to let interactions, between material and immaterial plans, free to become what they should, without strangling them forcibly. That's why I face artistic production as a vehicle to investigate reality. Usually, I start a project considering all the possibilities I can envisage, even that apparently devoid of potential. As these elements are put in relation in my creative process, the relevant forms emerge in an organic way. Likewise, the practical conditions that restrict the work's concretization are considered, not as limitations but as substantial data, able to diagnose the proper manner I can address a circumstance from a specific emplacement. Under this point of view, I believe I can establish an artistic trajectory, which effectively fits into the role I play in reality.

What is the most challenging part of your work?

As my creative process is guided by uncertainty about the final result and the methods implicated, each new project represents a challenge to be faced. On the one hand, intertwining an unpredictable nexus with conceptual and material aspects is a mental challenge. On the other hand, the overture to work with whatever technique and style surely imposes challenges that vary according to my expertise's level over the procedure chosen to carry out the piece. There's also a risk in my search of offering ethical treatments towards the themes addressed since they usually present a conflictual, and sometimes a controversial, immanence. Anyway, these manners are profoundly consolidated over the basis of art as a field open to free experimentation, which in turn challenges a common and trite character and not a cause for concern and immobilization.

Where do you find inspiration, and what is your creative process like?

Maybe the ideas of a collector, an antenna, and a lantern fit well to propel my creative process. My inspiration arises from different findings, tunings, and insights. That is, what inspires me can't be outlined by categories or defined areas, but by what is manifested to me as powerfully significant or just as a noticed detail. There are two ways by which these connections can be put into play, one is due to a very insistent "thing" that remains latent for me, and the other is a logical articulation of symbolic discourses. For example, the gestural performative experiments, which I develop under projects about diverse themes, always encompass a conflict between control and lack of control, oppression and extravasation, concluding a sort of meditative exercise on attaining equilibrium amid intense and intense and antagonistic forces. This rhythmic pulsation, constant in my artistic production, relates to sensations that are constant in me. Just like it invades my body in different situations, the design of each art project, in a parallel way, when using this technique, considers relations established by the elements punctually selected from the topic addressed. So, I don't deal with pure expression nor with pure logical reason. I manage conceptual and perceptual instances in a reciprocal plane. This procedure entangles ecological precepts, as it considers life's elements in its organics processes.

What do you hope that the public takes away from your work?

I construct my artworks with the objective of offering to the public a platform, able to mobilize reflections, in them, around a context. That's why I don't use to dispose of univocal and objectively raw discourses, preferring to address a thematic while infiltrated by complexities that compound it. It doesn't mean that my art pieces don't offer a critical point of view, even because they usually do. It means that the commentary established by the work presents ambiguities and is open to be interpreted by a variety of elaborations. With it, I hope that each person constructs her or his own syntax, as I'm concerned with the instance of people thinking on their own and creating his or her own speech. Furthermore, as the themes my artworks address are constantly socio-political, my production, in general, intends to promote awareness of the public. Nevertheless, this composition, with a sort of literary elements, doesn't imply inhibition of the sensitive sphere, as the works' plasticity is constituted to deepen the public's aesthetical experience and provide a kind of consubstantial interaction with the art piece.   

Do you have any upcoming shows or collaborations you are looking forward to?

The current pandemic moment doesn't permit us to schedule compromises for sure. I'm developing a project for Projeto EXTRAI that was initially planned to be concluded in 2020. I've been changing my propose in order to accomplish it without the participation of the community of Village of Lousal, which has its history tied to the mining of pyrite since the 19th century and that today, with the mine disabled, faces the defy of elaborating ways that allow the local population to remain in the territory. The proposal consists of inviting five artists to reflect, through artistic residencies, around this context from Alentejo, Portugal's region. My approach is focused on the role of the woman in daily mining life, which extrapolates the work in the mine onto everyday care. A final presentation with all the artists, Ângela Ferreira, Carlos Moura, Rogério Taveira and Tiago Rocha Costa, probably will take place in the second semester of the present year. In it, I'll present a performance accompanied by a musical composition by Lino Guerreiro, created especially for the project. I'm also developing a partnership with the Mexican artist Arturo Hernández Alcázar, around land extractivism and symbolic ways of addressing these problems. We are establishing a reciprocal creative dialogue as a form able to manifest connections in resonance, and our plan is to conclude this process in 2022's first semester, in Mexico City, by a conference, an intangible artistic piece, and an exhibition in co-authorship. Finally, I'm programming a three months residence together with an individual exhibition in Zaratan Arte Contemporânea, in Lisbon, for the second semester of 2022. The aim is to present a cutout from the art pieces I'm producing during my Ph.D.

Finally, share something you would like the world to know about you?

This way of considering art, immiscible in life's context, manifests a view on art just as a field of humanity practices, not as an exceptional scope of great revelations. My love for art is real, and I feel thankful for finding an operational activity that permits me such a commitment. But I don't think that art is a special branch to constitute consubstantial relations with the subjects implied in human production and its fruition, or better, I do not think that in an original instance it is. I see this art's facet as a response nowadays to a predominant system where certain values are socially emptied. However, maybe a reminiscence of the European colonization's process is what makes me figure out today, like art, whatever kind of human work made with substantial compromise, desire, and dedication. In whatever terrain of human actuation, I understand this kind of exercise as the one able to create, able to invent forms for "sculpting" an ongoing human living's manner. With it, my special interest is in how people deal with transitory reality, on the way they take care of the existence they naturally have. So, I appreciate artistic qualities in forms that manifest a subject's devotion to life's stream, independently of the style put forward.