A Catira / O Catira
or

The Visuality of Sound in the Transformation of Genre by the Power (and Disruption) Caused by the Artist's Encounter with a Tradition in Its Insertion into the Present of the World.

These drawings with copper and lead by Eneida Sanches, and the video presented here, were created during the longest residency held at the Núcleo de Arte do Centro-Oeste – NACO, to date: eight weeks. It was the first residency where an artist stayed there solo. What would result from this encounter in the small town of Olhos d’Água was an unknown for the artist, whose journey would unfold from her own rhythm (idiorhythmia), her ongoing questions and readings, and how she would approach the place.

The artist’s trajectory during this period was gradually constructed, with care and attention, so that the daily impressions offered by the city and its inhabitants could become material for the work, integrated into an investigative process around questions involving the notion of otherness, as derived from James Clifford, and which encompasses other adjacent notions such as "landscape of notion," borrowed from Vernon Reid. The artist’s search for updating discourses and representations.

At a certain point in the immersive journey, the encounter with Catira, a rhythmic dance associated with the folias of the Divine Holy Spirit, emerges as the phenomenon that triggers the production of the drawings that follow. A poetic stitching takes place that re-elaborates tradition by bending, under unusual perspectives, the customary attributes of representation, allowing tradition to connect with an unthought plurality of interpretations.

Perceiving this phenomenon with the eyes of one who does not know it, approaching it for the first time, investing desires and energy into translating the events, allows the creation of a new field of force generators: Catira explodes and shatters, revealing targets that might not have emerged were it not for the artist’s gaze. Parallax effect. The woman, the violence, the overturned hourglass, history, power, and the shot emerge.

Ca-atira!

Renata Azambuja / Nov. 2016

Eneida Sanches is an artist currently based in São Paulo. A draftsman and printmaker, she has been dedicated for years to the symbology surrounding Afro-Brazilian mythology, investigating it within the context of contemporary ethnographic discourse.

This residency was carried out by the Instituto Sacatar in Itaparica, in partnership with the Núcleo de Arte do Centro-Oeste, as a result of the Olhares Brasileiros Project, part of the 12th edition of the Rede Nacional Artes Visuais Program. The present exhibition was realized in partnership between NACO and Galeria deCurators.