The Usina de Arte inaugurated Saturday, March 11, “Conversadeiras”, a new permanent work by artist Claudia Jaguaribe.
March 2023
Overlapping past and present, "Conversadeiras" is a work that enhances the power of dialogues at the Usina de Arte.
The artwork by the artist Claudia Jaguaribe brings a set of tile-covered benches with overlapping images to the art collection of the project’s Artistic-Botanical Park in Mata Sul, Pernambuco.
Conversar (to converse); from the Latin conversartio, to join the other or meet someone frequently. In times of disconnections and isolations, the Rio de Janeiro visual artist Claudia Jaguaribe proposes an invitation to dialogue, as the simplest consequence of encounters, with her new work “Conversadeiras”.
Bringing the word “conversation” to the name of the work presupposes multiple meanings since the creation is composed of four sets of sculptural benches, three of them with a tall structure, all covered with tiles illustrated with superimpositions of elements photographed by the artist. The structures, which are sometimes linear, sometimes curvilinear, organically compose the park furniture as a space to rest and contemplate the landscape, sparking conversation. It also encourages dialogues around itself, by combining elements belonging to the past and the present of this place, which was once a sugarcane mill.
“Conversadeiras” was designed by Jaguaribe for the Usina de Arte, precisely to create points of connection in this temporal mark of almost 100 years of existence of Usina Santa Terezinha. “These benches-sculptures work as a support for a material that I have been working with, which are the tiles, and tell a little of the trajectory and new proposals of the Usina and its totally redefined social function. It is from this link between the past and the present that we glimpse paths for the future,” says the artist, who has perceived the artistic potentiality of tiles since childhood. Items present at the entrance to her house, in the places she visited, among relatives’ houses, churches, and squares in the Northeast.
This is not the first time Claudia creates for external environments, but the work at Usina de Arte exclusively presents a new technique that allows for the immortality of photographic images in open spaces. Digitally printed in an oven at more than 3,000ºC, the tiles that cover the concrete and iron structure carry an eternalized palimpsest of elements that mirror the local flora and popular art, folklore, historical periods, maps, among other kinds of references. These elements compose the history of Pernambuco and of the cultural equipment in Mata Sul, Pernambuco, which for almost 10 years has been driving the socioeconomic development of its surroundings with art, environment, culture, and education. An environment, then, of conversations among people, conversation about what has been left behind with the foreseeable horizons.
