Strombolian in its eruption for over a thousand years, the volcanic island in the Mediterranean Sea is a geological body in constant activity and transformation. Its black beaches, incandescent lava, toxic gases, and guttural rumblings, as well as its tortuous magmatic rocks, make Stromboli a landscape of both beauty and devastation.
The human body can also be understood as a volcano – an organism in permanent metamorphosis. Successive emotional tremors, eruptions of desire, rage, and passion set in motionchanges that unfold both physically and psychically. Pushed to its limits, much like the island of Stromboli, the body reacts in various ways to the constellation of forces imposed upon it – whether gravity, oppression, labor, pleasure, insanity, or fear.
As an allegory of a world in disarray – whose biological, political, social, and technological configurations open onto multiple possibilities of coexistence, survival, and decline – this exhibition brings together artists from a broad geographical and generational spectrum to speculate on the transformations of the body in both life and art, whether it is human, non-human, or more-than-human. This body is understood here as a malleable sphere from which antagonistic forces erupt, simultaneously seeking and rejecting stability – two sides of the same face, one visible, the other hidden, both operating within an atmosphere of fragility, risk, violence, and passion.
Bernardo José de Souza
Artists: Adriana Varejão, Alice Shintani, Amoako Boafo, Ana Mazzei, Andressa Cantergiani, Arthur Barrio, Camila Elis, Carlos Pasquetti, Chico Machado, Cildo Meireles, Cristiano Lenhardt, Di Cavalcanti, Eduardo Haesbaert, Elena Damiani, Emmanuel Nassar, Hélio Melo, Iberê Camargo, Ío, Ismael Nery, Ivens Machado, José Leonilson, Letícia Lopes, Letícia Ramos, Liuba Wolf, Louise Bourgeois, Lúcio Fontana, Luiz Roque, Luiz Sacilotto, Lygia Pape, Maria Lídia Magliani, Marina Borges, Mauro Fuke, Michel Zózimo, Montez Magno, Nelson Leirner, Olga de Amaral, Paloma Bosquê, Portinari, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rodolpho Parigi, Romy Pocztaruk, Saint Clair Cemin, Sara Ramo, Sarah Lucas, Tarsila do Amaral, Tony Oursler e Toyin Ojih Odutola.
