An art production and development residency by Ana Sousa (PT).
In art, as in life, there is a movement, a constant metamorphosis, visible or invisible, perceptible or not.
Flying away brings us to a game we all played in our childhood. The process was to put paint, or crayons scraps on a paper sheet and fold it in half. The result was an image, very colorful, and symmetric. After this, with some imagination, as fluid as it was during that time, we would give names to what would show on the paper, like magic. We felt like gods doing this, to make something and name it with a certainty that no predetermined conviction could give. It could be a blue bird, a flower blooming, the Sun, an ant, our best friend with a hat, fresh baked cookies from granny, a bug, a dragon, anything we wanted it to be, anything that our will suggested.
I believe that the animals are the main characters in the child’s universe, in my own dreams they would appear many times…I remember dreaming about wolves that would steal my ice creams (nightmares), and huge turtles that lived in the strange and dark place under my bed. Really, what I saw during the day would be transformed in the night and gain distorted unusual shapes. In the mentioned game this would also happen, sometimes the bee would not be exactly a bee, it would be more a butterfly or a slater…the shapes would infect each other, they would look like this, but could also be that, and they could be both at the same time. Maybe it was at this time in my life that I learned that something is not only one thing, it can have many facets. One does not equal one, what a complicated idea! Things are not closed and stationary. In Art, as in Life, there is a movement, a constant metamorphosis, visible or invisible, perceptible or not.
Ana Sousa (PT)
Ana Gonçalves de Sousa was born in Lisboa, in 1980. She lived and studied in Faro until 1998. She has a degree in Fine arts – Painting from the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa and a Mst from the same intitution. She is currently a PhD Candidate there as well. Since 2002 she has been developing and coordinating projects and exhibitions in contemporary tapestry. Some examples of her work were shown in ArtLab Futuro -Tapeçaria Contemporânea (2011) e ArteLab21 – Tapeçaria Contemporânea (2010), both in the Museu de Tapeçaria de Portalegre Guy Fino, em Portalegre; Utopia9 (2003), part of the 2º Simpósio da Moda e do Têxtil, Escola Superior de Artes Aplicadas do Instituto Superior Politécnico de Castelo Branco, Cineteatro Avenida, Castelo Branco; O têxtil na Europa: passado, presente e futuro (2002), 1º Encontro da Texere – Textil Education and Research in Europe – em Portugal, Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, Auditório e Cisterna, Lisboa. Ana Gonçalves de Sousa is since 2009 teaching and researching at the Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa.
