São Luis, Maranhão – Brasil April/May 2023

Artist Residency Program

Lab.Suav emerged as an initiative to provide space and resources for artists to carry out their investigations. The purpose of this project was precisely to promote a meeting between artists from different contexts: between themselves and between territories (familiar or not) , and thereby launch the possibility of reimagining symbols, whether they are well established or buried in the official layers of culture.

The city of São Luís housed most of the process, and perhaps itself, as well as other elements of the infinite universe of political and cultural references in Maranhão, is the greatest point of convergence between the works. Not as a theme that explains or justifies them, but as a common ground from which each artist departed to conduct their unique practice.

The laboratory was an experience, and the exhibition presented here is an empirical cut of the combination of so many repertoires and subjectivities, individual and collective, that make up the result of this process.

This exhibition, therefore, is a record, an archive, of something that existed in a very particular time and space, formed by the equation of possibility and impossibility of a laboratory study: accounting for countless successes and errors, but above all, delivering research bases poetic, formal, sensitive, that will continue to develop in new encounters, and that only a new time, a new ground, a new study will be able to interpret them.