Aline Bispo, visual artist from Brazil. Photo © Daisy Serena
Tell us what you do and your beginnings.
I am a multi visual artist and more recently I have been carrying out some work as an independent curator. My work involves languages ranging from painting on canvas, on buildings, through urban interventions, and creating prints for various uses in the world of fashion, book covers, performance, and photographic studies.
Last year I started my research with the development of sculptures and objects for installation. My path as a visual artist began from concerns that were born before I thought about taking them to artistic work.
Before talking about this, it is important to say that I was a child, I always drew and I followed my mother sewing at home during my childhood, so she sewed and I made clothes for my dolls and I was a little fascinated by the old magazines that my mother used. They had fashion, lifestyle, architecture, and decoration content, all of which were incredible to me and enriched my artistic production.
But I lived in a part of the outskirts of the city of São Paulo and as I grew older I began to observe social and ethnic differences, especially when I needed to move around the city to work and study, this was the first moment, around 2008, that I spent looking at myself seeking a greater purpose than just living following some imposed rhythms.
It was at this moment that I started to observe myself and look at my physical characteristics, since in Brazil racial issues are difficult to the same extent that it is believed that there is a racial democracy, I started to look at the history of my family and what I call it a ‘non-place’ which is where my mixed-race body finds itself in my country.
These were the motivating factors for me to take the first step, look at myself in the world in a different way, find out what the world thought about it and, of course, which stories were similar to mine.
It was when I went to study interior design, at the same time I did small graffiti around the city and these two practices encouraged me to follow my later training and to continue making art in other ways.
What does your work aim to say?
Today this creation of art, which began with this look at this mixed-race body in the world, brings other stories. In my search for what I call ‘non-place’, I came to understand the stories of my country, its people, and consequently how these stories connect to Afro-diasporic peoples and Afro-diasporic stories, but also connect to the people indigenous and Latino people from different parts of the world.
And then I can look, from the ‘non-place’, at my body as a body that has several places within itself, a body-territory, but more than that, a body-territory that is plural, in the face of all the stories I find. And one of these places is also the Afro-Amerindian-religious space, where many cults are formed and were formed from syncretic and miscegenation processes that needed to emerge in many places in other ways, due to slavery and colonization.
Currently, in these developments, I have traveled and researched a lot, about the relationships between nature, human beings, different faiths, memories, connections, and affections. I think that today my work talks about all of this and allows the public to relate to its history and repertoire, starting from its place in the world.
Where do you find inspiration for your art?
I find inspiration in everything I can and in each new research process. I believe that the movement of seeking possible encounters in different places, people, and of course, in nature, does this to my creation.
The research processes are constant and important for this, with each new theme, support, language or phase, reading, dialogue, and music being fundamental for me to be inspired. In addition to the constant presence in the studio, looking at what I have produced before and how some dormant ideas can come back in another way.
Could you give us some insight into your creative process?
There is a phrase that I like, although I don’t know its authorship, says: “The future is ancestral”; I like to think about this type of movement to facilitate the creative process.
Writing, writing things down, looking for references, and from time to time looking at this material, for me this is something important. In addition to reading about the topics I’m looking at, dialogues with other creatives, curators, and friends are also things that facilitate many processes.
Learning from our elders and our past selves also contributes a lot. Music is also something that helps me, I tend to listen to a lot of things, without limiting myself and when I find musical themes that connect with what I’m producing, I listen a lot to stay focused.
Another thing that has been increasingly important for me is routine, having a work and production routine with an organized schedule makes a lot of difference and helps me a lot to not get overwhelmed.
What are your future projects?
Ah, thank you for this question! haha. This week I become part of the MASP (São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand Art Museum) collection with three pieces of clothing that are part of a fashion and art project, in August I open my next solo exhibition in São Paulo, entitled The Line Gives The Point, the line gives the knot, at Usina Luis Maluf, which is the result of a project of around nine trips through states in Brazil, recording religious festivities in different ways.
This exhibition was shown in a smaller format at MACRS – Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul, but now in São Paulo it will have a larger size and some works are still in production. The objective is for this research to grow and go beyond oceanic borders as well.
I will also participate in the next SP Arte Fair in April and there are some projects with design brands for November. In 2023 I had the opportunity to work with the Latin GRAMMY and now I hope to find other opportunities to take my work to other countries.
Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website
