Clara Vieira Silveira

【Statement】

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Over the past six years, I have been developing a research project that intertwines several distinct images, linking personal experience with collectively created solutions that emerge from poetic translations and interweavings of classical traditions with dance, literature, and the Latin American territory. The works in this exhibition are part of this ongoing investigation, exploring the idea of natural technologies of shelter through the use of animal intestines to create second-skins or cocoon-like structures.
Chrysalis departs from the Brazilian idiom "fazer das tripas coração" – to make heart from guts – which speaks of gathering courage in the face of adversity. The idiom evokes a technology of transformation, courage, and visceral knowledge that operates below consciousness. The title refers to the embryonic state of transformation – a suspended space in which the body dissolves and rebuilds itself. This state is one of radical vulnerability, but also of profound potential. The chrysalis is an active shelter that enables transformation by holding the body while it breaks down and reconfigures itself, occupying a liminal space between preservation and disappearance. The choice of material points to gut knowledge, intuition, and a wisdom that precedes language. The structures built are vestiges of a process – second skins, discarded exoskeletons, shells that once housed a body in transition.
The residency at Absolute Space AIR in Taiwan was fundamental to this work. It provided the time, studio space, and support necessary to process the material and develop the techniques that shape these pieces. Beyond the practical conditions, the experience reshaped my understanding of ritual. Visiting temples in Tainan, I observed how religious practice is woven into the fabric of daily life – not as something separate, but as a continuous presence. I began to see the repetitive gestures of preparing the intestines – cleaning, drying, smoking – as a form of devotion, a way of establishing a relationship with the material and the promise of protection. The incense used in the temples also informed my research on scent; I started working with elements of traditional Chinese medicinal, exploring how fragrance and smoke can function as an invisible architecture; building space, marking thresholds, and inviting presence.
This series of works connects choreographic practice and ritual. The intestines are prepared by hand – cleaned, dried, and smoked with resins and incense – before being sewn onto armatures made of bamboo and twigs. The process is slow, repetitive, and attentive, requiring patience and a kind of repetition that echoes the logic of praying or the rhythm of a mantra. The body of the artist and the body of the material enter into a dialogue, each responding to the other's rhythm. The hands learn the resistance of the intestines; the intestines learn the pressure of the hands. This is a choreography of care – a dance between vulnerability and protection. The repetition is not monotonous; it is a form of attention that deepens with each gesture, like the repetition of a mantra that opens a space for presence. This ritual establishes a relationship with the material and the promise of protection, sheltering the body that will inhabit it.
For this first approach to the form, I adapted historical and contemporary patterns – 18th-century panniers, 1960s fashion, fetish wear, cosplay – reinterpreting some as sculptural volumes and others as garments. What unites these patterns is their relationship to the body: they shape, contain, exaggerate, or disguise it. My gesture displaces these technologies of bodily constraint into technologies of shelter and expansion.
My artistic practice emerges from exercises of prediction, dissolution, and paralysis – strategies that operate in the liminal spaces between preservation and disappearance, where divination becomes a methodology for interrogating inherited trauma and biological memory. This framework has guided my research into natural technologies of shelter, where the paradox of preserving vulnerable bodies unfolds through their very dissolution. The past months have been spent investigating the alchemy of transmutation: how intestines can be transformed into structures of care, architectures that hold space for what is fragile and unfinished, and that make heart from guts.