Artworks
Narrative
The flower-patterned fabric that covers me, that covers this figure, is the curtain from the living room of my childhood home. A materialised childhood memory. It was no coincidence that I chose it to cross this river and accompany me on another major journey: from the home to the public space, from a marginal existence as an artist to the possibility of paving the way for this to be my daily life. This protective capsule and activator of new powers has the effect of opening a door of perception through which I passed during this residency. This work reveals the eccentricity of the journey, of this concrete and imaginary passage that has opened up inner space for the possibility of a new reality, a new way of seeing and acting in the world: multiplying myself, summoning rituals, climbing roofs and trees, defying gravity, and duplicating space itself, creating imaginary architectures, is possible on the other side of the door. An exploratory journey that concretely goes from the house to the studio, but metaphorically is an exploratory journey in a space to be conquered, right now, in the future.
Biography
Rita Carmo (Lisbon, 1976) is a multidisciplinary artist and founder of Galeria Mergulho - an independent project in a domestic space. With a degree in Fine Arts (ESAD.CR), she completed the Erasmus programme and a research project at Kunsthogskolen i Bergen, with the support of the Research Council of Norway. In her work she investigates the relationship between Past and Present, Unconscious and Conscious, Private and Public, Strange and Familiar, articulating these dualities in objects, installations and performances. Exploring what remains of the building materials from her childhood home, she investigates the domestic space as an archive and setting for memories and emotions, in which she stages symbolic self-representations and creates installations that juxtapose heterogeneous spaces and times. By continually rehearsing strategies of belonging, protection and overcoming, she tests possibilities of integration between the child and the adult, between the past, the present and the future.