São Paulo. Installation, sculpture, photography

Maria Thereza Alves spent her Brazilian childhood in New York to later reside in Mexico. It may be that this multiple status of emigrant - initially involuntary, now voluntary - means, on the one hand, that Maria Thereza may have developed a multiple feeling of nostalgia, eventually leading to a strong consciousness of resistance. On the other hand, she received and then almost naturally adopted cultural plurality, from the "exile syndrome" and the benefits of what we still call the first world; from the Afro-Portuguese culture of the coasts of Brazil and the Mexicanist syncretism ”. The perpetual movements of Maria Thereza Alves have repercussions on the circulations of cultural data that animate her works, chosen in counterpoints to each other and deliberately confused.

Originally from a country where the devastation of nature has reached dramatic levels, the product of ambitions and excessive and mistaken economic policies (it should be added that this situation has become widespread throughout the planet), María Thereza has developed a constant environmental militancy in various forums and countries; the most growing was as part of the effort to prevent the destruction of a shopping center despite protests from environmental groups and organizations.

Maria Thereza takes us from the Amazon - a zone of cultural, as well as economic and ecological conflicts - to New York, now converted into the capital of all syncretisms. Namely; She carries out conceptual works to express her doubts, her conflicts, her tensions as a displaced Brazilian. The very tools that Maria Thereza uses reflect these tensions: she mixes sculpture and photography elaborated as narrative space, installation, a derivation of museography and engraving, a document before being an art. It integrates these elements in a given space, without looking - like others to highlight the "spectacular" - anti-theatrical work, which is therefore located halfway between the "artistic" and the "documentary".

Her work is offered primarily as political discourse, even though this is not so evident in her assemblages of natural materials, nor in the ambiguous relationships she introduces by treating nature from the perspective of the natural science museum (the Amazonas turned into scenery and her few remains imprisoned in transparent plastic bubbles) or her condition as a Latin woman forced to retain her feelings.

Alves has worked and exhibited internationally since the 1980s, creating a body of work that investigates the stories and circumstances of particular localities to bear witness to silenced stories. Her projects are based on research and are developed from her interactions with the physical and social environment of the places where she lives, as well as visits to exhibitions and residences.

Since the late 1990s, the artist has developed a great project in progress: Seeds of Change. Focusing on different cities like Berlin, Bristol, Guangzhou or Dubai. As nodes of the inter-port traffic of seeds that characterized the colonial period, it investigates antecedents related to the origin of these and their transport throughout the globe. This movement is a process by which the seeds become vehicles of meaning.

These projects begin in response to local needs and continue through a process of dialogue that is often facilitated between material and environmental realities and social circumstances. Although she is aware of the Western binaries between nature and culture, art and politics, or art and everyday life, she deliberately refuses to acknowledge them in her practice. Instead, she chooses to work with people in communities as equals through collaborative relational practices that require constant movement across all of these boundaries.