Luana Vitra

Interview by Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy

The work of Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Luana Vitra responds to the inherent desire for collapse found in matter removed from its natural state. This subject reveals itself in her investigation of the iron industry as symbolic of the journey of the Black body within the diaspora, as well as of the tension between industry and the natural world. In this conversation, Vitra speaks fondly of collaborating with her father, a carpenter by trade, the spirituality within her choices of material and color, the roles of contradiction and poetry, and healing as a series of everyday gestures. Furthermore, the artist explains understanding her body as a trap and how dance has aided in conveying this notion.

Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy (AVL): What concepts are you focusing on right now?

Luana Vitra (LV): I am currently investigating the relationship between iron and the Black body through the process of electrolysis. Electrolysis transfers rust from one object to another through a shared energy source within an aqueous environment. Usually, this process is used to remove rust from one of the objects. However, I have been working with interrupted electrolysis. In other words, object one shares its rust with object two, but before object one loses all its rust, the process is stopped. Iron is industrially galvanized, which I understand as a way of whitening the material. When this galvanized layer is broken the iron oxidizes and loses electrons. The matter breathes and loses negative charge. I think that any body forcibly removed from its origin carries within itself a desire for ruin. For iron, rust is the proclamation of this desire, through which it can return to the ground.

Understanding rust as a memory and encouraging the sharing of it between rusty and non-rusty pieces through electrolysis, I reflect on the movements of the Black body in diaspora. Ruin undoes form—it is a high degree of freedom for the body. For the Black body, memory is perhaps the place where it becomes possible to undo the fiction of race, which limits form for our subjectivities. By connecting to memories from before slavery, it becomes possible to connect to the nonexistence of race, and how this fiction expands, remakes, and reworks our construction of the body. I have been thinking of ways to reactivate this pre-annihilation existence to allow the imagination to orbit and inhabit this possibility. Iron is the material that helps me imagine these ways.

In addition to my investigation of iron, I am also currently researching traps. As a child, I learned from my father how to develop some of these devices for capturing. Over time, I came to understand myself as a trap, and I also understood that these objects are ancient technologies for protection and survival. Being a trap presents possibilities for both defense and attack, but nowadays I see this positioning mainly as an attitude, a way of existing in the world. Based on this, I have been thinking about scaring and threatening as protection strategies. In Brazilian culture, if you know how to threaten, you are protected. Defense has more to do with how the threat is communicated than with physical force. When thinking about Capoeira, the most valued skill is not the actual blow, but getting one’s foot within a millimeter of the other person’s without actually touching it. The Capoeirista’s white clothes remain clean—the gesture is one of elegance, a warning that plays with possibilities.

In formal terms, both inquiries have been directing me to create artworks that are born from the encounter between installation and dance. Because of these research interests, I am currently looking for long-term residencies where I can build an installation, inhabit it, and produce site-specific dance performances. My piece Zanzado em trama é armacao de arapuca, currently on view at the Trienal Frestas at Sesc Sorocaba, is the beginning of this process.

"I think that any body forcibly removed from its origin carries within itself a desire for ruin. For iron, rust is the proclamation of this desire, through which it can return to the ground."

AVL: What is life like in Belo Horizonte and how was it growing up there?

LV: I grew up in Contagem, an industrial city in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte. When I started to study Fine Arts at the Minas Gerais State University (UEMG), I moved to Belo Horizonte because I needed to be closer to the university and the commute would be less stressful. I moved from the periphery to the center. I find it difficult to explain this time period but here I will share a generalization of my experience: on the outskirts of Contagem, I learned collectivity, the ethics that guide me. Contagem is the root I always turn to when I need to remember who I am. In the central/southern zone of Belo Horizonte, I understood selfishness as I came in contact with more social conflicts and interacted with rich people. My maturation arose from the contrast between these two.

Object Landscape 1, 2018

Wood, iron, nail, wire, cement, and paint

Minefield, 2021

Iron, plastic, rubber, fabric, rope, cement, acrylic paint, nylon, and thread

AVL: In your artist statement, you write that you are the product of “word” and “carpentry," representing your mother and father, respectively. How do they each practice these mediums and how did they influence your practice?

LV: My father is a carpenter and my mother is a teacher. My mother, Graziela Pires, works specifically with literacy and teaches her students through poetry. Whenever she is going to introduce a new subject, or needs to pass on some information that is necessary to memorize, she makes use of poetry as a method for this transmission. The metric she uses is typical of cordel poetry, a style created in the northeast of Brazil, which has the presence of rhyme and rhythm very markedly, and thus becomes poetry that is easier to memorize. Cordel poetry is an important manifestation of our oral culture, but it is also expressed in the form of small books illustrated through woodcuts.

In my childhood, my mother wrote some poetry for me to memorize around subjects that she thought were important. She taught me a unique way to read, assimilate, and process the world. I realize that I only memorize things easily if I identify some poetic presence in them. Ultimately, I think what my mother taught me through poetry was the right to learn only what delights me, the right not to need to know all the things of the world. When I say delight, I am not talking only about beautiful and light things, because I am very interested in the weight and densities of the world. Delight, to me, is a way of organizing words that broaden and transport the perception of things. Poetry is an important access to the body. Words connect to a sensory understanding within the body that produces, among many things, relief.

My father, Jorge da Costa, is a carpenter. He has the ability to listen to plants, follow the moon, and inhabit time. He works specifically with a lathe, therefore he listens to the wood with his hands. He understands by turning over the relief, the veins, and the temperature of the wood. This interaction with my father and with carpentry brought me very close to nature. In this profession, he takes from nature but he also gives back by planting many trees. I know the smell of several types of wood because my father's body always had the smell of the wood he was working on at the time. He would come home and I would ask him what wood that was, and this is how I became intimate with this particular universe. I feel that this coexistence guides my way of inhabiting the world.

"Delight, to me, is a way of organizing words that broaden and transport the perception of things. Poetry is an important access to the body. Words connect to a sensory understanding within the body that produces, among many things, relief."

AVL: In your artist statement, you note that you are looking for survival and healing in the spaces you inhabit. How do you envision healing in these spaces? Are you looking for personal healing, collective healing, or environmental healing?

LV: It is impossible to answer this question objectively because, for me, the cure for all of these are interconnected. Healing lies in the gestures I make during the day: in the water that I drink and give to the iron to drink, in the dances that I do for the landscape, trying to undo the knots present in it and in me, in the coconut—we dance together. The personal, collective, and environmental aspects are inseparable. It is like fabric. If you pull a thread, everything moves. Healing is an attention to the health of the gesture. I hold that attention in me.

AVL: Your work combines very physical elements (earth, metal, wood, cement, mountains) with ephemeral ones (memory, changing landscapes, poetry). How do you see this relationship between the tangible and intangible?

LV: Whenever I suspend a work from the ceiling, I feel the need to also tie it to the floor. I like that my works inhabit gravity and flight at the same time. I feel that what I do exists through contradiction, even in a discursive dimension. Sometimes I say something about my work and suddenly I see it being exactly the opposite of what I said. However, I believe that contradiction is the most honest and elaborate way of inhabiting the world. The things I say and do are light and heavy, they go back and forth, up and down, they are and are not.

Murmur-riot, 2020

Iron, wood, iron ore stone, wire, plastic, copper, iron weight, acrylic paint, and rubber

Sky is the suture of a collapsing ceiling: floor, 2018

Iron light boxes, cement, and iron grids

AVL: How are you sourcing your materials? How do you decide which material you will use to express a concept?

LV: Some of the materials I find in my family's home. My father is an absolute hoarder; he has a habit of picking up things off the street and dropping them in his backyard because he thinks they might come in handy at some point. These things spend years there, waiting to be used. I am very interested in these materials and I am always looking out for what is lying around the yard. I also visit junkyards, fishing stores, construction depots, and rubber, rope, and iron stores. Materials come from many places. Part of creation is also this search. One of the main motivations in these choices is listening to the discourse already present in the matter. Every material has its own voice. I understand the creation of a work as a way of speaking to what has already been said—a way to amplify the voice that already exists in things.

In general, I am very interested in subjects that have the mark of time and use. When I buy new things, I need to use them up a little to make the work. I am interested in the moment in which matter points out, in its own body, the possibility of undoing itself. The concepts are already in the materials in a broad way, encompassing a full dimension of what they represent in the world. In creating my pieces, I extract the micro from the macro: the unique. It’s like choosing a sentence from a book written by each subject. I associate this sentence with other events in the world, creating a dialogue to broaden the possibilities of understanding things. It is about the union of a voice that is speaking in the present moment (the voice of an event), together with an ancestral voice (the voice of natural materials). The ancestral voice of matter provides a better interpretation of the voice of the event that speaks in the present.

"I feel that what I do exists through contradiction, even in a discursive dimension. Sometimes I say something about my work and suddenly I see it being exactly the opposite of what I said. However, I believe that contradiction is the most honest and elaborate way of inhabiting the world."

AVL: Why are mountains reoccurring in your work? Are the shapes in your work based on reality, or are they your own interpretations?

LV: In Minas Gerais, where I grew up, the mountains have a lot of iron and precious metals. Mining has been the main activity for the exploitation of this land since the Europeans arrived. It continues today. It is very common to live surrounded by the relief of a mountain and, after a while, looking at that same mountain and seeing that it has become a groove. Or, when you go walking on a mountain, you realize that it is like a billboard because the whole backside does not exist anymore. The mountains here do not inhabit geological time, because the constant extraction of iron does not allow the stones to move at their own pace.

The shapes of the mountains that appear in my work most of the time do not refer to reality, except in the series "Sumiço no sopro ou no sulco do chão,” which I produced in the period when I lived in a house in Brumadinho. The view from the house was a mountain that I really liked. I made several drawings of it and reflected a lot on this context. I tend to think that the mountains that appear in my work were, or will, all be real somewhere in time as memories of landscapes that have disappeared or that will still emerge. Some of these shapes are drawn by the encounter of iron with time, land, air and water. These elements cause the iron to rust, and as its shape collapses, it transforms into images that resemble mountains. Some drawings appear in my work without my presence. I am just a witness.

Ruin desire, 2001-20

Rusty cans

AVL: There is a post-apocalyptic feel to your work, a certain fragility, a warning of collapse. What brings up this vulnerability?

I believe it is the fact that most of the world is ruled by a capitalist system and a colonial logic. Living in this system, words like fragility, collapse, and vulnerability become inherent. I expand on this desire for the collapse of the world and the creation of a different world.

AVL: Can you speak to ideas of collaboration in your practice?

I work a lot with my father. I have also invited my cousin, Débora Costa, and two other friends, Serena Rocha and Vinícius Rezende, to collaborate, but I work mostly with my father. I think about collaboration as a bond that extends over time. I am interested in thinking of ways to prolong our time together and to improve our ways of listening to each other. I have a really mature listening ability with my father in particular. All the woods present in my work pass through his hands. Everything that is related to the earth also always passes through him, because it was from my father that I learned about these materials. In the projects that I invite him to join me in, I feel that the motivating factor is often my desire to listen again, to observe how he does things, to have his energy with me. I often ask him to perform specific actions, such as cutting the wood to a certain size, or to cut out a drawing that I made on an iron plate with a machine that I do not know how to use quite as well. I like my father to do it because he never does it exactly as I ask. I like to keep in mind the minimal deviations he draws on what I draw. I trust his deviations, and that is absolutely rare. I usually obsessively pursue the image I have in mind. Collaboration with my father is a way to revere his skills and spirituality, and to multiply our gestures. For example, in the performance, Arado, I invited him to paint with me through a gesture he taught me.

AVL: You are using industrial materials to reflect or mirror the natural landscape. Why that juxtaposition?

LV: Landscape is a term born from human contemplation. Without this gaze that frames a certain space and calls it a landscape, we have nature, without limits, without cropping—an experience of totality. With this in mind, I begin to understand the landscape as an intermediate space between industry and nature. Industry, most of the time, is a human movement that extracts the raw material from nature and transforms it into a product. However, everything that leaves nature tends to return to it. When observing the movements of industrialized products in time, it is remarkable when this form goes into collapse and the matter starts moving in the opposite direction towards nature. To the route between these two places, I give the name landscape. I use industrial materials to refer to nature because I am interested in discussing the violence of human capitalist actions onto and against it. At the same time, I have always lived between these two places, therefore I identify myself with this movement of matter. I grew up in an industrial city, but I always had contact with nature. Living at this crossroads certainly influences my understanding of the world.

"I feel that in a capitalist world, all things become a number. A mountain of iron ore corresponds to the profits that it can create. When the tailings dam from this mining operation breaks, it kills a number of people. Subsequently, the company wants to discuss what amount of money buys the silence of the people who were affected and lost their loved ones."

AVL: I noticed there are a lot of numbers in your work. What do they mean?

LV: I feel that in a capitalist world, all things become a number. A mountain of iron ore corresponds to the profits that it can create. When the tailings dam from this mining operation breaks, it kills a number of people. Subsequently, the company wants to discuss what amount of money buys the silence of the people who were affected and lost their loved ones. The number is always infinitely smaller than the profit of the company responsible for the deaths. Killing becomes an absolutely profitable business decision. They keep on killing because it is cheaper, and they never take the time to observe the weight of losing a loved one, land, a house, the clean river where we bathed, and the pictures that were inside that house. That costs more, it is harder to pay, and it is impossible to repay. The numbers in my work symbolize this violence.

Vanish with a blow or furrow of the ground, disappearance XIX, 2020

Drawing on paper, wire, and iron ore stones

AVL: You believe that your body is a trap. What does that mean and how does using the body as your medium relate to it?

LV: To be a trap is a way of moving in the world, a way of solving adversity. It is having a calm and attentive body. In Brazil, the enslaved Africans used to add guinea to the cachaça they served to white people, because over time the ingestion of this plant caused dementia. For me, this is one of the main examples of being a trap. It is about using the body to create a strategy for capturing, and knowing how to wait.

I have been studying the body of traps and realizing that this body is muscular. When it is waiting for prey, its muscles contract; when it catches its prey, these muscles relax. I have been thinking about these relationships in the creation of my movements. The process of studying the traps allows my own body to go deeper into what it already is.

AVL: Generally, your work contains many neutral tones, lots of browns that are both earthy and industrial, but blue features prominently too. Why this color choice?

LV: When we look at a mountain up close, we see its true colors, but as we get farther away, due to the limitations of our eyes, it becomes dark blue, and the blue gets lighter and lighter in a gradient that ends in white. The landscape disappears in a natural way through the color blue. This color has always given me a feeling of lightness, air, ether, and sublimation. Brown and the other earthy colors are connected to iron, to the ground, to my skin. I feel that the mixture of brown and blue creates an axis for the transit of spirituality. At the same time, I believe that through these colors it is possible to appear and disappear. I like to think that blue and brown create an energetic bridge that allows me to walk between the visible and the invisible.

AVL: Do you have any rituals you perform in your studio or your daily life?

LV: I usually dance. Dance always helps me organize my sensations. Through improvisation, I move between contemporary dance, Coco, Samba, and Capoeira and, little by little, I find the energy I need to organize myself in the moment. I give water and cachaça to the energies that accompany me. I dance for the landscape when I am in the countryside. Sometimes I also need to be upside down for a while to think differently and activate another point of view. Sometimes I need to walk a long stretch and sometimes that walk needs to be in the early morning. Other times, I need to talk to strangers and when I run out of energy I always listen to Lauryn Hill. My breakfast lasts about three hours. I need to do things very slowly in the morning. This time helps me to figure out what I am going to do for the rest of the day. Generally, I do things slowly so I can be truly present.

Luana Vitra’s answers have been translated from Portuguese.

Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy

Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy is a New York and Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and administrator of contemporary art and craft. She is Assistant Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York, where she oversees the Burke Prize, a prestigious contemporary craft award. Vizcarrondo-Laboy has independently curated exhibitions at the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC, and the Jane Hartsook Gallery in New York. She is also the co-host and co-creator of the podcast Clay in Color and has published texts in Cultured magazine and the Journal of Modern Craft. She holds an MA in the History of Decorative Arts, Design, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, Annandale-on-Hudson.