Saudade

June 18, 2021 - Casa Bicho + Ocupa

Group Exhibition:

Guilherme Kid, Helena Cebrian, Pedro Gomes, and Rona Neves

Curators: Carla Oliveira and Luyza De Luca

"A melancholic feeling due to the absence of a person, thing, place, or pleasurable experiences already lived."

Saudade is the feeling of a loss. Perhaps one of the most powerful forces during this pandemic, emphasized by the constant presence of memories on social media. Saudade is expressed in various forms, mediums, and languages. Everyone has their own version of saudade, and it’s something everyone feels. It’s about the melancholy of wishing to relive something already lived, recognizing in the past a pleasurable period. It's about wanting to be there again. Trying to find meanings for the word saudade is a solitary, insufficient, and frustrating task. It's solitary because, to explain it, you must feel it. It's insufficient because no description can truly express the absence we feel in our chest. And it's frustrating because, despite being the hardest to describe, it generates the most descriptions. Even though we all feel it, not every kind of saudade can be resolved. Saudade is also about being affected by the longing of others.

This exhibition was born from such a feeling. For this exhibition, which opens a new cycle at Casa Bicho, we invited Rio-based artists who, despite sharing the theme of saudade, each chose to portray it in their own way. Each artist presents their own unique situations and sensations, which resonate within all of us, even evoking saudade for something we haven’t lived through. Ocupa is pleased to present this group exhibition featuring the artists Rona Neves, Helena Cebrian, Guilherme Kid, and Pedro Gomes.

Rona is a visual artist, performer, and writer born in the Morro dos Pretos Forros, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. He investigates everyday stories, analyzing dreams and lived experiences to compose his tales, which serve as the foundation for his artistic production. In this exhibition, Rona offers himself entirely, resulting in the staging of the tale "Oceano" in one of Casa Bicho’s rooms, tied to a powerful video performance. By placing the unresolved longing for a father into the space, Rona fills every layer of the room with blue, emphasizing the weight and madness of memory.

While Rona’s work assumes a dynamic movement through the exhibition space, Helena Cebrian’s work deals with static saudade. Helena incorporated aspects of her culture and personal life to convey the intimacy of saudade through historical family records. With a strong interest in analog photography, she used it as a tool to reflect the theme, relating film as an organic and old, yet renewing, form of photography to the various ways of interpreting memory and nostalgia. The artist’s photo installation was designed to revisit this family imagery and emphasize the empty spaces of this saudade.

Helena shows us through her work that photography plays an essential role in the task of recalling a well-lived past. Similarly drawing from personal memories, Guilherme Kid contributes a four-meter mural developed specifically for this show. Kid is an urban artist who feels the need to depict the social, cultural, and everyday aspects of Rio’s suburbs in his work: the street vendor, the açaí stall, children playing soccer and flying kites, the market, the bar. Always seeking to represent the peripheral population as the protagonists of his works, Kid incorporates the language of urban graffiti into his art.

Pedro Gomes, also a graffiti artist, acquired techniques across various pillars of art and began to create projects involving tattooing, oil painting, design, muralism, silkscreen printing, among others. In "Saudade," Pedro brings a bit of his childhood memories and stories with his siblings and family. With striking colors, loose formal structure, and diffuse outlines, Pedro successfully translates a childhood that belonged to all of us, imprinting his brother Bruno’s face onto the two canvases that make up the exhibition. Returning to the idea of childhood portraits, Pedro brings the melancholy of being a child to the show.

Just as saudade in art can be translated as absence, empty spaces, or voids, it also offers the possibility of “a romance with one's own fantasy.” Embracing the positive side of feeling saudade, we decided to approach it from the perspective of memories, exploring and provoking the yearning for better times. Beyond seeking to define it, we propose a sensitive look at this feeling through this exhibition, providing spaces for appreciation and reflection—a new way to feel and understand saudade.

For more saudade and its forms of expression.

Welcome.

- Luyza De Luca