Artworks

Fernanda Froes' work displays a transversal gaze that moves from one realm of nature to another in various series, in search of a key that will return the trace of the primordial connection between living beings. A key that our Western culture lost in its vertiginous march towards forms of domination that were devastating to plants and animals, finally endangering even our own species. In her extensive series inspired by the tree that gave its name to Brazil ─Ibirapitanga or Pau-Brasil─ which was exploited until it approached extinction, there is a delicate gesture of reinvention that extends its existence. In her Indigo Landscapes, the blue regions on cotton paper, created with Indigofera tinctoria dyes from Asia, Africa, and Central and South America, evoke the origins and currents of the expansion of its usage, and its lucrative exploitation following the Conquest.

Froes transports the domains of the prodigious and varied botanical dyes into the realm of artistic imagination, revealing their intersections with the history of the America-a land that generated the very notion of utopia while being marked by multiple colonialist dystopias. At the same time, the whiteness of her paper reliefs inspired by the movement of those borderless creatures that are the mangroves, compelled to migrate by climate change, she reflects the alarming extent of their disappearance caused by the vortex of human impact. In her no less delicate insect pieces, Froes explores the architectures that these small creatures employ in building their habitats as a way to invoke models of human cooperation in a time that urgently requires the coming together of diverse groups within the same species. Following the understanding of Lévi-Strauss, her work essentially begins with identification with all forms of life, starting with the humblest, as a fundamental gesture of collective wisdom.

Adriana Herrera, PhD
Independent writer and curator
Co-founder Aluna Art Foundation