CarolinE Ricca Lee (BR, 1990)
Residency period: September-November 2025
When I first thought about my project HOMEBODYTERRITORY, I was interested in the home as a bodily extension of an imagined motherland, wondering how this space could reveal connections between Brazilian and Swiss contexts. Over time, and during my Pro Helvetia residency at La Becque, this intention evolved, shifting from parallels to resonances through inherited gestures, material traces, and how ancestry becomes bound to a site.
In the ceramics studio, I explored how clay’s plasticity can absorb, distort, and preserve embodied memories, as well as anatomical echoes manifesting through textile shapes. As a non-binary and queer person, it became important for me to acknowledge other meanings of bodies: to consider what a body can be beyond what has been historically constructed or permitted. These corporeal cartographies offer multiple mapping possibilities of wear, shift, and play with—rather than control. Tracing the diversity of possibilities within the notion “We were always here”.
My writing practice was in flux alongside the studio, where I worked through speculative narratives and intimate correspondences to examine how longing, desire, and memory reorganize one’s relationship to place. So, the work Home as Desire evolved through performance, speculative writing, and dialogues with Swiss-Vietnamese artist Thi My Lien Nguyen. Such cultural encounters challenged the notion of belonging as a fixed state, viewing it instead as an ongoing negotiation shaped by love, diasporic proximity and inherited silences. — Caroline Ricca Lee
Caroline Ricca Lee is a Sino-Japanese Brazilian transdisciplinary artist and researcher, born and based in São Paulo. Through sculptures, installations, critical writing, performance, video, Lee delves into archiving and memory of decolonial, queer, and feminist epistemology, and reclaims an ancestral body and narratives of Asian diasporas in Brazil. Lee particularly investigates an unofficial memory preserved in alternative documentation such as personal stories, inherited memorabilia, and family photographs. The syncretic gaze in their production reveals a repertoire in which Asian ancestry and Brazilian culture collide to create a noisy body of work inherent to the tapestry of a multicultural identity.
1-3 : Caroline Ricca Lee, La Becque, 2025, photo Matthieu Croizier
4-6 : Caroline Ricca Lee, ‘HOMEBODYTERRITORY’, Open Studios, La Becque, 2025, photo Aurélien Haslebacher
7-10 : Caroline Ricca Lee, La Becque, 2025, photo Aurélien Haslebacher
11-13 : Caroline Ricca Lee, ‘Home as Desire’, City Salts, 2025, photo Nicolas Gysin