CarolinE Ricca Lee (BR, 1990)
Residency period: September-November 2025
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.
Their residency project draws on Lee’s ongoing research into ancestry as a form of fiction. Based on the idea that we can move bodies of territories but hardly the territories from such bodies, the project focuses on the household as an extension of an imagined motherland. The artist’s main goal is to investigate parallels between Brazilian and Swiss family homes, domestic contexts, and traditional practices, intertwining memories and collective narratives and revealing intricate bonds between memory, family, generation, identity, gender, and cultural heritage.