Luana Vitra (BR)
Residency period: May-July 2024
luanavitra.com
Born in Brazil in 1995, artist, dancer, and performer Luana Vitra grew up in Contagem (where she still lives and works today), a region heavily affected by industrial mining activities. Deeply marked by the smells and omnipresence of iron and soot in her childhood environment, Vitra went on to develop an artistic practice that focuses on the psycho-emotional infusion of landscapes and the subtleties of the materials that compose them to find a form of survival and healing. Combining a wide variety of natural and transformed objects and materials, Vitra’s installations address themes of the environment, racial justice, and the re-examination of history, evoking a form of poetry while raising and confronting political issues.
Vitra’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (2022), the South London Gallery (2022), MASP in São Paulo (2022), the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (2022-2023), and the Framer Framed gallery in Amsterdam (2022).
During her residency at La Becque, Vitra will first pursue her research into the “speech” of minerals and the physical-chemical movements involved in the oxidation of iron. After a period of experimentation and investigation, she then plans to build an installation from oxidized materials, using electrolysis technology, which enables rust to be transferred from one object to another by connecting them to an energy source. Using this process as a means of sharing, Vitra will then create a dance work around this installation, based on the process of oxidation and the agitation of protons, electrons, and neutrons it implies.
Luana-Vitra, photo Fabio Souza, MAM Rio