Bel Falleiros
Olho da Terra (Eye of the Earth), 2019
Archival Print on Cotton Paper
01 - 10 x 16 / 25.4 x 40.64 cm
02 - 13 x 20 in / 33.02 x 50.8 cm
The performance and its consequent images and installation is the outcome of a one month residency at Massapê Projetos (São Paulo, Brazil), where the artist used local soil to honor the knoll where the city was founded. Working with found natural earth from construction site waste in the downtown area of the city, the artist symbolically recreated the mountain to celebrate its ancestral sacredness and bring attention to its forgotten history. Inhampabuassu, or the Eye of the Earth, is the name of the knoll. It is a site that carries many stories. For example, it was the stage of colonial battles, an indigenous crossroads, and the site where ‘zero-mark’ monument was displaced during the city's expansion. The work brings attention to the many layers of historical amnesia at this particular site and the universality of these stories. The act of reconstructing the knoll with its raw earth is an act to reenact memory and reconnect with the land, its ancestrality and the sense of belonging.
$120
$200
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Bel Falleiros (São Paulo, 1983) is a Brazilian artist with an Architecture degree from the University of São Paulo. She performed investigative walks in São Paulo as part of her first solo show at CAIXA Cultural, while in residency at the Sacatar Institute (2014) and in Rome at the MAXXI Museum (2015). In 2013, she founded Aurora, an artist-run space in São Paulo, that won the State Grant for Independent Art Spaces for three consecutive years (2014-2016).
In the U.S., Falleiros has worked with the landscape in a site-specific project at Pecos National Park, New Mexico (2016) and constructed a permanent earth-work at Burnside Farm Detroit (2017). For the Santa Fe Art Institute Equal Justice themed residency, she worked in collaboration with the Native women-led organization Tewa Women United (2018). In New York, she took part in the residencies: Works on Water/Underwater New York and AnnexB (2018). Her works were shown at the Spring Break Art Show in New York, and the Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin (2019). She is currently a recipient of the 2020 New York Foundation for the Art Immigrant Program and the 2020 Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship.