Adriana Varella

Known for

Directing

Birthplace

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Adriana Varella is a Brazilian artist. Adriana Varella’s way of thinking, making, and presenting art is situated in a position of resistance to hierarchical social structures, especially about the bipartite division of genders, women’s oppression, and the marginality and violence to which the LGBTQIA + community is subjected. It also encompasses other social problems such as class issues, racism, and the forest people’s extinction, as is a great part of the Brazilian indigenous population. All those fronts of struggle, consequences of colonialism, and the neoliberal logic, its updated manifestation, are recognized by the artist and assembled in their intersectional way of producing art by building networks and connections between different social demands. Adriana Varella's production is located in the intersectional view of capitalist oppression and also in an optimistic perspective of establishing links between the multiple networks of social demands that pursue a place of horizontality. Adriana Varella's political motivation they provoke their gesture, which unfolds in public and collective art projects that aim to deterritorialize spaces, discourses and languages conditioned to capitalism and patriarchy. Their projects consist in hybrid devices that assemble different media and supports, such as video, cinema, photography, drawing, sculpture, as well as the insertion of appropriated objects and performance actions, expanding the field of experimentation and diluting the borders of languages. The construction of these imagetic fields takes place outside institutionalized art spaces. With a modified space-time, their environments are composed of fragments of the "real", embedded in systems of signs that reverberate in new narratives, senses and thoughts. Stripped of immediate messages to be interpreted, their devices are heterotopic spaces for immersive experiences, providing the opportunity of reconfiguration of ways of being, seeing and acting in the world and in relation to others. By embracing active modes of image perception, Adriana Varella's devices have the power to, in the light of Deleuze, force thought (2006) in a society where entrenched mindsets are rooted in instances such as social groups, the nuclear family, schools, churches and the workplace, Varella's work is coming to confront them.