Manauara Clandestina’s practice includes photography, video, performance, textiles, and fashion, frequently collaborating with other artists and featuring the travesti (local transgender) community as one of her main subjects. For the Biennale Arte 2024, the artist presents the second version of the video Migranta (2020-23), incorporating new elements such as recent recordings of her father. In this sense, one should understand the title as a sign of the ongoing construction process of the work, as well as the artist’s identity and relations. The video alternates screenshots from her mobile phone, excerpts from security cameras, material from archives, and historical movies, using a wide range of technologies, from high-resolution images to low-tech, which results in different textures and qualities of depictions. For Clandestina, this use of ready-made images transposes the concept of “upcycling” – in which one uses discarded material to make new clothes – that she learned in the fashion world to her practice in video. In narrative terms, Building (2021-24) gathers scenes depicting the exploration of the moon, edifices in collapse, and the artist herself, as well as accounts about travestility, ecology, economic inequalities, labour, religion, violence, intimacy, and affection, proposing interconnections between all these issues.
This is the first time the work of Manauara Clandestina is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Leandro Muniz
