Darks Miranda
Open Studio on Wednesday, 28th of August 2024
from 6 pm:
Open Studio at the Sitterwerk Gastatelier
7.30 pm:
Performance
8.30 pm:
Weird Lambada, 2020 (13 min)
Cellphone, 2020 (POR / EN, 23 min)
A Dangerous Night in Vulcano Island, 2022 (40 min) at Sitter-Ciné
Darks Miranda's work deals with skins. Originally the skin and shells of fruit, then animal skins, scales and feathers, and finally herself, when she slips into camouflage and costumes for performances, or her name, which she has wrapped herself in since she started making art. During her three months at the Sitterwerk, Miranda made ceramic sculptures that we could call bichos. In Brazilian-Portuguese, bichos are creatures from the animal world, but also mythical creatures from fantasy. Miranda's ceramic figures emerge layer by layer from a playful, dream-like fiction. For the open studio, Miranda turns her studio into a stage for these loving little monsters and lets them run the show, unlike in earlier performances in which she herself becomes the leading actress.
Her way of working becomes introverted and introspective, a response to the Sitter valley- in contrast to Rio de Janeiro where she currently lives.
Miranda's creatures made of ceramics and their props are just as Néstor Perlongher describes in his poem "Once upon an animal"
Once upon an Animal
Once upon an animal bleeding and sweet
of numerous faces
whose wounds oozed music and sweat
bleeding in their lapses
It was like an extinct species
muted and meek
but whose antics sometimes reveal a friskiness
—perhaps a nostalgia—
of its gallant grooming
Once upon an animal fugitive and fossil, but its felonies
betrayed the same sense of petals
in whose gums it stank, tangled, the anguish
impaled, like a young invader
—in its disobedient flashes throbbed a hopeless dread
How many adverbs and adjectives will catch its wake,
the enclosure
Its wicked life
Wicked calm its stubbornness
in a wretched aperture
Oh instruments of wind where nipples are shaken
hooted, howled in the light of a Chinese music
bottomless barns where it found no wheezing virtue
sloppy stamens
Once upon and once upon: blond gallants
dragged their glow like a banner
trampling the fringes
Once upon an animal tethered and troubled
by fervent misfortunes
fed by the dust of rubies
and the sound of the hills
This stay was organised in collaboration with ProHelvetia.