Reimagining Care – A Research Residency by Rubiane Maia

In the last few years, discourses about care have been brought to the forefront by social movements, calling us to acknowledge our mutual interdependence while navigating the pandemic condition in an interconnected world in multiple crises. What do frameworks of care contribute to better understand and transform the art sector? How can they help us question funding priorities and ways and paces of working, and what tools do they offer to address the often extractive relationship between institutions and artists?

Responding to the urgency of such discussions and to our commitment to care as an organisational practice, LADA is thrilled to announce that the transdisciplinary artist and independent researcher Rubiane Maia is launching the project Reimagining Care with a six-month residency lasting until March 2023. Starting from the fact that to be an artist today could be a process in itself exhausting, especially for artists who have care responsibilities, Rubiane will explore and expand notions of care and talk with transnational art projects and initiatives whose work centres practices and understandings of care.

The residency focuses on processes and exchanges rather than outcome, and is funded through the salary of LADA’s Co-Director Chinasa Vivian Ezugha.

Biography

Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian transdisciplinary artist based in Folkestone, UK. She completed a degree in Visual Arts and a Master degree in Institutional Psychology at Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil. Her artwork is a hybrid across performance, images and writing; sometimes flirting with drawing, painting and collage practices. In general, she is interested in the body, voice, memory, phenomena and organic matter. Rubiane is attracted to states of perception, synergy and healing that encompass relationships of interdependence and affect between human and non-human beings as minerals and plants. She often develops research in site-specific contexts, always considering the landscape and the environment as guides and co-creators of her artworks.  

In 2015, Rubiane took part in the exhibition Terra Comunal – Marina Abramovic + MAI, at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo with the long durational performance The Garden for two consecutive months. In the same year, she produced her first short film EVO in collaboration with the filmmaker Renata Ferraz; EVO premiered at the 26th Festival Internacional de São Paulo and the 22nd Festival de Cinema de Vitória. In 2016, Rubiane worked on the project Preparation for Aerial Exercise, the Desert and the Mountain which required her to travel to high landscapes of Uyuni (Bolivia), Pico da Bandeira (Espírito Santo/Minas Gerais, BRA) and Monte Roraima (Roraima, BRA/Santa Helena de Uyarén, VEN). In 2017, she launched her second short film titled ÁDITO. Since 2018 she has been working on the ongoing project Book-Performance, composed of a series of actions devised in response to autobiographical texts, particularly influenced by traumatic transgenerational memories connected to gender and racialisation issues. Currently, she is part of Food Art Research (FAR) Network, a wide international network of over twenty established artists that engage with the politics and aesthetics of food, and Room to Bloom programme, a feminist platform for ecological and postcolonial narratives. Recently, Rubiane launched the online installation DIVISA project.