Photography: 40 photographs and Artist’s book.

In 2008, Patricia W. Ribas started photographing Brazilians living in Amsterdam who, due to different reasons, had been undocumented for a certain period of time. During these photo sessions, the conversations would always revolve around the feeling of homesickness and the wish to go back to the motherland.

After having photographed more than fifteen people, Ribas decided to take the negatives to Brazil with her and, as a symbolic gesture, perform an Afro-Brazilian-inspired ritual with them.

While in Brazil, she dipped the negatives in a cocktail of tropical fruits and drinks and let them soak in the mixture for three weeks. After that, she laid them out to dry on printed literary texts.

The results of the ritual are 40 images-15  portraits and 25 abstracts. The artist’s book (only 150 copies) contains 72 pages, it is printed on IBO 1 paper and it includes an essay in English, Dutch, and Portuguese by Sebastian Rapson.

Many thanks to the several generous individual donations to the crowdfunding campaign at Voordekunst, the support of the Mondriaan Fund, and Pictoright Steunfonds.

This project was made possible with the generous support from The Mondriaan Fund.

The post Dispatch to Origin appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

This work is also distributed by LIMA

Watch trailer here

©2020 Patricia Werneck Ribas

 (video still)

This project was made possible with the financial support of the Mondriaan Fund.

Press Release:

Since the 1800s German people have been fascinated with Native Americans. A rough estimate is that 40,000 to 80,000 people, all over the country, participate in ‘powwows’ where they dress up in traditional clothing, dance together and chant. Patricia Werneck Ribas traveled to a little village called Grimma close to Dresden to collect images of these gatherings and to research these phenomena. It may be a surprise to learn that dressing up as indigenous peoples is a thriving subculture in these cold lands. These scenes of German people in full native costume dancing in a circle inside a huge tent have a documentary character. The artist wanted to go beyond looking at the absurdity of white people dressing up as Native Americans, however. We see men and women wearing headdresses made of eagle feathers chanting and stamping their feet while wearing noisy bells on their ankles. In their leather beaded moccasins, fringed patchwork aprons, shiny sequined skirts, they slowly circle the large canvas tent. Patricia Werneck Ribas learned that these chants are carefully researched and the rituals are supposedly ‘authentic’. For some people, these gatherings are seen as cultural appropriation and are controversial. For this artwork, the artist has added something else. She edited a conversation between two tribal women from South America looking at the video images of the Germans slow dancing in their ‘exotic’ costumes. The sound of the Europeans chanting can be heard in the background while the women speak. This unexpected combination is neither critical nor condoning these fascinating get-togethers, just opening up a space to reflect on what it means to be ‘the other’.

The video begins with the camera slowly panning down to the ground, showing us where all plants emerge from. From the start, we are invited to look differently at this lush European landscape.  The Germans wear clothes inspired by the Sioux and Dakota tribes, and these events belong to a revered history following the extensive German colonization in the Americas. Buffalo Bill, an American soldier, and bison hunter toured Europe, performing in shows that displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. These shows inspired German children, and then adults, to dress up in indigenous clothing and learn about the different native cultures. Even before the First World War circuses brought over people from the Americas and powwows became much more common in German towns and villages. Now tourism thrives in reservations in the USA, continuing the German fascination with the ‘exotic’ and romantic idea of the native warrior and a culture that has an ‘innocent’ communion with nature.  Stories about the Mid-West, travel diaries, and documentaries about the white people’s colonization of Western states fed into idealistic literature, in particular, narratives of resistance as native societies resisted American dominance.  In addition, when the German film industry was in crisis at the start of the 20^th Century, German ‘cowboy and Indian’ films helped revive the German film industry, which also fed into the Teutonic fascination with the ‘Wild West’ and people from the prairies. 

So, in this video, women from a non-specific tribe heard that some people from the North have affinities with the Indian spirit and organize these powwows in huge tents. Watching this video is as if the two women are also observers of these scenes. Seeing potential in a shared love of nature, they wanted to study the possibilities of contacting the Germans to see if they could be allies in the women’s quest to take over the world, finding solutions to global environmental problems.

This video combines footage of native Germans dancing in a tent with audio and subtitled observations from undisclosed observers. Here, they are viewers, too.  Looking at these images is their ‘first contact’ with Northern Europeans.  The women wondered – will people in the North be willing to abandon their comforts? What would they give up to help save the planet?  The women’s plan is not yet known but there around 40 million indigenous people in Latin America getting ready to organize themselves and investigating the possibilities of working together for a common cause.

In Patricia Werneck Ribas’s video, we don’t see the women, but we hear their voices. Speaking in a mysterious language they say, “Our proposal is unique in the history of humankind. We need to help them overcome greed and individualism.”  They are passionate about their mission to transform the world. Fading out at the end, we are still left with questions about the relationship between the indigenous women from South America and the German devotees of North American tribal cultures. Will this encounter be a real possibility of enabling change or are the women’s hopes just a fantasy? 

text © Siobhan Wall 2019

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The texts are made up of words written individually in the dark with a torch (light painting) and then assembled in Photoshop. |
Inkjet prints on Canson Baryta Paper, various dimensions.

hope_teal

hope_red

hope_pink

hope_blue

Machos

Cultivate

your_mind

inthemood

what_if

melting_away

Tropical_love

still_becoming

Some_things_will_be_all_right

living_in

lalala

Sheshall

How_useful

Embrace

Egos

cannot_help

Accept mortality

Even_latinos

another

endless

are_you

The post Notes appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

Press Release
Text by Siobhan Wall
(© Siobhan Wall 2019)

Head (of a woman)

Heads have become central to Patricia Werneck Ribas’s recent work about identity. In the annex of the gallery, she has hung subdued images of the back of her shaved head taken when she was having chemotherapy. These seemingly gender-neutral heads are almost anti-portraits with their minimalistic aesthetic. In contrast, she has hung vividly coloured wigs in the adjoining space. She uses these apparently contrasting forms to explore underlying concerns in women’s lives, drawing on her own experience and memories. This is more than just a collection of personal narratives, however, she will be ‘painting’ the space with artificial highly saturated hairpieces. These straight crimson, purple, blue, yellow locks are her palette; a way to invite the viewer to identify with the glamour of dressing up and to expand on an idea of what it means to be female.

Along with other projects she has worked on, her mixed media work such as Head (of a Woman) is informed, but not confined by feminist thinking. The vividly pigmented strands of hair are only one element in her current work. She uses found objects and her own photographs of the back of her head to create minimalistic pieces that elude easy categorization. Based on her experience of recovery from a serious illness, she uses these images to relate her memories to a deeper understanding of illness and recovery. Using two contrasting pieces of work, she believes that it is in looking at the interstices between one image and another than new meanings emerge. What is missing in the spatial arrangement of the photographs invites a concerned gaze, for example.

Questions of ‘identity’ run throughout her work, a word which is always predicated on defining what we are not as a way of thinking through who we are. She sees the artist as someone who is always making decisions that have strong cultural and social ramifications- whether this is explicit in the artwork or not. Her focus is on inviting the viewer to imagine themselves in the place of the other- as in the way she depicts the back of her head in the centre frame rather than showing us her face.

In some ways, this is a documenting of her relationship to her illness and how she wanted to depict a more universal understanding of the human head.

Installation details at Josilda da Conceição Gallery:

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For the new works I used old photographic self-portraits taken over the course of several years. These old photographs were first torn apart, recycled, moulded into new shapes and then painted.

With this work I want to investigate the need for images, specially those of the self in a moment in time when we get bombarded with billions of images on a daily basis.

Installation: “I am many islands”, 2018
47 pieces
materials: recycled inkjet fine art photographic prints, acrylic paint, metal pins.
format: variable

(detail)
“Primary Me”, 2018
Format:25×25 cm each
Materials: recycled fine art photographic prints, acrylic paint, insect exhibit cases

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Angela

Vincent

Noah

Luna

Augusta

Jullie

Wiston

Casper

Nikki

Annika

Amber

Muriel

Rozi

2017

Digital C-prints

For my commissioned portraits, I usually get asked by the subjects if I can do some post-processing, in particular on the skin, in order to make them look better.

Taking this desire for perfection as a starting point, I wanted to subvert the idea of the portrait by creating abstractions, using cloned parts of the face, and randomly disposing them on a blank background.

While image manipulation has become more and more acceptable and, in many cases, a necessary part of image-making, we’re still debating how far we are allowed to go, ethically and realistically.

By only presenting some dots (many of them containing a flaw), I wanted to create abstractions of portraits, where the final image is not revealed and can only be constructed in the viewer’s mind.

The post Blemishes and Flaws appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

HD video 3 min, stereo sound, 2014
+ 12 photos

Four teenage girls appear to be having a good time in the park, enjoying a hot sunny day.
At a closer look though, they seem to be distracted by a presence under the shadow of a tree. They carry on playing until the moment they can’t hide their curiosity anymore and decide to take a closer look.

In Blossom, we are watching blond girls, who in their turn are watching a dark figure not so far away. This quiet, unmoving figure suggests the disquieting presence of “the other” in a place where it doesn’t seem to belong.
Although the girls seem to be playing like children, their bodies are already transforming into young women’s bodies and their clumsiness show they are still adjusting. At moments they seem like giant “Alices in Wonderland” The figure in the shadow is physically different from them and doesn’t take part in their games. It is a quiet, but disturbing presence.

“De film Blossom! leest als een gedicht. In zijn eerste lezing eenvoudig, maar bij een tweede of derde lezing is er voor de beschouwer, een andere, nieuwe betekenis te vinden. In de schaduw van de bloeinde meisjes, spelt zich een verbogen geschiedenis af. Leeft de man eigenlijk wel? Of is hij juist gestorven? Is het een droom? Het zijn geheimzinnige beelden met de kracht van poezie.”

Jose Vonk

(installation view)

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In a high definition screen, portraits of adolescents slide by and a voice that doesn’t say much will once in a while mumble words such as: no, maybe, a bit too American and very few yes-es.

As we listen, we start secretly selecting as well and hoping for a Yes when the comment was No and the other way around. But how can we select if we do not know what we are looking for?
In common, all the teenagers have very light skin and most are blond. They are not equally beautiful or charismatic. The search here is not for a model for an advert or an actor for a film, but for the idealized stereotype of a pure blooded Dutch teenager.

De Groene Amsterdammer
Gezocht: de perfecte Nederlander. En een warme douche na afloop
door Jonas Kooyman
05-07-2014

Op een scherm flitsen portretten voorbij van tientallen pubers. A trois quart geschoten in een licht dat ze niet spaart: veel jeugdpuistjes, donssnorren en slecht aangebrachte make-up. Ondertussen klinkt de verveelde stem van de castingdirector, een vrouw met een niet te plaatsen accent. ‘Maybe’, ‘no’, ‘hmmm’ en een enkele ‘yes’.

Wat is dit voor casting? De huidskleur van de veertig tieners – blank – is een eerste hint. De Braziliaanse kunstenares Patricia Werneck Ribas zoekt in haar werk A Casting, onderdeel van de eindexamenexpositie van de Rietveld Academie, naar ‘de’ Nederlander.

Het werkt heel eenvoudig: zodra je weet wat de bedoeling van de kunstenaar is, beoordeel je mee. Dus als Ribas ‘too French’ zegt bij de foto van een meisje, denk jij dat ook. Bij elk nieuw portret deel je de puber in bij ‘Nederlands’ of ‘niet-Nederlands’. A Casting is een geinige knipoog naar de discussie over ‘de’ Nederlandse identiteit, die sinds Fortuyn woedt. Tegelijkertijd is het een waarschuwing tegen hokjesdenken.

Jonas Kooyman (1989)volgt een master Journalistiek aan de UvA en studeerde een semester aan de New School in New York. Hij is organisator van de schrijversmanifestatie Shut Up & Write Amsterdam en schrijft als freelance journalist o.a. voor NRC Handelsblad

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https://vimeo.com/97221985

Video HD 4min, stereo sound, 2014

Christina Wild is a woman with Canadian-Sechelt tribal roots who lives and works in The Netherlands. Together with her mother, Tenderjoy Wild, she dreams of a different life in a different place. Although they both have jobs and entertain themselves, they feel like foreign bodies no matter where they go. The artificial landscapes where they wander about don’t contribute to a sense of belonging and the only option remains to dream about happier and sunnier places.

The post Native Colors appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

http://www.theoneminutes.org/content/04-about/3-press/for-release-world-at-a-crossroads-open-call-wake-up-call.pdf

World at a Crossroads – Open Call, Wake Up Call is curated by Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson. The series consists of thirteen one-minute films by various artists reflecting on our volatile present and envisioning our future, by merging performance and portrayal and appropriating texts and juxtaposing to still and moving images.

PARTICIPANTS

Minhong Yu
Golrokh Goli Nafisi
Florencia Almiron
Ina Wudtke
Cihad Caner
Mohamed Youssef
María Linares
Monika Gruzite
Vikenti Komitski
Thais F. Guisasola
Emil Freyr Freysson and Björgvin Helgi Möller Pálsson
Patricia Werneck Ribas
Katrin Jónsdottir Hjördisardóttir

SCREENINGS

Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts (CN)
Amsterdam Academy of Architecture (NL)
Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (NL)
Dortmunder U (DE)
East China Normal University, Shanghai (CN)
Lloyd Hotel & Cultural Embassy, Amsterdam (NL)
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle (NL)
Museum Hilversum (NL)
Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (NL)
WOW, Amsterdam (NL)
Reykjavík International Film Festival (IS)
National gallery of Iceland – Listasafn Íslands, Reykjavík (IS)

https://vimeo.com/191134591

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