Camila Rocha / The Pool

27 November 2009 > 04 December 2009 The Pool
Presentation of the artist and her works: 27th November 2009 at 3pm
Studio 8 Gallery, at Soteska 8, Ljubljana

Produkcija: KUD Mreža / Galerija Alkatraz
V sodelovanju z: Galerijo Studio 8

Camila Rocha

is a Brazilian artist whose international residences have led to increasing recognition for her work. In the last five years, she has undertaken residencies in several countries. Her artistic proposals show the special attention that she pays to the circulation of motifs and themes linked to a plant world under threat of extinction, showing how those references survive in the contemporary world, mainly through images. The great range of activities that she has undertaken in the course of her career – as a producer and design of exhibitions and art books or even as a researcher with the BRG (Barn Research Group) - has also been mirrored in her own artistic proposals, in which she resorts to supports and techniques that range from drawing, video, photography and performance, most particulary in her more recent interventions, undertaken in urban spaces.

Lucia Marques in "An Atlas of Events" exhibition catalogue, Lisboa, 2007

The artistic instalation The Pool by Camila Rocha wants to create a special environment that creates a feeling of beeing inside of a pool in a spectator. Water tank is a different world from the one we are used to and it offers new perspectives of the body's movements in different circumstances. The water creates unfamiliar realities of the body, we can experiment with another physicality inside it. The body becomes the light against all that density of the water.
The pool represents a place of the rest, relaxation and fun. The authoress wants to stop the time of an already very slow and leisurely happening and compare that moment to the hustle and bustle of Istambul. With a strange performance, as she reffers to it, of a dressed actress with an oldfashioned swimming hat she had susspended the moment in which the actress is located. Therefore, simultaneously, she had put passers-by, trapped in the rhythm of their daily routines, unavare of the unusual situation, in the same time. The artist had drawn nearer two realities, set them on a display and made an comparison between them.

Cooperators of the project: Filiz Sizanli (performance), Cengiz Tanz (camera) and Murat Opus (sound).

Photo: Jasmina Klančar