Juliana Matsumura: RIO-CORRENTEZA
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"Matsumura’s practice begins with an investigation into the Butsudan, a household altar in Japanese tradition dedicated to the memory of ancestors, and expands toward other geographies of affection and memory. By also engaging with her maternal history, rooted in the sertão of Bahia, the artist weaves together memories of distinct origins, unfolding them into a cartography of ancestry that transcends national and symbolic borders."
The exhibition brings together a series of works that explore the relationships between memory, ancestry, diaspora, and belonging, tracing a sensitive path through the ways individual and collective experiences intertwine in the formation of identities that are multiple and constantly in motion.
Some of the works were developed during the Xakra Artistic Residency, located in Serra da Moeda, in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais. Led by artists Benedikt Wiertz and Joseane Jorge, the studio is a space dedicated to ceramics and culinary practices, fostering encounters and exchanges between artists and local communities. In this environment, Juliana deepened her experimental processes with ceramics and wood, which materialize in the works presented here, where gesture, matter, and memory intertwine organically.
The artist works with materials such as paper, clay, plaster, jute, wood, brick, and metal, evoking the five Taoist elements: metal, fire, water, earth, and wood. These materials refer not only to the natural world, but also to the body and to time, to that which is shaped and transformed. The use of carbon paper, a technique that echoes the artist’s childhood in the 1990s and ideas of inscription and transfer, brings forth the corporeal and affective dimension of artistic practice: each mark reveals what remains and what is lost, like a record of passage.
Matsumura’s practice begins with an investigation into the Butsudan, a household altar in Japanese tradition dedicated to the memory of ancestors, and expands toward other geographies of affection and memory. By also engaging with her maternal history, rooted in the sertão of Bahia, the artist weaves together memories of distinct origins, unfolding them into a cartography of ancestry that transcends national and symbolic borders. This recombination of references, from cotton, papaya, and persimmon to the architecture of her grandmothers’ homes, constructs a poetic field in which belonging is always an open-ended project.
In Rio-Correnteza, Juliana’s work moves like water itself: patient, porous, capable of winding around, dissolving, and recomposing. Her works appear as fragments of the same river, a map made of folds, fissures, and new beginnings. In the gaps between these material and symbolic encounters pulses the vital force of stories carried across generations, a continuous flow between body, time, and memory.
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Installation Shots
