32nd Bienal de Sao Paulo

Ana Mazzei's work is motivated by her search for other worlds and imaginary universes and by a need to tell and re-signify stories. She is interested in the eternal and diverse relations between man and history: landscapes, architectures, fictions, theories and archives. Everything is part of a large narrative construction of man in this world. Her artworks are like pieces and fragments of myths, lives and fictions that are represented in drawings, videos, sculptures and installations. At other times, her works function as observation devices framing this vast repertoire from a specific point of view. Focusing on a widely experimental practice, the artist appropriates different sensorial materials, such as felt and concrete, connecting to the environments in which she works.

The relationship between the body and space is recurrent in her oeuvre. In recent years Mazzei has created many installation-objects, some with a performative nature and others participative, such as Avistador de Pássaros [Birdwatcher] (2014/2015) and Garabandal (2015). In the first piece, the spectator is invited to go up some steps to a viewing point or pulpit located at the top of a building and check out the view, perhaps to see a bird in a furtive flight? In the second piece, she invites the viewer to try a seat where the body takes on what the artist calls a “position of ecstasy”: bent knees, open arms and head up – a position in which we are forced to look up whilst our body is off balance. This composition, which is recurrent in the history of painting, also appears in early psychiatric studies, and is associated with psychic decontrol. In Garabandal, the positioning of the viewer's body provides a displacement of points of view, a change of place that triggers other world visions and, consequently, different perspectives and references.