Boutographies - ARLES 2024

« Bone Foam » exhibition by Maria Oliveira

Vernissage thursday 4 July at 19:00

I find the familiar universe of Alto Minho, in Portugal, life and death and the movement between them, in balance. I recover the connection with this geographical area, with my ancestry, family, physical, spiritual; my heritage. Living in close relationship with nature, the cycles come closer together, flowing naturally. The transitory movement is magical and mysterious. The female presence is constant and intense. Women generate, create, kill and feed. There is a pagan and earthly dimension that hovers over all things and cannot be ignored. The earth is touched with the whole body. At this critical moment in our journey as humanity we are nurtured by a desire to return to an idyllic and saving nature. But, we are that place. It no longer makes sense to think of the human being as an isolated element, above or beside nature itself. Nature is "a heap of living contradictions", as Gabriel Tarde said. Sharing the thinking of the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, being alive is a process of constant learning and openness, of connection to the earth, of body movement, of moving things with your hands, a world of human and non human beings, living or inert, in permanent interaction and mutual shaping, from the functioning of the body to its entire connection to the world through incessant exchanges of forces and energies. In these images, bodies, things and people are not forgotten. They find a place where they land and remain there, ajar in time. Bone Foam is about this movement of connection and encounter, the recognition that we are a part of the larger scale of things, where what is known and unknown coexist. We are not exceptional; everything that exists is part of us, and we are part of all that exists.