Through films, performances, texts and textiles my work experiments mostly with story-telling and (re)telling histories. I’m fascinated with how stories and images have the power of exposing us to poetics while simultaneously confronting us with slices of life and depictions of reality.

 

I’m particularly interested in looking at how time and memory are understood by different societies and entities—either human, mythical, geological, organic or not. So, most of my works are assemblages of impressions, images, allegories and thoughts, in montages of lapses that give rise to cyclical narratives, or narratives where one story, form, meaning can continuously fold and unfold into a myriad of stories, forms, meanings.

 

I’ve been investigating through my work how certain authorities and entities strive to perpetuate certain myths and how historical and cultural narratives are generated. Different authorities have found in progressive and dialectical forms of narrative a way to assert their agendas and secure their hegemony. In order to assure these forms as conductors of their authority it is necessary that the categories and entities they encompass are perceived as stable and unified truths. My practice is populated with characters, locations, objects and memories that aren’t stable and fully crystallized entities, instead by fragmented ones or in flux. I’m very much invested in creating and hosting poly-vocal narratives that can question each other, so that they can call attention to what the organizational and compositional models of story and history telling we have inherited might encompass (mostly white male, colonial, anthropocentric and heteronormative agendas). By creating this stage for these different voices I’m also aiming to question if the truths in which a story (let’s say a historical narrative) claims to be anchored perhaps exist only as truths immanent to the formulation of this (historical) narrative.

 

That said my practice isn’t just about condemning and pointing fingers, far from it. I’m interested in creating forms and compositions that embrace temporalities, ontologies and epistemologies that exist outside normative modes and that resonate with the vibrations of other beings and entities—that acknowledge realms of energy and recognize life and intelligence in rocks and rivers and plants and animals.

                                                                                                                       

 Catarina Oliveira

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