Aula aberta DAP com Sofia Borges
RHAPSODY OF EFFACEMENT: A CAVE DANCE
Aula Magna da FBAUP
24 de Abril 2025, às 17h
Aula aberta com a artista brasileira Sofia Borges, baseada em Nova Iorque, desta vez em colaboração com a Ciclo – Bienal de Fotografia do Porto, no contexto da residência que resultou na exposição A New Rhapsody, apresentada no Pavilhão de Exposições da FBAUP.
Sofia Borges (1984, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil) Lives and works in New York City, USA.
Sofia is a conceptual artist who uses photography, assemblage and performance to delve into philosophical questions surrounding the artifacts of culture, in special the museological object, and their relation to matter, to the transmutation of the meaning of that matter throughout time, and to being, consequently, intricate and liquid manifestations of culture.
In the first decade of research, Borges built a large and resounding body of works exploring the philosophical understanding of images only with the use of photography, researching mainly inside spaces of representation (museums, zoos, caves, archeological sites and natural history research centers).
Moving forward, she expanded her photographic practice into performances, sculptures and curatorial projects that explores the notion of ‘total artwork’.
Relevant side facts and projects
(2014) While living between Paris and São Paulo, Borges travels to Dordogne (France), spending days immersed in the prehistoric caves and forests of the region. The comprehensions gained on this expedition profoundly altered the conceptual foundation of her research; this ‘philosophical collapse’ remains a milestone, continually expanding and shaping her practice. Shortly after returning, Borges creates an experimental-short-film to organize those comprehensions [https://sofiaborges.carbonmade.com/projects/7274408] and completely redefines No Sound, her first project as curator.
(2015) Is invited to create an instalation in an exhibition celebrating the opening of the full scale replica of Chauvet Cave (most important prehistorical discover, for their 36.000 year old ultra-complex drawings).
On this occasion, Sofia is granted special permission to photograph the entire replica before its public unveiling. She then remains in the region, dedicating a full month to in-depth research on the forests that surrounded the original cave.
(2016) Publishes The Swamp, an award-winning authorial book that resumes, as a book-manifest, the first philosophical phase of the research.
(2018) Gets invited to solely curate a large section of 33rd São Paulo Biennial, for which she develops a conceptual Tragedy. Her curatorship occupied one entire floor in the Biennial Pavilion.
(2019) Borges secludes herself for four months in a remote rural region of Greece, where she sets a phenomenological-learning-practice of swimming daily into two caves with access only by sea, staying inside the caves for a couple of hours every day, this defines a third period of intense learnings.
(2020) Returns from Greece parallel to the advent of pandemic and start living near a natural reserve in Brazil, dividing her time between the forest and her studio in deep downtown São Paulo. Starts a series of new investigations involving painting, sculpture, drawing and multiple interventions on photography.
(2021) Borges writes and directs her first film: The Fossil, The Eye And The Fire – in which she demonstrates the investigative practices that happens far for the public’s eyes. This piece is done with the intention to mark the fundaments of a second major phase of her research.
(2022) After receiving an award from the Jerusalem International Fellows—a New York-based Jewish organization that fosters integration between Israeli and Palestinian institutions—Borges spends three months in Jerusalem and develops a collaborative ‘Practice of Becoming’ with students from IBDAA School of the Arts, a school in East Jerusalem dedicated to the Palestinian youth.
(2023) Moves to NYC.
https://sofiaborges.carbonmade.com/