Ethnographic Poetics in Heloisa Maia

by Walter Arcela

Daughter of a man from Paraíba and a woman from Rio Grande do Sul, Heloisa Maia got used to an itinerant life from an early age, with transitions, impermanence, and longing being recurring experiences. Her intermittent residences between Southern Brazil, the Sertão, and the Northeastern coast have shaped the identity and memory that define her, configuring the predominant aspects of her subjectivity in the world.

Her artistic journey, much like her life, navigates through the various spaces she has inhabited. She lived and worked for several years between João Pessoa and Porto Alegre in Brazil, as well as in San Francisco, New York, and Miami in the United States, where she has been based since 2017. The maturation of her work came through studies in painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics at institutions such as the San Francisco Art Academy and Palo Alto Art League (with Justine Parrish and Helen Barber) in California; the University of New Mexico (with Carl Paak) in Albuquerque; the Tambiá Visual Arts Center, where she was a student of the Paraíba canons Flávio Tavares and Marlene Almeida, in João Pessoa; the Atelier Livre da Prefeitura, with Michael Chapman, in Porto Alegre; the Art Students League of New York, with Phillip Sherrod and Antony Palumbo; and the Parsons School of Design, with Mohammad Khalil and Ellen Evjen, in New York. I bring these details about Heloisa's education not only to legitimize her journey but to contextualize her defining framework of aesthetic experiences.

For general theories of culture, the influence of our place in the world directly affects the processes of individualization. Above all, we are from a place—a place that transcends and shapes us. We absorb the myths, rites, and experiences of the geographies we inhabit. But what happens when these geographical references are constantly bifurcated from one another?

The desire for introspection and observation through common themes or convergent visual aspects, whether in the landscape, climate, or the sensitive atmosphere surrounding life, has been a constant in the poetics of the migrant artist Heloisa Maia. In her last two solo exhibitions in her hometown, João Pessoa, experiences from travels in Vietnam and Morocco came to the fore, respectively. This movement can be understood in light of what French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described as deterritorialization. Defined as a process of losing territory, deterritorialization is more of a pendulum movement than a fixed state. It is characterized by motion. If the loss of symbolic and functional appropriation of the geographical space is established on one side, on the other, a dance of perspectives begins, in which the new geographical space is appropriated in a blend with the previous reference. Deterritorialization is always accompanied by reterritorialization.

This dynamic, in turn, is closely linked to the idea of "the artist as ethnographer," introduced by the American art critic Hal Foster in his book "The Return of the Real" (1996), where he explores the relationship between contemporary art and ethnographic practice. Foster suggests that some contemporary artists approach the role of ethnographers by incorporating anthropological approaches into their work. He explains how some contemporary artists adopt ethnographic methods in their projects, using art as a means to investigate and reflect on society and culture. This perspective highlights the intersection between art and anthropology, promoting a more contextual and socially engaged approach to contemporary artistic production. These reflections resonate in Heloisa's research work, culminating in series such as "Deserto, (De)Sertão, Sertão… Ancestral" at the São Francisco Cultural Center in 2023, and "On the Road" at Usina Cultural Energisa in 2021.

The ethnographic trend in art has been noticeable for some time. During the modern art period, there was an almost obsessive concern with its own medium—that is, the material qualities of painting or sculpture, its internal play, its rules, and plastic (im)possibilities—regardless of the artist's life or the context of the works' creation. Contemporary art, on the other hand, has established a reconciliation with the world. It has moved away from conceptual hermeticism to infiltrate daily life and the sensitive experiences that surround and affect us.

The author concludes his argument by positioning the artist as an ethnographer, one whose passion for the real stems from the need to redefine individual and historical experience in terms of traumas and lived experiences—racial, social, and economic. Concretely, we see the dramatic rise of works that address coloniality, the enslavement processes of African peoples, refugee crises in Europe, and financial scandals in developing countries. In terms of association, the ethnographic artist challenges the established social norm through a subject of association, understood by Foster as a way of entering the other. If in Walter Benjamin's model of the artist as producer—appropriated by Foster to derive the discussion about the ethnographic artist—the other was in the field of economic relations, now it is in the field of cultural identity, making the artist's politically engaged stance one of identification.

Some precautions must be taken when undertaking these endeavors to avoid the risk of "ideological patronage". We cannot reduce identities to common essences or stereotypes, nor should we seek the whole, if it exists, of the other cultural identity in view. We only absorb fragments, glimpses, momentary flashes from it, and from these we arrive not at a result, but at a form. And if identity is not the same as identification, what in the pictorial practice of Heloisa Maia prevents total identification, safeguarding her ethnic writing methodology in an association rather than a generalizing identification? It would be, namely, her unavoidable condition of gender, being a woman, and coming from the South Latin American territory.

We notice in the artist's themes the recurring representation of the female body as a central element. In the 1980s, she even worked in fashion illustration, where most of the illustrated bodies were female. The figures are mostly women. In a mix of strength and fragility, the artist realizes her memorial and identity politics through them. On this subject, Madalena Zaccara (2023) states:

They are women who speak about the particular world of females. Through them, in drawings, paintings, or ceramics, Heloisa makes us delve into feelings of loneliness, doubts, questions, motherhood, and possible discoveries inherent to the feminine universe. These are memories that are sometimes fluid, sometimes dense. Perhaps Heloisa works in front of a mirror, even when the results are not self-portraits. A mirror that records her and her sisters: the collective. A mirror that all of us women look into, but few deeply contemplate (ZACCARA, 2023).In a conversation we had, Heloisa revealed that she does not habitually paint landscapes and that all her compositional exercises on canvas stem from the introduction of figures. Her brushstrokes are quick, the lines delineating the contours are free and wandering, while the colors undergo little dilution, being applied in their full tonal intensity. The emphasis on delineating figures underscores a key aspect of her poetics: there is no modern dehumanization here, and the human condition of life is based on a constant movement of dialogue with her memorial and identity politics. When the works focus on cultural experiences, she places her artistic production in a free, poetic, and affective ethnography, where embracing cultural diversity curiously makes her more integrated with her place of origin.

References:ARCELA, Walter. O deserto e o sertão in Heloisa Maia Deserto (De) Sertão ...Ancestral. João Pessoa. Gráfica Santa Marta, 2023.FOSTER, H. Retorno ao Real. São Paulo: Ubu, 2014INÁCIO, Jennifer, Cores da Memória: navegando narrativas pessoais em tons vibrantes in Heloisa Maia: Deserto (de) Sertão, Sertão...Ancestral.2023, s/p). João Pessoa: gráfica Santa Marta, 2023.MAIA, Heloisa. O deserto e o sertão in Heloisa Maia Deserto (De) Sertão ...Ancestral. João Pessoa. Gráfica Santa Marta, 2023 ZACCARA, Madalena, ARCELA, Walter. IDENTIDADE & SOBREVIVÊNCIA NA EXPOSIÇÃO DE HELOISA MAIA. Em prelo, 2023.ZACCARA, Madalena. Anotações sobre a presença da mulher nas Artes Visuais em Pernambuco. In: ZACCARA Madalena, PEDROSA, Sebastião. Artes Visuais e suas Conexões: panorama de Pesquisa. Recife: Editora da UFPE, 2010.