Sacatar is delighted to announce the group of six Fellows selected through the Sacatar Open Call 2022 and the African Diaspora in Brazil Open Call. These artists will be in residence at the Instituto Sacatar on the Island of Itaparica in Bahia, Brazil, from March 18 – May 6, 2024.
Among the artists in this group is the French visual artist, Beya Gille Gacha. She will be immersed in the creation of her sculpture and installations series titled ‘When God is a Woman,’ a collaborative project involving female artists from various corners of the globe. At Sacatar, Beya will be developing a sculpture for the Afro-Brazilian performance artist Fabiana Ex-Souza, whose work centers on themes such as decolonization and activism.
Another interesting artist in this session is the Brazilian singer and composer Mariella Santiago, selected in the African Diaspora in Brazil 2023 Open Call. Her project, called aquaLtunes, is a sonic project presenting short original musical pieces that she plans to compose during her residency at the Sacatar, using minimalist instrumentations and recorded ambient sounds. She would like to collaborate with local musicians and children.
Closing on a strong note, we are pleased to host the Bulgarian-American mixed reality artist Eva Davidova, who is dedicated to addressing critical ecological issues in her project for Sacatar. Joining her are the Brazilian writer and multimedia artist Rodrigo Carvalho; the musician and sound artist Diane Barbé (France/Germany); and the Japanese symphony composer Takuya Imahori.
Complete information about each project, as described by the artists themselves, can be found below:
Beya Gille Gacha
Visual Arts
Sacatar Open Call 2022
France
My main practice is anthropomorphic sculpture in seed beads. The work for me at Sacatar will be to produce a beaded sculpture of Fabiana Ex-Souza and define the elements and attributes that will accompany her. Fabiana Ex-Souza is an Afro-Brazilian visual artist, performance artist, and researcher in decolonized issues and activism.
This sculpture is part of my series ‘When God is a Woman.’ It’s a project of sculptures and installations in collaboration with contemporary female artists from around the world. It seeks to highlight the organic and relational ways in which artists feed off each other, through the prisms of sisterhood, feminism, spirituality, and respect for the living.
Thanks to the molding, each sculpture embodies an artist who, by her being, evokes images and allegories for me. The piece then becomes an ode to her divinity, to the sacred feminine, but also carries its own discourse on the world.
Diane Barbé
Music
Sacatar Open Call 2022
France > Germany
Project: The Inhabitants of the Air
Weaving lines between the trees, asking about the songs of birds or amphibians around, making a little music collectively: Diane’s project finds musical inspiration in the imitation of the voices of the forest. It begins with field recording and deep listening as ways of learning the tones and tunings of the environment in Itaparica. Several sites are selected and recorded at different times of the day, to understand who lives there, who is present, who is absent. The sites are chosen based on recommendations, stories, anecdotes told by the neighbors. The project then continues with making instruments—flutes, whistles, little percussions. They want to call and respond, to imitate, to speak. Much needs to be learned from local artisans and instrument makers: what are the natural or recycled materials that can be found around? Are there strange devices, not really used for music, but rather made to call birds and other animals? Following several instrument-building sessions, we then come to play together, outside, collectively, with children and grown-ups, in the open air. What are the songs of this place?
Eva Davidova
Mixed Reality
Sacatar Open Call 2022
Bulgaria > USA
‘Garden for Drowning Descendant’ is an experimental, participatory, and mixed reality project on ecological disaster, interdependency, and agency. It explores the emergence of collective action from the mixture of individual ones, resulting in a ‘dance of agencies’ between the audience, virtual beings, and performers from the past. I have a deep interest in movement, especially in the fact that new movements and actions influence the subconscious, pushing it into developing alternative visions and realizations of interdependency. My work is to de-homogenize human expression through technology by:
Enhancing a strive for mutuality that comes from the body
At Sacatar, I will work with performers and musicians and collaborate with people from different professions and statuses. We will research social structures, discuss political realities, and create tangible actions through storytelling, filming, capturing motion, and inventing new interactions. I am inspired by the possibility of working with the community to realize a participatory mixed reality installation and developing consistent public engagement, thanks to Sacatar’s unique relationships and assistance.
Exploring unconventional ways to transmit movement into different mediums and/or senses
Developing new movement in collaboration with performers, choreographers, and technologies
Mariella Santiago
Music
African Diaspora in Brazil Open Call 2023
Brazil
‘aquaLtunes’ is a sonic encounter project that proposes a musical presentation in a pocket show format, featuring short-duration original musical pieces (between 2 and 5 minutes), some composed during the residency at Sacatar. One of the pieces will be chosen to be recorded, finalized, and released as a single.
The INSTRUMENTATION is minimalist. The artist uses a microphone for voice and ambient sound capture, a multichannel sequencer (RC 505MKII), headphones, and an amplifier for rehearsals and performances, along with an audio editing interface (DAW – digital audio workstation) on the computer. Occasionally, local musicians, both professional and non-professional, including children and adults, may participate in the project.
The TITLE OF THE PROJECT arises from the semantic coincidence between the name of the Angolan warrior, an icon of the Quilombo de Palmares, Aqualtune, the word “tune,” which in colloquial English means song, and the aquatic, marine environment that surrounds the artist’s daily life. It is a daily life marked by the tensions of the city, her own subjectivity, and, at the same time, bordered by the sea, maintaining a fundamental connection with the waters. The residency takes place at a time the artist considers a “highly mobile” and “multiple belongings” moment for both herself and those who inhabit this coastal part of Northeast Brazil. aqualtunes aims to materialize, in music, the impressions of a Black woman, Afro-diasporic, rich in belongings, both by nature and existential necessity. A body that sings, dances, writes, and inscribes itself in the world as movement. “My residency at Sacatar will be a moment to let the musicality flow in a concentrated way, in tune with the island’s environment and the residency itself, with the encounters that may arise throughout this creative journey.”
Rodrigo Carvalho
Multidisciplinary Arts
Sacatar Open Call 2022
Brazil
How does the word move? How does it dance in the water? How does it fall? It travels, walks, floats, dissipates, evaporates… Word-water. “textoágua” is a series of interactive visual poems initiated in the year 2020. The research brings together the fields of visual arts, digital art, and literature, in which the poems are composed of moving blue particles with repulsion and attraction, producing images, displacements, and rhythms related to waters. The poems are created in the p5.js programming language, featuring sound and gestural interaction using various interfaces. The project aims to explore alternative ways of writing literature, incorporating relational modes of poetic composition with the environment, and with the energies and forces of the elements that compose it. In the context of the Sacatar Artistic Residency, it proposes to continue this writing process, introducing other interactive elements and modes of composition that relate to the space and natural elements of Itaparica Island.
Takuya Imahori
Music
Sacatar Open Call 2022
Japan
Born in 1978 in Yokohama, I graduated from Tamagawa University, L’École Normale de Musique de Paris Alfred Cortot, the composition program at IRCAM, Haute École de Musique de Genève, and Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia di Roma in 2017 with a perfect score and praise. I studied composition with Yoshiyuki Doi, Masami Mikai, Yoshihisa Taira, Jean-Luc Hervé, Philippe Leroux, Michael Jarrell, Luis Naon, and Ivan Fedele.
I was awarded the Gaudeamus Prize in the Netherlands in 2001. In 2018, I was invited to the “KulturKontakt Austria” Artist in Residency Program in Vienna by the Austrian Federal Minister for the EU. In 2019, I received the third prize at the Basel Composition Competition and was awarded the Goffredo Petrassi Grants, presented to me by the President of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, in June of the same year. In 2020, I won the first prize at the Klang! International Competition.
I plan to compose a symphony for a sizable orchestra, with the premiere scheduled for November 2024. Currently, the composition is halfway complete, and it is anticipated to exceed 25 minutes in duration, spanning more than 100 pages in A3 format. In the event that I finish this symphony either during my residency or before the specified time, I am considering the creation of an additional orchestral piece.
