Creativity Unleashed: A Vibrant Kaleidoscope of Artistic Projects at Sacatar
Sacatar is delighted to announce the group of six Fellows that will be in residence at the Instituto Sacatar on the Island of Itaparica in Bahia, Brazil, from March 18 – May 6, 2024.
- Beya Gille Gacha / Visual Arts / Cameroon > France
- Diane Barbé / Sound Art / France > Germany
- Eva Davidova / Mixed Reality / Spain > Bulgaria > USA
- Mariella Santiago / Music / Brazil
- Rodrigo Carvalho / Multidisciplinary Arts / Brazil
- Takuya Imahori / Music / Japan
Beya Gille Gacha
Visual Arts
Cameroon > France
Born in Paris in 1990 to a Cameroonian mother and French father, Beya Gille Gacha is a self-taught artist. Her work can be found in several international collections, and she has exhibited in numerous institutions, including the Galleria Nazionale, the Grand Palais, Musée du Quai Branly, the Musée Nationale du Cameroun, and the Dakar Biennale.
One of Beya Gille Gacha’s main practices is anthropomorphic sculpture. Their skin is made of glass beads, inspired by Bamiléké beaded art (Cameroon), which is the art of covering an object with glass beads to show its status, as if it were covered in gold. By beading human beings, her approach is to alter this materialistic meaning to reposition the value of the living before that of the object. Her works takes life and meaning in staged settings or through artifacts, using symbolism to tell poetic and engaged stories.
Her project at Sacatar will be to produce a beaded sculpture of Fabiana Ex-Souza and define the elements and attributes that will accompany her. Fabiana is an Afro-Brazilian visual artist, performance artist, and researcher in decolonized issues and activism. This sculpture is part of her 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 the artist. 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
France > Germany
Diane Barbé earned her MA in Sound Studies & Sonic Arts from Universität der Künste Berlin in 2022. She also attended bioacoustics workshops with Felix Blume & Bernard Fort at Phonurgia Nova, Arles, from 2018 to 2019. Prior to that, she worked as an associate researcher and assistant curator at Technische Universität Berlin’s Habitat Unit from 2015 to 2018.
Weaving together experimental music, biophonic research and activism, Diane Barbé searches for forms of interspecies resonance. Her electronic works incorporate elements of drone and microtonality, oscillating between oneiric lightness and dystopia, often paired with flutes and field recordings, sometimes leaning into dub pulsations. The artist is currently creating an ensemble of wind instruments, percussions, bird calls and little sound devices, called “The Alien Kin”, that are used for musicking in open air, with and beyond human audiences. Diane is engaged in many forms of collaborations with dancers, dreamers, whistlers, image-makers, performers, writers, and other kinds of creatures.
At Sacatar, she’ll develop “The Inhabitants of the Air”. In this project, Diane Barbé interweaves lines between trees, inquiring about the songs of birds or amphibians around, aiming to create a bit of music collectively. Diane’s project finds musical inspiration in imitating the voices of the forest. Locations are chosen based on recommendations and stories from locals. Instruments are made, including flutes and percussions, using natural and recycled materials. The building sessions lead to outdoor performances, involving children and adults in exploring the songs of the place.
Eva Davidova
Mixed Reality
Spain > Bulgaria > USA
Eva Davidova explores behavior, ecological disaster, and the political implications of technology through performative works rooted in the absurd. Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum, the UVP at Everson Museum, the AKG Buffalo Art Museum, MACBA Barcelona, CAAC Sevilla, La Regenta, ISSUE Project Room, Harvestworks, Instituto Cervantes, and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.
Eva is an interdisciplinary artist with focus in new media. Her practice includes research, performance, film, immersive and extended realities, and site-specific interactive installations. She explores agency and interdependency in the context of climate catastrophe, and uses movement, disorientation, and myth to immerse the viewer in dreamlike playgrounds. The issues of her work—cruelty, ecological disaster and manipulation of information emerge as paradoxes rather than assumptions, in an almost fairy-tale fashion. Growing up in diverse cultural and linguistic environments has informed Davidova’s interest in hybridity, and the all present, but not-always-visible connections between war, ecological collapse, and technology.
‘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. At Sacatar, she plans to work with performers and musicians and collaborate with people from different professions and statuses. They will research social structures, discuss political realities, and create tangible actions through storytelling, filming, capturing motion, and inventing new interactions. Eva is 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.
Mariella Santiago
Music
Brazil
Mariella Santiago is an author, performer, and transdisciplinary artist from Salvador, Bahia. She released her debut album in 2002, collaborating with Pascal Héranval. The album showcases a repertoire dominated by her original compositions and boasts guest appearances by prominent figures in Brazilian music, such as Hermeto Pascoal, Carlinhos Brown, and Gerônimo Santana. Her artistic style reflects connections with literature, audiovisual elements, and various other realms of cultural production with which she engages.
The artist is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Culture and Society at IHAC-UFBA, and she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Communication, specializing in Journalism.
‘aquaLtunes’ is a sonic project that presents a musical experience in a pocket show format, showcasing original musical pieces of short duration (ranging from 2 to 5 minutes), some of which will be composed during the residency at Sacatar. One piece will be selected for recording, finalization, and release as a single. The instrumentation is minimalist, utilizing a microphone for capturing vocals and ambient sounds, a multichannel sequencer (RC 505MKII), headphones, an amplifier, and a digital audio interface (DAW) on the computer. The project may involve the participation of local musicians, children, and non-professional adults. The title of the project pays homage to the Angolan warrior Aqualtune, incorporates the colloquial English term “tune” for song, and reflects the marine environment that influences the artist. The residency will offer a moment of creative immersion, bridging the experiences of an Afro-diasporic black woman with the island environment and the encounters that unfold throughout the journey.
Rodrigo Carvalho
Multidisciplinary Arts
Brazil
An interdisciplinary artist coming from the backlands of Bahia to the shores of All-Saints Bay, Rodrigo Carvalho engages in audiovisual, digital arts, and contemporary literature projects. His artistic inquiry delves into relational modes of writing and poetic composition, exploring interactions with the environment, digital technologies, and natural elements. Presently, he is immersed in the creation of visual poems and interactive installations that evoke the visualities, movements, and rhythms associated with water. Rodrigo Carvalho holds an Interdisciplinary Bachelor’s Degree in Arts, majoring in Cinema and Audiovisual, from the Federal University of Bahia (IHAC/UFBA).
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, Rodrigo 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
Japan
Takuya Imahori, a music composer, with degrees from Tamagawa University and L’Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris Alfred Cortot. He’s trained at IRCAM and Haute Ecole de Musique de Geneve. His works are internationally acclaimed, performed at festivals like Donaucschinger Musiktage and Festival Presences of Radio France. Imahori has won awards such as the Gaudeamus Prize and Goffredo Petrassi Grants and participated in residency programs like Visby International Composers Centre and KulturKontakt Austria. He won 3rd prize in Basel Composition Competition and 1st prize in Klang! International Electroacoustic Competition, with special mention from Opéra National Orchestra Montpellier.
Takuya Imahori is a composer of contemporary classical music, specializing in orchestral pieces and chamber music. Several of his works draw inspiration from natural biology, including plants, flowers, forests, rivers, and mountains. He expresses great pleasure in the prospect of experiencing the Brazilian nature, despite never having visited. One of his masterworks is “Con mille fiori che sbocciano così belli” (With thousand flowers which bloom so beautifully), composed for orchestra in 2019. This piece is inspired by flowers, exploring not only poetic but also mathematical elements such as Fibonacci numbers, the golden ratio, and fractal forms. Another work, “Rosa rampicante” (climbing rose), written for an ensemble of five players, shares a similar perspective.
At Sacatar he plans to write a symphony for a large orchestra that it will premiere in November 2024. The work is already halfway written. It will be over 25 minutes and over 100 pages in A3 format. If he completes it during the residency or before, he will write another orchestral piece.
takuyaimahori.mystrikingly.com