ISABELA PRADO selected works
DOCE
Performance | duration 120 min
sugar, water, plexiglass containers
2005
Prado reminds us of the passage of time, as we see her in that situation, seating on a pile of sugar. Each gesture, each finished sphere, talks about counting of time in space. As if it could be calculated or measured. If one could say so, since time does not exist as materiality. It is only perceived in the physical action of our bodies aging, or on perishable materials that exist in nature or are created by men.
The work also deals with the quotidian in its repetition of days and situations. As in a ritualistic action, the artist patiently molds with her hands perfect sugar spheres that are accessible to her body, to her arms, in a room with the floor covered with this white substance, creating a kind of fantastic and snowy landscape. The sweet fragrance of sugar must be an inebriating presence in this performance. The artist deals, thus, with the senses.
2006
Installation which uses around 600 hollow white porcelain spheres, in an environment delimited by translucent fabric. The work deals with the presence of the body in space, and with the idea of transformation. By walking through the installation, each viewer changes the position of the spheres, creating a new configuration.
installation | variable dimension
2005
Building of a low ceiling – at 1.57 meters, my own height – with white elastic bands. The elastic is tied to wood structures on opposite walls of the gallery, covering the entire room with parallel lines. The use of elastic bands makes the low ceiling to be flexible and permeable, allowing the viewer to cross it with its head and/or arms.
Video performance that reflects on the body/space relation, and on the impacts of human presence. A displacement of the viewer is caused by activating the memory and by the framing bias to my own feet.
SHIFTING MAP
video | 7min 40sec 2010
The video, filmed in 30 days, shows a world map made out of castor beans, which dry out and explode as time passes, releasing the seeds and undoing the map. The work deals with the issue of natural resources in global scale, given the potential of castor beans oil for the production of biofuels.
Available at: https://vimeo.com/60807119
WIND CATCHER
intervention | variable duration
fabric “parachutes”, ropes, megaphone 2007
Intervention in the village of Shatana, in Jordan. Colorful parachutes are arranged in a tent in order to be used by the local public in a collective action. The wind is used as a tool to inflate the objects, which break the monochrome of the local landscape. With the participation of the public, the work has created an opportunity for conversation, exchange and a collective experience, not usual in that community.
2006
Intervention that took place in a foreign country, in which helium gas balloons, with the word “estrangeiro” written in white, were given to the local public, along with a note that suggested the balloons to be released in a specific time.
WATER SKYLINE
installation | variable dimension
2009
Installation with a series of photographs in black and white, which show water tanks on rooftops of houses and buildings in the West Bank, Palestine. Forming an imaginary skyline, the installation creates a new landscape and points to the restrictions of water supply in the region.
VANISHING POINT
video | 7min 42sec 2009
Video that shows the flow of vehicles and pedestrians at Qalandia checkpoint, near Ramallah. Recorded from the top of a nearby building, the video shows the movement in Qalandia during a full day, making explicit the limits of circulation in Palestine. The title, “Vanishing Point”, has a double meaning, and the work proposes a reflection on disappearing of culture, loss of identity and restrictions to freedom.
Available at: https://vimeo.com/60720511
NUEVA CÓRDOBA
series of postcards | 10 cm x 15 cm
2008
Series of postcards based on photos of the interior of demolished houses and buildings in Cordoba, Argentina. The work deals with space, memory, and urban issues. It shows the remaining of the interior of the houses, with its peculiarities, revealing part of the intimacy and identity of its previous residents. The title of the work is the name of the neighborhood where the pictures were taken, and the postcards are , thus, a remark of the old Nueva Córdoba.
AUDIO CAPTURE FROM CHANNELED STREAMS
Available at: https://vimeo.com/592610962
There are many artists who – by exploring the power of art to construct what is seen – aim to “make visible” some hidden aspects of life in society, and bring them to light by approaching these aspects in a sensitive, political and critical way.
(...)
The recent works of Isabela Prado can be situated within this context of urgencies. Sensitive to relations of alterity, the artist has expanded the territory of her works in order to systematically address the issue: in her latest works, a careful look at space, and a concern with the environmental dimension of subjectivity, have strongly emerged. Isabela Prado has not given up the metaphoric aspects of the relation between individual and environment. However, her latest works have been developing in a different order of concreteness, clearly closer to the instances which organize and provide meaning to social life, such as the city.”
Belo Horizonte: SESC Minas, 2012
Available at: https://issuu com/sescmg/docs/entrerioseruascatalogo
Clarissa Diniz “Rios, ruas, visibilidades” In: Gómez, J (org) Isabela Prado: entre rios e ruas
Video made from images of infiltrations in the wall of a house under which passes a covered stream, forming some sort of cartographic spots. In the video, projected on corners of internal spaces, the maps formed by mildew lead into each other, gradually changing and expanding boundaries.
at: https://vimeo.com/60781176
“By looking at the behavior of the city in response to the rivers’ condition, the artist started to photograph the emergence of humidity from the channelized waters, which appeared as mold in the houses located above the covered streams. The every day evidence of water that disobeys the attempts to suppress it would be Isabela’s first step in facing this issue, in the realization of an urban and social condition that is perceived in the relation between body, house, and city. Then it comes the series of images for the video MapaMofo (2012), in which the moist drawing that insinuates itself daily into the walls is framed, forming some sort of cartographic stains. Slowly, in the video projected on corners of the gallery, the maps made of mold lead into one another, gradually changing and expanding, borders. White gets ocher tones, the plan gets volume: the river insinuates itself through bricks and spackling, as if it would trace its own course ”
Clarissa Diniz. “Rios, ruas, visibilidades”. In:
Gómez, J. (org). Isabela Prado: entre rios e ruas. Belo Horizonte: SESC Minas, 2012.
Available at: https://issuu.com/sescmg/docs/entrerioseruascatalogo
REPAISAGEM
installation | 2.00 x 6.00 x 3.00m magnets, wooden boxes, speakers, zinc plates
2010
Installation with blue magnets that represent the rivers and streams in natural bed within the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The magnets can be assembled and linked freely by the public in a metallic frame, creating new designs, new landscapes. The installation also contains an audio element, that corresponds to the sound of the streams which run under the streets in downtown.
“I hear the sounds of a river I don’t see. The landscape I contemplate is a street in the middle of a city. I hear, but I don’t see the river that is the source of this sound. This dynamic between visible-invisible is also the starting point for Repaisagem. A landscape that, like the others, is built by social, cultural, aesthetic and political agencies, but redesigned and redefined by the participation of the public that, taking paths and drifts, develops an imaginary watershed based on fragments cut out of reality. Meanwhile, one can hear the sounds of rivers hidden in the urban landscape. Paradox of a borderline situation between what is there and what can no longer be seen, as opposed to what we see in representation, taken as a starting point for a recreation.”
Eduardo de Jesus “Cartografias quase-invisíveis” In: GÓMEZ, J C (org) Isabela Prado: Entre Rios e Ruas Belo Horizonte: SESC Minas, 2012 Available at: https://issuu.com/sescmg/docs/ entrerioseruascatalogo
MONTANTE JUSANTE carving on drywall | 1.20 x 1.80 m
2009
Low-relief drawing, carved on a dry wall plate, from the representation of stretches of channeled streams in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
“The sudden cut of the mining economy in the valleys surrounding Belo Horizonte, as well as the right angles which artificially guide the rivers within Av. do Contorno, emerges in part of these works, in a series of relief drawings. The channelization effort is silently acted out by the artist by carving, on dry wall panels, the orthogonal net which tames the organicity of the waters of the state capital: in the trace which deepens the surface, Isabela brings to light the rivers which, being submerse throughout the city, can only be seen through the drains and heard in the distance like a constant breath which leaks from under the urban pavement.”
Clarissa Diniz. “Rios, ruas,
In: Gómez, J. (org). Isabela Prado: entre rios e ruas. Belo Horizonte: SESC Minas, 2012.
Available at: https://issuu.com/sescmg/docs/ entrerioseruascatalogo
visibilidades”.MONTANTE JUSANTE
carbon drawing on wall | 1.20 x 1.80m 2010
Carbon drawing on the wall, using the representation of stretches of streams in natural bed in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
“With a background in printmaking, Isabela Prado takes the drawings made by mold as a starting point for the series of drawings Montante/Jusante (2010-2012). On a large white paper, the artist overlaps and articulates, from cartographic matrices, portions or entire riverbeds. The careful work in graphically putting together these geographies conforms landscapes and horizons located halfway between water and land: from the paths of the covered basin that irrigates Belo Horizonte, Isabela Prado composes drawings which allude to what surrounds the city, pervading the view –the mountains. Subtly, the artist brings together the invisible and the maximum visibility.”
Clarissa Diniz. “Rios, ruas, visibilidades”. In: Gómez, J. (org). Isabela Prado: entre rios e ruas. Belo Horizonte: SESC Minas, 2012. Available at: https://issuu.com/sescmg/docs/entrerioseruascatalogo
EU LEITO
white carbon drawing on inkjet archival
print | 42 x 30 cm
Image generated from a photograph of the artist's nipples sprouting milk, onto which a drawing is transferred using white carbon. The drawing is a reorganization of the lines that represent the streams in the city of Belo Horizonte.
Brooch in gold that explores the relationship between body and space. The design of this jewel, of 9.5 cm in length, replicates in a 1:10,000 scale the last 950 m of Ribeirão Arrudas in its natural bed within the limits of the municipality of Belo Horizonte.
JOIA
brooch in gold 18k | 9,5 cm 2010
“Carrying the jewel is the same as carrying what is left. Fixing it close to the body, carrying it as an ornament is the same as carrying a small fragment of time and space that all at once refer to the absence of a landscape and the issue of scale. In the cut of the fragment of the river, the entire surrounding was removed; it needed to be excluded, so that, highlighted, it could insert itself in other landscapes close to the body. The map is reduced from its real scale, which cannot coincide with the territory, as Borges reminded us. It needs to be reduced to make the experience of seeing from above count. From google maps to jewel, the path of the territoriality of emptiness. Smooth.”
Eduardo de Jesus. “Cartografias quase-invisíveis”. In: GÓMEZ, J.C. (org). Isabela Prado: Entre Rios e Ruas. Belo Horizonte: SESC Minas, 2012. Available at: https://issuu com/sescmg/docs/entrerioseruascatalogo
performance | variable duration
2009
Installation with blue magnets that represent the rivers and streams in natural bed within the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The magnets can be assembled and linked freely by the public in a metallic frame, creating new designs, new landscapes. The installation also contains an audio element, that corresponds to the sound of the streams which run under the streets in downtown.
Series of violin lessons on the street, in which the teacher tries to teach how to play the Brazilian folk song
“If this street was mine”. The lessons always happen at streets under which there are covered urban streams. The work points to the difficulties of the city and its people to develop a new relation with the environment.
“Lesson: if this street were a river starts from a mapping of the city’s covered streams, whose natural courses were redirected as to adjust them to the urban space planning Denouncing the invisibility to which these streams and the memories they carry were submitted in this process, Isabela Prado rearticulates the transparency of these gestures and cartographies of power by activating the overlapping spaces between covered streams and paved streets in her performances, thus proposing a moment of “re-creation of the city”, just like the possibility of re-creation that echoes from the song lyrics “If this street were mine” declares a not-belonging to the public space and the need to occupy it, to take possession of it with the forces of will and imagination.”
Júlio Martins “Notes from ‘Lesson: if this street were a river’ ” In: Prado, I Lição: Se essa rua fosse um rio Belo Horizonte: Ed Nunc, 2016
Available at: https://issuu com/isabela prado
SOBREORIO
Urban Intervention | aprox. 230 street signs
2019-2021
Permanent urban intervention that identifies and signalizes the channelized streams flowing under the streets in the central area of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The main goal is to raise consciousness of the community about these rivers and bring them back to the local agenda in order to promote public policies in favor of their revitalization.
The recognition of the presence of these “hidden” streams is seen as the first step on the way to a sustainable city, in which rivers could be uncovered, revitalized, and public spaces could be created along their margins.
Mapping of street signs installation in central Belo Horizonte
