And if you become a butterfly
no one thinks anymore
about what it was like
when you crawled on the ground
and wasn’t willing for wings.¹
— Alda Merini

With small gestures, stubbornly repeated, Lidia Lisbôa creates the characters, settings, and script for her theater. Her works, which start from clay, fabric, buttons, bronze, and paint, carry the artist’s touch and, with it, memories of events lived, witnessed, and, above all, re-signified by her. The works presented here invite us to listen attentively to the narratives they stage. They demand an immediate and bodily reaction, the kind of agreement that is established live, between actress and spectator.

The Casulos [Cocoons], made from overlapping layers of rings of various fabrics joined by crochet, form sculptures that the artist wears and uses in performances. They most clearly point to the theatrical and ritual aspect that permeates Lidia Lisbôa’s entire practice, whose first formal training in a traditionally recognized art form was as a theater actress and costume designer. Their title seems to refer to the artist’s own ability not only to imbue ordinary objects with memory but also to her skill in transforming past events.

Created in a similar crochet technique, Tetas que deram de mamar ao mundo [Breasts that Nursed the World], one of the artist’s most recognized series, are large-scale works suspended from the ceiling, forming a pouch whose shape resembles that of a breast. The technique used by the artist was learned in her childhood, as she recounts, by carefully observing her mother, aunts, grandmothers, and neighbors gathered together and crocheting. On the one hand, the work points to the fundamental, yet often invisible, caregiving work assigned to women in patriarchal societies. On the other, Lidia’s tale seems to also indicate how she recognized sewing as an important tool for female sociability and subjective empowerment.

Watching the way the artist works, shielding herself from external disturbances through this small movement, it’s easy to associate the act of crocheting with chanting a mantra—the repetition of a gesture that can put her in a state of concentration, similar to what precedes a performance or an actor’s stepping onto stage, a kind of trance.

The circularity present in the gestures that form the designs of Memórias de renda [Lace Memories], in the clay cords that, when stacked, form the Cupinzeiros [Termite Mounds], manifests as time. Some of the drawings made in the 1990s, shown for the first time in this exhibition, could be seen as projects for the works currently produced.

What these drawings undoubtedly attest to is Lidia’s unstoppable creative necessity, as she chooses whatever material is at hand to give vent to her impulse. This visceral force spreads in red color throughout the space and seeps from the openings of the Cupinzeiros created for this exhibition. The sap that escapes from these cracks is a reminder that inside them there is also a pulsating life, or, perhaps, that they themselves are alive, becoming almost entities that inhabit this stage.

When in contact with the work and the artist, we begin to believe in something that escapes sight. As if coincidences and everyday events were part of a preordained fate. A script we can alter in our favor with the help of certain objects or rituals.

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1. Free translation of the poem: “E se diventi farfalla / nessuno pensa più / a ciò che è stato / quando strisciavi per terra / e non volevi le ali”.