Clara Ianni

In her practice, Clara Ianni (1987, São Paulo, Brazil) explores the relationship between the materiality of space and its forms of representation. As their field of reference, her works consider the history of Brazil, spanning from its colonial formation to the recurrent cycles of authoritarianism, often questioning what is understood by modernization. Many of her works take this history as a field of dispute whose documents and narratives are found in the present time in order to develop possible futures. Attentive to the ways in which the powers that be regulate what is recognized as a fact and what is relegated to the field of rumors or to the marginalia of footnotes, she works with dissonant voices and happenings, promoting clashings between official discourses and possibilities of other expressions. This operation involves an interdisciplinary practice resulting in actions, installations, videos, objects and graphic sets of an essayist character. 

To produce the video Repetições [Repetitions] (2017-2018), the artist invited actor Izaías Almada to stage a present-day rendition of the theater play Arena conta Zumbi, written by Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and Augusto Boal and first presented by the Teatro de Arena (São Paulo) in 1965. Through theatrical exercises and reminiscences, the actor, who participated in the first staging, returns to the group’s home base theater and restages his fragments of a screenplay that recovered the struggle for freedom by enslaved people as an allegory for the revolutionary struggle of the generation of that moment, which was confronted by the violence of the military dictatorship and by alienating labor conditions.