by Vannie Gama.
A daily itinerary: going down a spiral staircase in the 7th arrondissement and walking until just past the botanical garden – in the first weeks, without headphones, to listen to the sounds of that city which, as a colleague, also a visual artist, used to say, was “in a love–hate relationship.” Hate more as a tension. A city of tensions – after all, a lot had happened there. During the art residency, The Rabbit Hole, I truly went down the rabbit hole, and lived an intense artistic experience collectively and individually. Back in Brazil, a new year awaited me. Still in Paris, I had been accepted into a six-month residency in Nepal, which I could not attend due to the high cost of airfare. In any case, the end of 2024 pulled 2025 into a suffocating dance, and it was evident from that moment that there were no “holidays.” I was artistically exhausted. I produced the works of Platitudinous Bizarreness, art as “memory as delirium,” besides collective works in a relatively short period, and honestly, the ideal was simply to return to dealing with the struggles of independent art, rents to be paid, and the organization of the agenda of the following year. What was it about? For the first semester, was about not taking a time off.
I spent New Year’s Eve with a close friend of mine, who welcomed me with open arms at his and his parents’ house in the countryside of São Paulo, in the Bauru region. It had been at least five years since I last visited that same region. With him, also an artist – of music, visual art, and also writing (more into scripts and short formats) – conversations about life always had new airs, although both of us somewhat depressed and skeptical about the future, laughing at our misfortunes, observing the starry sky in the early hours of that new year, after everyone else had left. On one of those nights, I met a friend of his, a psychologist, but also a lover of tarot and astrology for her own personal creativity – not as part of her profession, which remained loyal as an intellectual and mental health professional, but, as many of us do, keeping for herself the right to imagine other possibilities beyond what we are taught at university. The reveries of the occult have a particular glow, like the bioluminescence of nature, with an immanent magical air, and however scientifically descriptive it may be, its impact is dramatic, with playful and mysterious areas simply by its presence.
During the conversations at the friends’ table, I had the idea for the series ‘’Astrologia Poética’’. I refined it conceptually until the end of that trip, but the technical and structural form would only come a week later. It is a collective series, but we will talk about it at the end of the retrospective, since we are walking chronologically through this typical and atypical year. Well, the fact is that before starting Astrologia Poética, in January 2025, I decided to organize the creations from the residency in Paris. Since 2022, I understood that my agony between theory and practice could be resolved by presenting the visual works with their “files,” their “entry texts,” where butterflies have names and geographies, and forms have philosophy, symbolism, and depth, even if cryptographically. I kept thinking about how to make this presentation, and arrived at the resolution of a document, a single file with the series and its texts, after all, it had been the last series of 2024, and certainly the most relevant, although the most relevant work had been the painting, ‘’Intersexself’’, which received an honorable mention at the Biennial of Nude Art in Montenegro that year – and which was already in the catalog, in fact. It was important to present the works created, until then only shown physically in Paris, before starting the new series of 2025.
I wrote three pages about the first piece, ‘’wealth’’ (a “study piece” before Swan Lake). I stopped, looked at that new file, I remember my desk being a mess and me still living in Americana, in the countryside of São Paulo, in the Campinas region. Something was wrong, and a strange motion of writing seemed to want to manifest itself. I say this in such a dramatic way because until then, I only wrote articles, essays, and academic, scientific books, which although somewhat “intense,” were always “non‑fiction,” and worse, with theoretical or applied analyses quite distant from the imaginary. As it was January, a month in which, in general, I do not create anything relevant, and my concerns were basically about subsistence (an “ultrarealism”), it seemed natural simply to “allow myself” the experimentation of fantastic writing, and to mix the many philosophical conversations I had in Paris with friends and artists, as well as giving life to the paintings, with a first‑person language, of this character with the name of a scene from Alice in Wonderland, the Lion and the Unicorn.
It is quite a contrast, a book written in the first person (from the perspective of the individual, the ego), yet without us knowing what the Lion and the Unicorn are. We have no descriptions. It was precisely this place of freedom to write something I had never written before that allowed me “not to restrain myself” in making these experiments of not fully describing the characters, focusing on dialogues and the life of paintings, transforming something intimate into, at the same time, something almost totally impersonal by denying corporeality. Evidently, as someone who had read a lot, I did indeed do some research in books written in the first person, since I know they are not generally well regarded. I read the “pros and cons” of this style, striking examples, good and bad, and revisited works of fiction that were part of my intellectual constitution.
I finished the manuscript and its revision on April 14, 2025, three days before my birthday, thus in the last three days of my 27 years. It was my third book and the first, at the same time, besides containing the “most important” paintings up to then, although in such small dimensions. I researched some publishers and, on April 18, the publisher ‘’Libertinagem’’, focused on books quite authentic and outside market norms in content and presentation, accepted that small pile of two hundred and a few pages and pages of images, something not at all popular to share in a book that is neither an art catalog nor a children’s book. These processes are long, so although we signed there in April, we are now in November and the book is still in the printing process, with a small delay of one month. However, in a way, it was good, because now I have more time to make a good translation of the book and organize a good launch in Brazil – especially since the last book I released was O Cultivar das Imagens, at FLIMA – Festival Internacional de Literatura da Mantiqueira, in 2022, and what an event that was. At FLIMA, the books were sold together with watercolors and ink washes, in unique and closed series, keeping the digital book, mainly for environmental reasons.
And this is our first retrospective of 2025, literary‑artistic, united with 2024, in a certain way, and which lasted one third of the year. In ways I do not know how, there was still much to come, including the release of a theoretical book from 2024, some exhibitions, and the most important series of 2025, ‘’Atrás do Tempo’’ and ‘’Gestes’’. Note that the Astrologia Poética was not mentioned, because just like the first part of Platitudinous Bizarreness, it has not yet been finalized and it is quite likely that it will be exhibited in 2026.
Airs of collectivity, fraternity, and much stress with mundane changes.
See you next time, and keep it loud.
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