COVA - VENICE - LIMA - NEW YORK - LISBON: Dream Geographies

COVA - VENICE - LIMA - NEW YORK - LISBON

Walker, the path is made by dreaming.

Is there any geography finer than the geography of dreams? Where else might Antonio Machado’s poetry meet the dreams shaped by Rosa Ramalho, or the painted visions of Sara Flores? The Peruvian artist, now 76, works on fabric and cotton canvases using pigments drawn from the Amazon rainforest. Her work represents Peru at the Venice Biennale until 22 November.

Antonio Machado’s life ended in France in 1939, as he fled the Spanish Civil War on foot. Ceramicist Rosa Ramalho was born towards the end of the 19th century and lived to the age of 89. She began as a craftsperson before becoming an artist: making, combining and making again.

From the Minho village of Cova, Rosa Ramalho’s Portugal emerges as a realm of dreams and fantastical creatures: stories told beside the fire, and nightmares too.

Sara Flores’s visual ground comes from a thread handed down from mothers to daughters among the Shipibo-Conibo Indigenous people. In Amazonian tradition, this art is known as Kené, and can appear in textiles, ceramics and jewellery. It is connected to visions aided by ayahuasca, a natural hallucinogen. To me, it recalls secret maps concealed within patterns, made by girls and women taught to look - and to see beyond what is apparent at first glance.

At Lima’s Museo Larco, there are pre-Columbian erotic ceramics full of imagination, humour, death and sexual positions designed to avoid pregnancy. The Larco also holds a bowl created by joining a gold piece to an equally sized silver one. Together, they form a Chimú vessel from the Imperial Period, made between AD 1300 and 1532. Together, they embody duality and fusion - a centuries-old answer to anyone determined to harden inside their own little trench.

Decades ago, a British anthropologist met Sara Flores in the Amazon. The two became close, so much so that Carolyn Heath had twins fathered by Flores’s husband. It may have been on the anthropologist’s advice that the Indigenous artist began signing each painting with her own initials. Those initials would eventually lead Flores to the White Cube gallery’s group of artists - and now to the Venice Biennale.

In New York, Sara Flores’s maps of fusion will be shown at White Cube from 25 June to 14 August. Meanwhile, Lisbon’s next Latin American Film Festival takes place at São Jorge from 28 to 31 May. It opens at 21:00 on 28 May with the 2024 film “Mixture”, by Peruvian director Ricardo de Montreuil. I will not spoil the recipe of this story, which takes us to Lima in 1965. But it does include appetite - and dreams.

---

The end of the dinosaurs

FLORENCE - VANCOUVER - GULF OF MEXICO

The beauty of art can send our heartbeats out of rhythm. That is perfectly fine, provided it does not become excessive. In rare clinical cases, however, people are affected by what is known as Stendhal syndrome, first clinically described in the Italian city of Florence by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Graziella Magherini (1927–2023).

There are syndromes for every kind of distress, and more seem to be named all the time. In response to criticism of Israel’s policies of colonialism and genocide in Palestine and elsewhere, there has been a growing pattern of cancellation based on alleged antisemitism. Let us call it Nan Goldin syndrome.

Public criticism by the American photographer of Israel’s policies shook the Vancouver Art Gallery’s image. Yet perhaps the debate can produce a better future. Until 10 January, Vancouver is also where visitors can encounter the exhibition “Art in the Century of Climate Change”. There is the deadly beauty of Edward Burtynsky’s photograph: a 2010 fuel spill in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

---

PHOTOMATON

Forty years ago, Shigeo Anzai photographed Isamu Noguchi on this slide, which was taken to the Venice Biennale. Until 13 September, the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York tells this Venetian story. At the Biennale, the American artist appeared with one question: what is sculpture?