Mônica Ventura: Lending Visibility to Ancestral Religious Practices

C&AL: Tell us about how you came up with this project and the importance of lending visibility to these ancestral religious practices.

Monica Ventura: A noite suspensa ou o que posso aprender com o silêncio (“The suspended night or what I can learn from silence”) is an installation whose conception involves the idea of beginnings. It is composed of a central sculpture, standing 4.70 meters tall that is resting on a bed of earth formed in a female shape, the yoni. Together, the two pieces communicate feminine and masculine, or the power that creates life. That was my starting point while designing the project. Then came the concept of the hanging sheets of soil which, in addition to being communication devices for vibrating symbols, the soil has the tone of melanin, thus being a way of occupying the space as a whole.

My work is permeated by the theme of African spirituality—I don’t use any specific religion in my discourse, but it’s in the aesthetics and poetics. I believe that the exhibition space plays a role of mediator with the public when it presents this ancestral visuality, which is so engaging, inviting, and friendly.

C&AL: Can you tell us about the spheres contained in the layers of your installation and how elements of African practices and beliefs, as well as those of Pankararu cosmology, are represented in it?

MV: My descendants come from Southwest Africa, Costa da Mina, or the Gold Coast. As I know nothing about my ancestors, I have to do an exercise in imagination, where I look for my own connections as a tool. I’m particularly looking to ancestral worship services that happen in the region of Togo and Benin. The joy of festivities, celebrations, the colors and shapes of the devices made to receive the spirits of the ancestors inspire me, especially the Zangbetos.

Reflecting on these traditions of ancestral worship, we can extend this thinking and look to Indigenous American cultures, where another part of my ancestry comes from. There we have the Praiás, who dance the Toré, and the Umbu Race, a religious practice of the Pankararu people of Pernambuco. My attention, in this case, is directed on the aesthetics and the constructive ways of creating a mask that covers the whole body of the person who wears it and dances. But I can’t say here that my work is capable of conveying the Pankararu cosmology, something to which my work makes, in fact, only one very specific allusion.

C&AL: And what was the process of choosing the materials and assembling the installation like?

MV: My choice of materials is a continuation of what I’ve already been investigating and elaborating, constructive processes of architecture, craftsmanship and ancestral design. With that, I look to organic materials that can respond to my ecological awareness.

For the installation at Galeria Praça, the key choice was the use of local soil as a constructive element. Twelve tons of earth were collected from the surrounding area, hung and modeled to bring the installation to life, in addition to 30 kilos of buriti straw, a material I’d already been using in other productions. The sand we used to make the mixture comes from the Paraopeba river, the Brumadinho river.

The installation is alive and breathing. If it gets disposed of one day, nature will take back these materials.

Assembling it was a moment that involved a great deal of participation by the team at Instituto Inhotim Institute, as well as the materials, which have their own texture, smell, and temperature.

The architect Rodrigo Goya engineered the earth architecture project, who, together with the Inhotim production team, made the magic of art happen and took on the challenge of making the earth suspended in air.