C& AL: The idea of impossibility is highlighted as a guiding thread and central criterion in the selection of participants in this edition of the Bienal. What has your experience been like participating in the 35th São Paulo Bienal? How do you see the presence of impossibility in your own artistic work? How important is it to challenge the impossible in your creations and how has this approach manifested itself throughout your artistic career?
T: I think my life has become more possible. In fact, I didn’t know about a lot of existential things my work had presented to me for a long time. That’s so interesting. That’s why I think the work has a life of its own. Because who would have thought that from the life circumstances I come from, I would have this desire to keep on drawing, to keep doing things that, well, no one saw value in, or no one was so interested in. Until just a while ago, I don’t know, people thought my drawings were ugly, you know? Ever since I was a child, I imagined having wings, that I would be a winged horse, that I would fly like an angel, and I heard my mother thanking and talking to the stars, to the saints, to the deities and to the figures that she wants to see herself in, in a material way.
I feel that impossibility was and is a very specific and social marker. Impossibility exists, is guided and occurs in everyday ways and is almost an entity. At some point, it’s almost like a relative, it’s almost like it sits at your desk every day, if you let it. A relative who really does sit with you, who eats with you, you know? It’s part of your dreams and, at the same time, impossibility is what limits you. We can see impossibility as a social limitation, a political limitation, a socioeconomic limitation, a limitation for us to dance, a violent limitation. Because the impossible is perhaps what we didn’t even imagine would be possible to do and because you live with impossibility, you think that only certain things are possible. So, it is, again, an ambiguity, you have been living with impossibility for a long time, you live and sleep with impossibility and, suddenly, impossibility is so present that it begins to show you its possibilities and to know the foreign within this zone that limited you. I need to travel, cross a forest. Even though, until then, no one in my family had crossed it. But it seems to call to me.
And then, suddenly, you see yourself as a child. Believing that you’ll have wings. Believing that you, one day, will be among the stars or believing that, at some point, you will have contact and encounters with animals from another world and you realize that the world is talking to you. Just like when I was in church: a tongue of angels, a tongue of fire.
I was invited to the Bienal by a group who somehow also wanted to speak to me in this hidden language that I’ve been speaking, and that somehow, comes not from the same sensation, but, again, from something that comes closer in this time, but that may move away at another time, but for this point in time it was interesting, it was important. I’d never been to any biennial before, this is the first biennial, I’m actually going to this Bienal as a visitor and as an artist and I think that the curatorship has this role of bringing together these movements and not saying a single thing, but that can proliferate, you know? Oh, I don’t know, I’m already speechless.
Tadáskía was born in 1993 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she still lives. She works with drawing, photography, installation and textiles, creating imagined and mystical landscapes. Through her research and production, the artist also seeks to elaborate the imaginative experiences of the Black diaspora around family and foreign encounters.
Izzadora Sá is a Communication and Culture professional who currently resides in Caravelas, Bahia. She grew up immersed in the cultural influences of the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and a city in the interior of Bahia, called Alagoinhas. She combines diverse artistic and research techniques and practices in her work, including video, performance and visual arts. Critically, her works reconfigure memories, especially Afro-Atlantic and sexual and gender dissident ones, constructing new narratives that evoke other temporalities. Follow her on LinkedIn.