Pele de barro
Curated by Miguel von Hafe Pérez
Centro de Artes Visuais - CAV
Coimbra, Portugal
https://cav-ef.net/pele-de-barro/

Raw clay, natural pigments, ceramics and stainless steel.
2025
@ Filipe Braga




Working in traditional media such as ceramics and textiles, Flávia Vieira finds there the opportunity to create a discourse that can both problematize social and political issues and, on a formal level, develop a project of an updated re-centering of ancestral techniques.
Pele de barro is a work that unfolds into two sculptures and an intervention in the CAV gallery, conceived specifically for the site.
Here, a wall covered in clay winds its way through the space, sharply defining spatial perception. The filtered light, in a purplish hue, transports the work into a suspended dimension where the distance from the natural world is evident. In presenting the proposal, the artist describes it as follows: “It is a mural-body, a wall-screen that presents itself as a ‘skin’ or ‘mantle.’ This structure proposes itself as a symbolic and living boundary, where each material summons an extracted territory and a displaced memory. A space to imagine futures in which we are still clay or earth, and where an intimate relationship with nature is affirmed, one in which we are matter, we are territory, and we participate in the cycles of transformation that shape the world.”
The wall, with all its symbolic weight, demarcates, protects, or separates. Nothing in contemporaneity would suggest that walls, which in a recent past when nationalities seemed to dissolve within a globalizing flow and thus tended to disappear, would come to be pornographically rebuilt and claimed once again.
Pele de barro summons a lived dimension that is itself a process of awareness. The viewer moves through the piece, feels the way it appropriates space, and, in turn, it gives back a mutable existence organic, one might say.
Small modifications over the course of its existence anchor it in a fluid space of reception, in a dialogue that presupposes more than an occasional visit.
If the dialogue established here is with the history of art itself, namely between practices close to minimalism and process art, it nevertheless calls for a deeper reading, in which postcolonial discursivity asserts itself as a conceptual complement of the utmost importance.
Returning to the artist’s words: “The idea of opaque skin, which holds mysteries and invisible layers, is a concept I sought to evoke in explaining this proposal. I draw on Édouard Glissant’s notion of ‘opacity,’ which claims the right to non-transparency, to that which resists the colonial logic of total legibility and appropriation. Opacity is the condition of true relation: encounter only exists when the other can remain, in part, veiled, enchanted, untranslatable.”
In the universe of absolute digitization, where a lack of critical sense toward images makes us slide into the most unspeakable banality, there is an urgent need for another time (another speed) of making and learning to arise as a viable alternative to the generalized anesthesia of “consumers” (yes, because we are increasingly less citizens and merely the result of algorithmic speculation).
Flávia Vieira built this Pele de barro as a diligent delay, in which manuality is expressed as a mimetic attitude of an ancestry at risk of extinction (and misunderstanding). Her artistic gestures constitute a careful material and telluric punctuation within the grave incandescence of the present.


Miguel von Hafe Pérez