INTERVIEWS & WRITINGS ABOUT THE WORK
Text by David Lopes, 2023
Publication: Field Theory: Artistic Research in Light, Air and Matter, (pp. 81-95).
“(...) Caring for what is the representation of nature appears to be a common stand in Catarina’s work, in a way that reflects not only a much needed awareness of ecological problems, while at the same time — at least at this stage of her practice — seems to reflect an urge for philosophical maintenance of what landscape is. The use of grids, for example, call for territory mapping, and indeed historically speaking and ever since Ptolemy, humans have grown to represent the territory by dividing it into parallel lines going vertically and horizontaly (Rees, 1980).”
Text by Joana Valsassina, 2022
Exhibition catalogue: Linhas de Vento - Percursos Artísticos na Natureza, Galeria Municipal de Matosinhos, (p. 15 & p. 44).
“As obras mais recentes apresentadas nesta exposição que compõem a série If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? (2019), de Catarina Braga (Guimarães, 1994) centram-se também no território da Amazónia e no crescente impacto da ação humana nesta que é a maior formação florestal do planeta. Esta série consiste num conjunto de imagens aéreas retiradas do Google Earth no verão de 2019, quando a região era assolada por devastadores incêndios, denunciados internacionalmente como consequência direta das políticas de flexibilização da exploração agropecuária introduzidas pelo governo de Jair Bolsonaro. Estas imagens são impressas em seda — material orgânico, frágil e luxuoso cujo fabrico envolve, por norma, a morte dos insetos que produzem a sua fibra natural, — e surgem no contexto da investigação de Catarina Braga acerca do papel da tecnologia na relação que mantemos com a natureza e com a nossa cultura material. ”
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“The most recent works displayed in this exhibition, the series If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? (2019), by Catarina Braga (Guimarães, Portugal, 1994) are also centred on Amazon territory and on the increasing impact of human action on what constitutes the planet’s largest forest formation. This series consists of a group of aerial images taken from Google Earth in the summer of 2019, at a time when the region was ravaged by devastating fires, internationally acknowledged to be a direct consequence of the policies introduced by the Brazilian government led by Jair Bolsonaro, designed to give greater flexibility to agricultural and livestock activities in the Amazon. These images, obtained from a distance using complex technological processes that are now a ubiquitous feature of our everyday life, are printed in silk — an organic, fragile, and luxurious material, generally obtained by a manufacturing process which involves the death of the insects that produce its natural fibre — and integrate Catarina Braga’s research into the role played by technology in our relationship with nature and material culture.”
Cinco fragmentos sobre a génese de uma “[est]ética afirmativa” em contexto português
by Carolina Machado, published in Umbigo #80
(pp. 172-177), 2022.
Interview with Catarina Braga
by Margarida Alves, in Umbigo Magazine, 2021 ︎︎︎
post-world
by Catarina Real, in ARTE CAPITAL, 2020 ︎︎︎
(SELECTED) BIBLIOGRAPHY
& PUBLISHED WORK