I’ve been working with Genietta since we met in 2019 in Lima, Peru. I was fascinated by the way she approaches the body as a porous system in constant interrelation social, political environmental and technological forces. Genietta was part of the collective of artists, activists and scientists we gathered online during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, producing Systems of Flow from the Body. We then commissioned her to make new for of Live Streams in 2021 and she led breathwork sessions for the digital seminar Culturas hidrocomunes in 2023. Developed in São Paulo, Porosibilidades enabled us to collaborate on our shared research into the city’s buried rivers and interest in somatic experiences that bring human and non-human bodies of water into deeper contact.
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Genietta Varsi, Porosibilidades, Villa Mandaçaia Projetos, São Paulo
June 3 – July 1, 2023
In this exhibition, Genietta Varsi calls us to experience the interpermeations of liquid bodies in motion — the subtle secretions of the sweat that we emanate and the almost imperceptible flows of the Córrego Verde that runs under our feet.
We came from water, but body and city have been immersed in hydrophobia. Hydraulic policies and capitalist urbanization have modified territories, privileging a technical vision that subordinates bodies and water to productivity.
How can we recover from these gaps in times when the porosity of bodies, droughts and floods forcefully impose themselves on us?
It is time to feel the interfaces where the liquid that we are rushes over the world to think about the systems that organize individual and urban waters. Wrapped in plastic, covered in asphalt and concrete, the flows of our intimate and common climates return to the surface. The waters seek to drip towards the world, overflow limits that were never fixed but provisional, negotiable.
The drops of sweat on these plastic suits and the puddles and floods of urban rivers insist and remind us that we are living pulses.
Lisa Blackmore
Genietta Varsi (Peru)
Artist working with multidisciplinary methodologies and tools, combining arts and sciences, and reflecting on the relationship between human beings and territories, with special interest in body fluids.
She graduated with a BA in Sculpture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and is currently completing her MFA in Helsinki. Her practice spans works with sculpture, drawing, video, sound, actions and print publications.
Prensa
Cómo sudar un río, diálogo con Genietta Varsi
Artishock, 16-06-2023
Conversation with the artist on the themes running through her practice, the influences of posthumanist thought and interest in tracing São Paulo’s rivers to the rejection of abject flows of the body.
Read here
Porosibilidades: activar las aguas con Genietta Varsi
Tráfico Visual, 13-06-2023
Expanded curatorial essay delving into the history São Paulo’s water management, including the rectification and pollution of major rivers. I emphasize the importance of somatic experience in Varsi’s work, suggesting that by becoming more aware of our own bodily fluids, we can develop a deeper connection to urban water systems.
Read here