No One Is an Island: Fernanda Froes and Bella Cardim

Curated by Adriana Herrera

Nov. 9th/2023 | MIFA (Miami International Fine Arts)

Bella Cardim

 The connection between intimate life and art—in that sequence —can be profoundly revealing, precisely because “no one is an island.” Personal experience, especially when approached with the courage to expose unsettling themes, holds the potential to mirror the hidden realms, often unspeakable, of the social universe in which we navigate. Bella Cardim’s art exposes, stemming from her own history, one of the most dissociative dichotomies of contemporary life: the split between the ideals of counterfeit beauty—perpetuated by the fusion of mass media and the incitement to consumption—and the reality of bodies constrained by parameters alien to themselves.

The Frankfurt School understood that the most potent form of manipulation lies in semantic domination because it remains imperceptible, melding effortlessly with our natural understanding of the world. Bella Cardim has harnessed her artistic tools, honed over years as a professional food and fashion photographer, along with a conceptual perspective, to reveal how, often without our awareness, bodies—not only those suffering from eating disorders but all bodies—have been exposed to a pervasive mode of self-image distortion: aesthetic models of utopian bodies are imposed, perpetuated, and reinforced as socially desirable without us even realizing it.

Cardim resists the dystopian impact of this form of oppression, innovating on the strategies used in art history to confront hegemonic views in the construction of the social imaginary of our bodies. Instead of the explicit representation of the human body, she turns to photography-based and multimedia art practices, using food as metonymy and placing on it the weight of emotional fragility and eating disorders. In doing so, she develops a deeply personal language that incorporates texts and interactive mediums or installations, to invite the dismantling of restrictive models and to provoke an empowering and liberating gaze on the body, on art, and on life itself.

Fernanda Froes

Fernanda Froes’ work displays a transversal gaze that moves from one realm of nature to another in various series, in search of a key that will return the trace of the primordial connection between living beings. A key that our Western culture lost in its vertiginous march towards forms of domination that were devastating to plants and animals, finally endangering even our own species. In her extensive series inspired by the tree that gave its name to Brazil ─Ibirapitanga or Pau Brasil─ which was exploited until it approached extinction, there is a delicate gesture of reinvention that extends its existence. In her Indigo Landscapes, the blue regions on cotton paper, created with Indigofera tinctoria dyes from Asia, Africa, and Central and South America, evoke the origins and currents of the expansion of its usage, and its lucrative exploitation following the Conquest.

Froes transports the domains of the prodigious and varied botanical dyes into the realm of artistic imagination, revealing their intersections with the history of the America—a land that generated the very notion of utopia while being marked by multiple colonialist dystopias. At the same time, the whiteness of her paper reliefs inspired by the movement of those borderless creatures that are the mangroves, compelled to migrate by climate change, she reflects the alarming extent of their disappearance caused by the vortex of human impact. In her no less delicate insect pieces, Froes explores the architectures that these small creatures employ in building their habitats as a way to invoke models of human cooperation in a time that urgently requires the coming together of diverse groups within the same species. Following the understanding of Lévi-Strauss, her work essentially begins with identification with all forms of life, starting with the humblest, as a fundamental gesture of collective wisdom.