MÔNICA VENTURA

The word “fetish,” central to the vocabulary that runs through the exhibition, carries a history marked by displacements and distortions. Derived from the Latin facticius, the notion was appropriated in the colonial context to designate objects invested with spiritual power by populations of the Gold Coast, in the African continent, reduced by the European gaze to the condition of superstition or exoticism. By recovering this genealogy, the exhibition proposes a critical inflection: the so-called “fetish” is reinscribed as a symbolic system, as a condensation of forces, and as a form inseparable from practices, rituals, and memories.

In this context, Mônica Ventura’s sculptures, paintings, and installations bring artistic procedures into proximity with diverse ritual technologies, mobilizing materials and processes as active agents. Here, form emerges as an animated body, a device for exchange between the visible and the invisible, between presence and transformation.

The gourd, also known as cuia, igbá, or poronga, runs through the exhibition as both a formal and symbolic axis. Present in different Afro-Indigenous cosmologies as a matrix form, it appears in the works as womb, container, and seed. In versions ranging from gold to corten steel, from charred wood to ceramic and its natural form, the gourd unfolds into a multiple plastic vocabulary, operating as structure and organizing principle.

From this axis, the artist’s practice expands into a broader material field. Plants, metals, pigments, oils, and transformative processes configure a domain in which matter is understood as a carrier of energy and memory, traversing different systems of knowledge and modes of making.

By bringing these elements together, the exhibition shifts the exhibition space into a hybrid condition between laboratory, shelter, and altar. In this environment, identities and forms are conceived as systems in circulation, permeated by passages, exchanges, and renewals.

If the colonial fetish sought to fix the object within a stable reading, Mônica Ventura’s work refuses stability and insists on transformation, making matter a field in which forces condense and continuously reorganize.