A revista Estado da Arte é um periódico científico de Artes Visuais publicado semestralmente pelos grupos de pesquisa do Instituto de Artes da Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU-MG): Grupo de Pesquisa Poéticas da Imagem (GPPI); Núcleo de Pesquisa em Ensino de Pintura (NUPPE) e Núcleo de Pesquisa em Artes Visuais (NUPAV). A revista Estado da Arte [ISSN 2675-4576] tem por objetivo divulgar resultados de investigações artísticas no âmbito das Artes Visuais e suas interfaces, privilegiando pesquisas que tenham por foco o contexto contemporâneo da obra de arte e de seus processos e sistemas, seja em relação aos desafios da produção poética no século XXI, ou a inserção e reverberação da obra histórica nos circuitos existentes ou em construção. Tendo em vista a situação geográfica de sua sede, busca evidenciar teorias e métodos que dialoguem com as novas perspectivas de descentralização da produção e dos discursos da arte.
Universidade Federal de Uberlândia - UFU
Copyright (c) 2025 Revista Estado da Arte
Let’s be us : entrevista com Kapka Kassabova por Nikoleta Kerinska
Let’s be us : Interview with Kapka Kassabova by Nikoleta Kerinska
Artistic Imagination Beyond Technotopic Futures
This essay begins with the question what the future is and how humanity has attempted to predict and control it throughout history. Drawing on philosophers such as Rousseau, Bernard Stiegler and Yuk Hui the article unfolds the argument that the idea about the future is closely intertwined with the development of technology. The evolution of tertiary retention (Stiegler) and tertiary protention (Hui) leads to the contemporary situation in which the calculating techno-logos has become so ubiquitous that it has set the horizon for both utopian (e.g. futurism) and dystopian (e.g. cyberpunk) visions of the future. To overcome the ethical myopia of such discourses, we need to find a radical imagination beyond the techno-topic horizon. The essay discusses two interactive art-science projects “Mitigation of Shock” (Superflux 2017-2019) and “Aerocene Pacha” (Saraceno 2020) as examples which transcend the techno-topic framework by transforming technology from the inside. These works unfold beyond the images and narratives about technology. Instead, they utilize technoscientific instruments only to radically reverse thinking about what technology could be and how it could contribute to the creation of desirable futures. Rooted in the DIY ethos of experimentation and inventiveness these artworks raise heightened awareness of human interdependence with other non-human species and intelligences and profound concern for ecological balance. Grand narratives of the future, infused with enthusiasm or fear, are replaced with patience, care, and receptivity to the full complexity of situations in the present. The future in this case is neither abstract nor empty, and although fundamentally open to transformation, it is alive in the present. Such projects generate new forms of cognition and attune our senses to potentialities existing beyond the calculated probabilities, proposed as an automated self-reproduction of the technocratic logos governing existing socio-political forms of coexistence.
Symbioses: dynamics between human and non-human in art
This text, whose writing oscillates between essay and academic article, deals with the notion of symbiosis, the dichotomy between nature and culture in the capitalist system, and some thoughts and artistic forms that challenge this dichotomy. The aim is to sketch out a framework of ideas that both underpins the theme of symbiosis between humans and non-humans and provides an opening for thinking about it in the field of art. This is only a brief outline, whose main mission is to unsettle its readers.
This text presents the Photo Brute exhibition, created by fine arts students at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, under the direction of Nicolas Devigne. Some of the works were presented at the III Biennale della Fotografia di Senigallia (Italy) in 2023. Two years later, a second exhibition was held at the University Art Museum – Muna, University of Uberlândia, Brazil, in April-May 2025.
Étrange entre deux : franchir la frontière
Marianne Chanel est une artiste française, qui vit et travaille à Paris. Née en 1963, elle ne fait pas dans la dentelle. Après des études aux Beaux -Arts de Paris, elle entreprend un parcours original. Elle participe à la création de l’atelier collectif Frigo 6 en 1985 dans les anciens entrepôts frigorifiques de Paris, où elle travaille jusqu’à ce jour. En dehors des sentiers battus, elle explore les limites, de l’art et de la technique. De la toile au papier, de la couleur au noir et blanc, du point à la ligne du plan au volume. Ses installations témoignent de son goût du second degré, de l'ironie du regard. Si son travail prend des formes variées, il n'en est pas moins construit sur les mêmes questionnements. Il n'en est que des représentations des mises en scènes. Des approches, des angles, des points de vue. Mettre en scène la question. De quoi est-il question : de questionnements, de plasticité, de place et d’espace, de jeu visuel, de doute de trouble, d’ambiguïté, du signe et du sens. De ce moment où l'on franchit, où l'on passe d'un état à l’autre. Des métamorphoses pour arriver où ? ...Pour en arriver là !
This essay[1] begins with the question what the future is and how humanity has attempted to predict and control it throughout history. Drawing on philosophers such as Rousseau, Bernard Stiegler and Yuk Hui the article unfolds the argument that the idea about the future is closely intertwined with the development of technology. The evolution of tertiary retention (Stiegler) and tertiary protention (Hui) leads to the contemporary situation in which the calculating techno-logos has become so ubiquitous that it has set the horizon for both utopian (e.g. futurism) and dystopian (e.g. cyberpunk) visions of the future. To overcome the ethical myopia of such discourses, we need to find a radical imagination beyond the techno-topic horizon. The essay discusses two interactive art-science projects “Mitigation of Shock” (Superflux 2017-2019) and “Aerocene Pacha” (Saraceno 2020) as examples which transcend the techno-topic framework by transforming technology from the inside. These works unfold beyond the images and narratives about technology. Instead, they utilize technoscientific instruments only to radically reverse thinking about what technology could be and how it could contribute to the creation of desirable futures. Rooted in the DIY ethos of experimentation and inventiveness these artworks raise heightened awareness of human interdependence with other non-human species and intelligences and profound concern for ecological balance. Grand narratives of the future, infused with enthusiasm or fear, are replaced with patience, care, and receptivity to the full complexity of situations in the present. The future in this case is neither abstract nor empty, and although fundamentally open to transformation, it is alive in the present. Such projects generate new forms of cognition and attune our senses to potentialities existing beyond the calculated probabilities, proposed as an automated self-reproduction of the technocratic logos governing existing socio-political forms of coexistence. [1] This article was first published in Bulgarian in Ст. Ставру (ред.) Етика и бъдеще: философски траектории към убягващото бъдеще under the title: „Фиктивни наративи за бъдещето като основа за етическа рефлексия“ (“Future Fictions as a Ground for Ethical Reflection“), Sofia: Nova Zvezda, 2024, 107-124.
Poetics of the chimera: Thomas Cailley's The animal kingdom (Le règne animal), in light of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Man/Animal in The animal that therefore I am (L'animal que donc je suis’)
The Animal Kingdom (Le règne animal) (2023), a French film by Thomas Cailley, has been hailed as an original and striking work: the first major anti-speciesist film. Both in the fable it unfolds and in the choices made in the way it is filmed, the work echoes contemporary concerns about the relationship between humans and nature and the non-human living beings that inhabit it. The fiction – an epidemic of mutations transforms some humans into animals – gives rise to the creation, then the embodiment by the actors, of astonishing chimeras representing this transformation. I will consider the film's message and the creation of these chimeras as the fabulous culmination of the deconstruction of the Man/Animal opposition inaugurated by Jacques Derrida in his posthumous work, The Animal That Therefore I Am (L'animal que donc je suis) (2006). He attacks a philosophical tradition that, since Descartes, has based the nature of man, his essence and his dignity on the distinction between him and animals, which are incapable of pain, emotion, thought, reason and language. Kant, Levinas, Lacan and Heidegger are all challenged in this regard.
Poetics of the chimera: Thomas Cailley's The Animal Kingdom (Le règne animal), in light of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Man/Animal inThe Animal That Therefore I Am (L'animal que donc je suis’)
How can we learn from places what memory is?: situated artistic practices in the Anthropocene
This article offers a reflection on situated artistic practices—those that explore specific spaces and the possibilities of creating conceptual and operational forms of relating to places beyond an anthropocentric perspective. Based on an artistic residency undertaken by the authors around the question “How can we learn from places what memory is?”, the article presents a protocol for approaching places and two artistic experiments conducted in specific contexts. Considering the recognition of Gaia's intrusions (Stengers, 2015) as an immanent and unavoidable element in artistic experiments with places, and adopting the notion of more-than-human landscapes (Tsing, 2019) as a way to understand the human-place/memory-landscape relationship, the article seeks to reflect on how certain situated artistic practices can offer us tools to think and live in the Anthropocene.
Women and stones: Some artistic rituals for reconnecting with the Earth
Since ancient times, stones have been essential components of magical and religious rituals, traces of which still shape the landscape today. Artists, for their part, have always manipulated mineral objects, using them as subjects for representation, sculptural elements, or parts of narrative works. This article focuses in particular on the performative works of women artists who revisit ancestral knowledge and ritual practices. Through an analysis of artistic borrowings from ancient ritual forms, we will examine how these works propose ways of reconnecting with the Earth, while developing new spiritual imaginaries.
Raw matter: reading works of art from an extra-modern perspective
This work aims to present the black light method developed by Brazilian philosopher and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva. Based on the texts “Em estado bruto” (Ferreira da Silva, 2019) and “Luz Negra” (Ferreira da Silva, 2016), I argue that the perspective of black light proposes shifts in relation to the foundations of what we call modern thought. To this end, I investigate which formulations are challenged by the method based on a brief overview of the history of Western metaphysics. Next, I present how thinkers in the field of aesthetics relate to Ferreira da Silva's ideas. Finally, I argue that the black light method proposes a unique critical reflective method for the analysis of artistic works by emphasizing historically undervalued aspects.
Imaginary human and non-human characters in drawing practice in elementary school
Throughout the researcher's teaching practice, the attraction of adolescents to drawing imaginary characters with human and non-human forms was observed. This demonstrates their openness to figures that catch their attention in their everyday experience with media. Students' willingness to receive, contemplate, and translate the characters onto paper through drawing can be considered a way for the individual to influence the environment in which they live, creating possibilities through the practice of drawing. In creating, students present themselves to the world through their drawings and begin to compose and initiate the aesthetic experience. Drawing as a process and journey in knowledge construction reveals that students' actions while drawing are full of information that can be apprehended. It is important to highlight the significance of the teacher's observation of students' experiences and preferences as expressed in their drawings and in the appreciation of natural forms, in a process of symbiosis between nature and humans in elementary education.
The Artistic Residency as the Forestation of Creative Processes in Contemporary Sculpture
This article discusses the transformations in artistic creation processes driven by the Artistic Residency experience, focusing on the case study that took place in 2020, at the critical moment of the beginning of the pandemic, in an area located in the riparian forest of the Cerrado in the Federal District. In this process, we identified the artist's travel and displacement as affecting his perspective of poetic production, with the object of study being the creation of contemporary sculptures based on what we call forestation.
Cosmic Poetics: Ethnoastronomy in Contemporary Art
This article proposes a reflection on the relationship between art, nature, and the cosmos, based on the ancestral knowledge of Brazil’s indigenous and original peoples. Drawing on the principles of ethnoastronomy — a field that investigates the connections between these peoples’ symbolic dimensions and the universe, their rituals, and practices — the study demonstrates how narratives about the sky and its natural cycles shape ways of existence and modes of relating to time and space. By observing the celestial landscape and its myriad stars, these early astronomers recorded phenomena objectively, transforming astral wonder into communication aimed at sociocultural aspects such as planting and daily organization. By approaching this knowledge through the lens of art, this work seeks to raise awareness of our relationship with the universe and expand artistic experiences that connect art with cosmologies rooted in prehistoric knowledge from the Global South, integrating ancestry in a critical and poetic reading. It concludes that such reflection is essential for artistic and scientific learning in light of this knowledge.
STOMACHS: fragmented bodies and poorly digested ideas
The presente research focuses on the artistic work “ESTOMACAL”, an approach to the vanitas genre in contemporary art, involving the practice of taxidermy and addressing the relationship between organic and industrial materialities. In the process of theoretical investigation, I concentrated on certain words, such as “ham” and its derivatives, seeking semantic openness based on their meanings – formal, metaphorical, adjectival, colloquial –, which would reveal aspects of the contemporary relationship with the sign “meat”, addressing how these words are used to refer to animals and human beings. Finally, the article uses the thought of John Peter Berger to approach issues such as consumerist culture, the aestheticization of death and the ontology of animals.
HIPERMAR: a poetic-visual fabulation to aguapés composed in 15 dives
HIPERMAR is a poetic-visual essay, a speculative fabulation composed of Aguapés, aquatic plants living in three lagoons of the present and past in Abya Yala. The Aguapés here are companion species (Haraway, 2021) and co-authors of this fabulation. This essay is driven by dreamaction, a concept I’m developing in my doctoral research at XXXX. HIPERMAR moves through a constellation of lagoons and dreams, through the concept of hypersea (McMenamin & McMenamin,1994) reviewed by Linn Margulis (2022). HIPERMAR is also a critique about colonial inhabiting (Ferdinand, 2022), which continues to threaten the forms of life and matter that constitute the planet's diverse biomes. HIPERMAR asks: how can art research transform the ways of performing other humanities, with more response-ability (Haraway, 2023) in living together at this turbulent moment on the planet? HIPERMAR was composed as an essay in 15 dives with water hyacinths between 2023-2025, in the diverse waters of the lagoons of Lençóis Maranhenses (MA, Brazil), Boqueirão da Ajuda (RJ, Brazil) and Bacalar (Mexico).
The poetics of nature through the eyes of Darli de Oliveira
This article investigates the artistic work of visual artist Darli de Oliveira through a series called "Poetics of nature," produced between 2010 and 2011. In this series, the artist delves into the poetic manifestations that a visual work achieves through elements of nature, in an artistic investigation that connects contemporary art with primitive art and proposes a symbiosis between art, humanity, and nature. In a time of accelerated technological transformation, of increasing artificialization of life in its multiple dimensions, the perception of an ever-increasing distance from so-called "nature" seems inescapable. Darli de Oliveira is an artist of a reality that has nature in material form, in which the minerals, the chemistry of oxides, botany, and the animals used in her work break down the distinction between nature and culture.
Observatory of Interspecific Relations in Extreme Contexts
This article analyzes how art research, as a situated practical-reflexive construction, develops ways of thinking about the relationships between the human and the non-human. The aim is to demonstrate how speculative practice, understood as an instrument of art research, fosters interpretations of other ways of creating worlds and their possible natures. To this end, the "Observatory of Interspecific Relations in Extreme Contexts (ORICE)" is used as a case study, a fictional prospective segment developed by the author. Based on an analysis of its structure, two interrelated perspectives are identified: a systemic one, which seeks to perceive terrestrial processes in their relational complexities, and a speculative one, which acquires a narrative form through fabulation. Artistic practice is understood as a prospective resource about consensual reality and its alternative possibilities. Thinking about the human and the non-human at the interface between art and fiction affirms the role of speculative processes in reformulating perceptions and subjectivities necessary for the repositioning of the human in the face of current geological contexts.
Copyright (c) 2024 Revista Estado da Arte
Symbiotic Corpography: Experiential Learning with Proustian Signs and Huni Kuin Ritual Trance
This article proposes an interdisciplinary investigation into experiential learning processes through signs, articulating the work of Marcel Proust and the ritual practices of the Huni Kuin people of the Amazon. Drawing on Deleuze’s reading of “Proust and Signs”, the discussion explores how the variety of signs and the sensitivity of the body without organs configure a learning space that transcends voluntary control, allowing for the emergence of new potentials for individuation. In parallel, the study examines ritual learning among the Huni Kuin, particularly through trance experiences mediated by songs, drawings, and cosmologies that establish a symbiotic body without organs, emerging from the relationship with the signs of the ancestral world and the sacred medicine of Ayahuasca. By integrating these horizons, the study proposes an enactivist reading of learning that considers the dance between three bodies (organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective) and a fourth ontogenetic body—a space of bifurcation and lived potentiality within transformative experiences, both artistic and ritualistic.
Art and Nature in the Age of Climate Change
This introduction proposes a transdisciplinary perspective on the relationships between art and nature in times of climate crisis, as addressed in this dossier. The selected contributions reflect on the coexistence of humans and non-humans, addressing ecological, symbolic, political, and poetic issues. Art is understood as a critical and sensitive force for reimagining environmental imaginaries, fostering new connections between aesthetics, science, spirituality, and education. Nature is approached not as an object of contemplation, but as an agent and partner.