Latin America

Patricia Belli

Diálogo [Dialogue]

2000

Diálogo, 2000

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In the mid-1990s, Patricia Belli started to create soft sculptures that allowed her to reconnect with manual labor and sewing learned from her seamstress mother. Using recycled fabrics and objects collected from friends and second-hand stores in Nicaragua, Belli’s work explored the codification of family space—using dolls, tables, tablecloths, and curtains—making tangible how masculine authority is inscribed onto women’s bodies daily. Produced during her time as an MFA student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Diálogo is part of a group of sculptures that addresses the tension between restriction and agency, imprisonment and liberation, and ultimately, the possibilities and limits of human action in a society with deeply eroded democratic structures. Diálogo is one of the first sculptures in which Belli introduced the concept of balance that accompanied her work in the next two decades. For Belli, these sculptures were also a response to patriarchal hegemony.

Since the 1980s, Patricia Belli has been a driving force behind the rise of experimental work in Nicaragua. Belli claims the power of the vulnerable body, its rage, and libidinal energy, as powerful forms of resistance. In Belli’s approach, there is an affirmative yet disenchanted dimension. Affirmative in the sense that she creates work aimed at reconnecting us with our own fragility in order to interpret the world from that position. But also disenchanted in the way that Belli’s work insists on placing us within a social stage of brutality and terror, where we coexist. Against a general state of collective cruelty and senselessness, Belli proposes a practice of mending and healing; a laboratory for the transferal of emotional energy; an extension of empathy. She invents objects that combine a strange mix of joy and disillusion, pleasure and complaint, as if the most important aspect of living is to redefine our way of being in this world.

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Patricia Belli Diálogo [Dialogue]

Patricia Belli

Diálogo [Dialogue]