Leonardo Gabriel do Amaral
Bio/Statement
Selected
Bio/Statement
“What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding?” - David Foster Wallace
I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, but never really felt like it. I was raised in English, for no reason other than it might give me a leg up in an ever-Americanized job landscape. Raised on movies and cartoons that stitched my vocal cords into a generic American accent. Raised on the internet, learning how to float over an ocean of information, people, and cultures. Never calling anywhere home, never committing to a self, never having to.
Working across photography, installation, sculpture, video, and writing, I explore immigration as an ongoing condition. My projects emerge in response to one another, each forming the next step within a lived sequence of encounters, contradictions, and failures. I am interested in the physical and metaphysical ruptures caused by imperialism and immigration, and attempts at mending said ruptures.
Projects like Colonização Cultural, Dress Like a Brazilian, and On Performing as an Immigrant trace systems of cultural power, stereotype, and assimilation as they move through branding, bureaucracy, and spectacle. These works adopt the visual and rhetorical language of commerce and sovereignty not to critique them from a distance, but to inhabit them fully. Parody becomes a way of understanding how American hegemony is fabricated and enforced, how non-western cultures are exoticized, flattened, and commodified, and how censorship makes it impossible for immigrants to have their voices heard.
More recent projects like Almost (T)here and Ask me to stay, a little longer continue this line of questioning, but shift inward, exploring my relationships with what I love from afar and the cold in-between spaces I inhabit as an immigrant. Poetry on LED displays, large prints of stock images, ready-made sculptures, and photographs of loved ones caught within phone calls and text messages assemble into large-scale installations that stage a set of relations through which the logic of these spaces and the conditions of longing surface.
The work lives in the in-between. It does not seek to resolve immigration, imperialism, globalization, longing, mediation, love. The work arises from attachments that precede choice: to places, languages, people, images, systems that claimed me before I claimed them. In inhabiting these contradictions, I make visible the soft violences, the quiet seductions, the fractures where longing pulsates.