Bolivian feather art makes its way to the Venice Biennale

La Paz, May 4 (Prensa Latina) Plastic artist Alexandra Bravo assured today that the feather art of Bolivia conquered the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Italy.

“It was a good decision by our authorities to invite me to represent our country along with other Bolivian creators at the world exhibition that takes place from April 20 to November 24 with the theme Foreigners everywhere,” he stated in an interview with Prensa. Latina via Internet.

Bravo expressed his gratitude to this news agency to Russia, which gave its space to Bolivia to attend with its own pavilion and a curatorial proposal to one of the oldest and most prestigious artistic events on the planet, founded in 1895.

He explained that this year, the Biennial raises great expectations because, for the first time, it has a Latin American curator as its director of Visual Arts, the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, known for his successful career and his work as artistic director of the Sao Paulo Museum of Art. Assis Chateaubriand.

As general curator for the 2024 Venice Biennale, Pedrosa expressed a bold vision committed to diversity and inclusion in contemporary art that challenges Eurocentric narratives, and proposed the theme Foreigners Everywhere, Bravo commented. “In this sense, "I participated in the project Art with Feathers: Nobody is Illegal in the World, in which feathers help me express and denounce the situation of undocumented Latin American Migrant Women in Europe and their contribution to that society," the artist reported.

She added that in this way her art becomes a testimony of the problems of migrants, of undocumented women.

When referring to the exhibition she described that it consists of compositions of linked feathers that help her express the situation of Latin American migrant women in Europe, as well as medium and large installations.

“Likewise,” Bravo stressed, “owning a pavilion allowed me to exhibit costumes from my Marca País collection based on feathers on a catwalk, and give the conferences Importance of Plumaria Art in the Abya Yala Continent, as well as Mal de País: women undocumented migrants in Europe.

In this regard, she thanked the collaboration of the Italian-Bolivian curator Renato Di Marchi.

Also a psychologist, the artist explained to Prensa Latina that the content of this last conference is the result of research carried out in Switzerland, where she lived a good part of her 40 years as a political refugee after the coup d'état of Hugo Bánzer (1971). .

Bravo meant that the Bolivian exhibition provoked so much interest that it encouraged exchanges in the Bolivian pavilion with cultural personalities from China, France, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Argentina and many visitors.

Before concluding, the artist mentioned as an unforgettable moment during her stay in Venice the performance performed with the Argentine artist Clara Collet, who wore the Sajama design with a hat, both made of feathers, while singing El Regreso, by the great Bolivian troubadour Matilde Casasola.

Bravo told Prensa Latina that his interest in this form of artistic expression was born in the Andean roots of his homeland, where he carried out extensive research especially in the indigenous communities of the lowlands and the highlands such as the Ayoreo, Moré, Moxeños, Sirionós, Chiriguanos and others.

She now only works with poultry feathers with the aim of preserving the rich fauna of the Andean Amazonian country, an environmental concept that she promotes among her disciples and the public that attends her exhibitions.

Some of her work was exhibited in galleries and museums in Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Poland, Cuba, Bolivia and now at the 60th Venice Biennale.

As a creator, she received a solid academic training at the Faculty of Plastic Arts at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, where she was a student of Gustavo Riveros, Solón Romero and Eduardo Espinosa; In Chile (1971-1973) she was a disciple of Oswaldo Guayasamín and José Balmes.

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