Stephanie Boaventura

Madre Tectônica, 2022

Drawing, tear and stitches
14.8cm x 21cm

Stephanie Boaventura is a female specimen of the human species, most commonly found in the Cerrado biome. First described in 1987, she is a shy, small-sized, nocturnal animal. A gregarious mammal, she normally avoids conflict but, if threatened, can attack and devour the aggressor, especially to protect her offspring. Since childhood, she has communicated best through writing and images, but can also use vocalizations, gestures, scents, and touch. With a keen sense of smell, her means of obtaining nourishment is the exercise of creativity. Boaventura’s research interests involve women’s knowledge, the webs and spiral movements of life, motherhood and ancestral futures, the communicational dimension of dreams, epistemology, memory, feminism, ethics of care, and online social networks. She works at the intersections between art and science, seeking to develop a poetics of the ordinary in everyday life. 

Madre Tectônica is a series reflecting on the human–nature fracture that begins with the rupture between mother and offspring in Western cultures. The mother is formed at the boundary between worlds, a trench the empire of men must conquer to bleed the planet. By taming the mother, the children are tamed. Man imposes a fragmented life on the mother, convincing her to break from the animal, to diminish herself at the altar of the sacred, to hide her fractures, and to internalize a false split—surgically made—between herself and the unfolding of life.

 
steboaventura.com