Margarida Alves (1983) is a Portuguese multidisciplinary artist. Her research embraces different media, including installation, sculpture (in glass, stone, bone, wood, clay and natural objects), performance, photography and film experimentation. The themes of existence, the phenomena of our being, otherness, and the search for origin are present in her work and take into account historical, artistic, philosophical and scientific perspectives. In the lightness of the diaphanous and light materials she chooses – dust, seeds, water, cyantypic atmospheres – hope in the balance between man and nature emerges as the guiding thread of the poetics of life.
On the occasion of her second solo exhibition in Venice, entitled “Diaphanous Matter”, she questions that particular state of matter, when being and becoming merge.
It is in this continuous body in which natural elements mingle with traces of anthropic nature that the human being must find his meaning, but this relationship becomes increasingly complicated and the artist has the task, through image/imagination, of questioning himself on the way to live this complexity.
Quoting Margarida Alves: “How to live this complexity? How to become in the eternal present? And how to think and act in the future?
Perhaps the answer lies beyond the anthropos, not as a domain, but as freedom, a sense of otherness, merging, absorbing, and exhaling the same salts that permeate everything, letting the body submerge through the Earth, witnessing the temporality of becoming, and being Earth and dust, life in full, beyond this body-organism”.
