Artist In-Conversation

About

Daniella Valz Gen 

Process-led, Valz Gen's work explores poetic experience through different forms of reading, writing, performing and making. Their methods include, land intervention, crafts, ritual, divination and interweaving. They have a long standing interest in textiles that manifests in the work through knitted and woven pieces expressed through different media.  

Valz Gen was born in Peru, and lives and work in the UK. Their work has been shown at the Aichi Triennale in Japan, ICA, TATE, Gropius Bau, The Showroom, Glasgow International amongst others. Subversive Economies, their first poetry collection in English, was published by PSS Press in 2018. Valz Gen's writing has been featured in The Happy Hypocrite, Map Magazine, Salt. amongst others. 

In October 2022 Valz Gen took part in the OrganizmoBloom residency, ‘Body, Weaving and Territory’ (British Council/European Alternatives) in the indigenous community of La Urbana, Colombia. Throughout this time they witnessed a process of reclamation of oral and weaving traditions. 

Other recent projects include Deslices, Glasgow International 2021; Howl Sigh Sing, An Tobar 2022; and You can call me Horse, Gropius Bau 2022. 

Rubbiane Maia 

Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian transdisciplinary artist and independent researcher based between Folkestone, UK and Vitoria, Brazil. She completed a degree in Visual Arts and a Master degree in Institutional Psychology at Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil. Her artwork is a hybrid across performance, images and writing; sometimes flirting with drawing, painting and collage practices. In general, she is interested in the body, voice, memory, phenomena and organic matter. She is attracted to states of perception, synergy and healing that encompass relationships of interdependence and affect between human and non-human beings as minerals and plants. She often develops research in site specific contexts, always considering the landscape and the environment as guide and co-creators of her artworks.  

In 2015, she took part at the exhibition 'Terra Comunal - Marina Abramovic + MAI', at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo with the long durational performance ‘The Garden’ for two consecutive months. In the same year, she produced her first short film ‘EVO’ in collaboration with the filmmaker Renata Ferraz, it premiered at the 26th Festival Internacional de São Paulo and 22nd Festival de Cinema de Vitória. In 2016, she worked on the project 'Preparation for Aerial Exercise, the Desert and the Mountain' which required her to travel to high landscapes of Uyuni (Bolivia), Pico da Bandeira (Espírito Santo/Minas Gerais, BRA) and Monte Roraima (Roraima, BRA/Santa Helena de Uyarén, VEN). In 2017, she launched her second short film titled ‘ÁDITO'. Since 2018 she has been working on the ongoing project ‘Book-Performance’, composed by a series of actions devised in response to autobiographical texts particularly influenced by traumatic transgenerational memories connected to gender and racialization issues. In 2020, during the isolation caused by the Pandemic, she made the experimental film 'My Battery is Weak and It's Getting Late' in partnership with artist Tom Nóbrega. Currently, she is part of 'Food Art Research (FAR) Network’, a wide international network of over twenty established artists that engage with the politics and aesthetics of food and 'Room to Bloom’ program, a feminist platform for ecological and postcolonial narratives. Recently, she launched the Divisa project, an online installation that can be accessed at www.projetodivisa.com.