Terra
(Re)imaginada
- Type
- Installation
- Year
- 2024 - 2025
- Curator
- Rossana Mendes Fonseca
- Featured
- Culture Hub - PROSTOR
- CRU Creative Hub
- MNJC - Gerador
- Award 2025
- National Young Creators Portugal
- (Cross-disciplinary)
Rossana Mendes FonsecaCuratorial text
I am the river that winds between asphalt and memory; my trail is a blend. I am neither seen nor touched, yet I have touched everything. Who am I?
Terra (re)imaginada is a hybrid installation composed of digital environments, created through 3D mapping, digital manipulation, and AI-generated images, interspersed with material objects that embody this imaginary.
Izzy Benigno, originally from Belém do Pará, invokes local myths to remind us that the city extends beyond its visible surface. It is the invisible layers that sustain it, both structurally (foundations, tunnels, underground infrastructures) and symbolically (migratory flows, transgenerational memories, local narratives), that reveal its transformative potential.
The city is a space filled with invisible portals that transcend obvious materiality, allowing the observer to experience a parallel narrative. The city is not only traversed by streets and avenues; it is a transition between different realities or dimensions. The artist employs what she calls dismantled scenography, the visual deconstruction of rigid and static elements, as a means to deconstruct urban structures, which dissolve into fragmented and mutating visual planes. Terra (re)imagined invites us to reflect on the fragility of contemporary cities and the human interactions occurring within them.
It is an invitation to (re)enchantment.
Enchantment is not merely fantasy but the discovery of a new perspective on the ordinary. It is a way of seeing the city as a living entity, constantly transforming. By dismantling its most obvious layers, we have the opportunity to reconstruct it in a richer, more complex, and meaningful way.
2022 to 2024From body to space
The first materialization of these ideas was a performance in 2022 exploring the carimbó, a traditional dance from Belém do Pará, wearing a skirt crafted by my mother and parts of a song composed by my father in 1988.
In Below the Ground Only My Body Exists (2024), the practice expands into a hybrid installation. I embody a creature that merges my physical form with the ancestral forces of my birthplace: the Cobra Grande, a colossal serpent resting beneath Belém. Within Belém's cosmovision, there is a belief that if it awakens, the city could sink, allowing the land and waters to reclaim their space.
In a context where flooding has become increasingly recurrent in Belém, this presence resonates beyond metaphor, echoing ongoing processes of environmental pressure and territorial imbalance. It also evokes broader movements of retomada, where land, water, and more-than-human forces assert themselves against extractive and urban logics. Within this tension, a question emerges: is the Cobra beginning to awaken?
Belém do Pará, Brazil · Aveiro, Porto, Santarém, PortugalTransatlantic connections
The project explores the historical and postcolonial ties between Belém do Pará and Aveiro, two sister cities connected by maritime and colonial histories. Rua de Belém do Pará, in Aveiro, served as a bridge between continents; I transformed it into a digital 3D map revealing the space's invisible layers.
The research continued in Porto's Miguel Bombarda district, where at CRU Creative Hub I created hybrid beings that navigate the boundary between imagination and reality, and later in Santarém, another sister city to Belém.
Along the way, the project highlights the transitory nature of human experience: wherever people move, they carry ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, and with them, their stories. Have traditional narratives migrated to the city, or has the city brought them with it?
Between destruction and regeneration, the city floats. In a video art piece, the buildings of Rua Belém do Pará take on a playful appearance reminiscent of pink balloons, rising, bursting into clouds of rosy smoke, and returning to the ground in a continuous loop. It evokes fragility and destruction, reminiscent of urban crises or even war; and it reflects regeneration and flow, echoing Ailton Krenak's reflections on river water that evaporates only to return from the sky.
The video is accompanied by a textile sculpture on a metallic framework. Purples and pinks evoke ethereal atmospheres, while greens and blues, associated with nature, are digitally manipulated through chroma key, suggesting the coexistence of utopian and dystopian possibilities within the city.