Residency
The Residency program presents the organization’s annual artist residencies, created to support the development of artistic research and new work. Each residency provides artists with time, space, and opportunities for dialogue with curators, scholars, and cultural institutions.
Bel Falleiros & Renata Cruz
In Collaboration with El Espacio 23, Miami.
Curated by Adriana Herrera, Phd
2025
Bel Falleiros and Renata Cruz develop practices rooted in listening, narrative, and the construction of shared spaces. Falleiros investigates place and belonging through environments that invite coexistence with nature, inner landscapes, and collective presence, questioning how contemporary territories are built and inhabited. Cruz works with fragments of texts, images, and personal stories to create open, non-linear narratives, where multiple voices and temporalities intersect.
Together, their works propose art as a space of encounter rather than representation. By foregrounding relationships, memory, and lived experience, both artists resist fixed meanings and linear readings, opening spaces where territory, storytelling, and collective imagination remain in constant transformation.
Panmela Castro
In Collaboration with El Espacio 23, Miami.
Curated by Jennifer Inacio
2024
Panmela Castro’s practice is rooted in a confessional approach that merges art and activism. Her work addresses gender- and race-based violence while advocating for the occupation of spaces of power by women, Black communities, LGBTQIAP+ people, people with disabilities, and Indigenous peoples, particularly in decision-making processes related to planetary sustainability, climate change, and the finitude of natural resources.
Working across performance, painting, sculpture, installation, video, and photography, Castro explores affect and alterity as tools for social transformation. Her work has been exhibited internationally, challenging sexist and elitist structures within the traditional art world. She is also the founder of Rede NAMI, an organization dedicated to women’s rights and the fight against domestic violence, impacting more than 200,000 people worldwide.
André Azevedo
In Collaboration with El Espacio 23, Miami.
Curated by Jennifer Inacio
2023
André Azevedo's research with fabrics is part of his personal and familiar experience with this materiality. From this intimate connection, Azevedo began to understand textiles simultaneously as language, concept, and materiality, which allowed him numerous forms of interaction with the world. The starting point for realizing his works comes from the etymology of the word text and a recurring quotation among several authors: “Text means fabric and a line a thread of a linen fabric.”
He explores the plot structure within the universe of storytelling, using notions of “following the thread,” “backdrop,” and “knotless stitch,” among other figures of speech. The fabric is an opportunity to deal with the idea that things are entangled: they follow phenomena of repetition, transmit processes, and consequently revive images. Azevedo begins with the statement that fabric is a medium because it is in between – between men and the world, and between the world and all the things it coats –and, then, makes use of different malleable media, such as books, screens, video, and sound installations.
2022
Rafael RG
Rafael RG is a visual artist who lives and works between Guarulhos and São Luís do Maranhão, Brazil. He has a degree in Visual Arts from Belas Artes de São Paulo and has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the 1st Foco ArtRio Award and the Iberê Camargo Scholarship for residency at Künstlerhaus Bremen in Germany. RG has had residencies at various institutions, including Gasworks in London, Triangle France in Marseille, and FAAP Artist Residency in São Paulo.
In his artistic practice, RG brings together documentary and affective sources to construct his works. He often uses documents from institutional or personal archives and integrates these with narratives that may involve himself or an alter ego. The result is works that often approach fiction or a notion of fictionality. RG's current areas of interest include affective relationships, sexual and gender politics, racial identity, and related issues. He explores these themes through workshops, installations, performative texts, publications, and objects.
RG's work is supported by the @garciafamilyfoundation. He continues to produce thought-provoking works that challenge viewers to consider the complex intersections of politics, identity, and affect in our lives.
Curated by Jennifer Inacio
Nadia Taquary
In collaboration with Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami. Curated by Christian Larsen and Jennifer Inacio
2021
Nádia Taquary raises questions related to the knowledge and practices of traditions in Creole jewelry. In her works, she uses wood, gold, silver, beads, straw, and other objects representative of the history of the Black population in Brazil. These objects, which have lost their meaning over time, originally represented freedom for many enslaved Black women, and today are being revisited and empowered by the artist to emphasize the continuation of contemporary racial struggles.
Mano Penalva
In Collaboration with The Fountainhead Residency
Curated by Ana Clara Silva
2020
We are thrilled to have Mano Penalva for the residency program 2020 in partnership between The55Project and The Fountainhead Residency in Miami. We want to thank Kathryn Mikesell, co-founder of The Fountainhead, Adriana Malfitano, and Ricardo Mor for helping us with the artist selection and nomination. Congratulations to Mano Penalva. Mano Penalva is a Brazilian artist who documents the material culture, behavioral changes, and globalization surrounding our contemporary lives. His art reflects on the character of objects and how they transition through the world.
During the program, Mano Penalva created “American Sky,” 2020, a 5 min. video performance.
"The flag of Penalva waves high, an imagined flag suggests an inclusive America with all nations under the same sky. The stars and the navy blue color are borrowed from the flag of the United States, its version signals to infinite stars that shine even in dark times. The work reminds the viewer of the many types of Americans that exist above and below Ecuador and serves as an invitation to understand America in its entirety better. "
Text by Ana Clara Silva.
Ivan Grilo
In Collaboration with Mana Contemporary
Curated by Adriana Herrea and Tatiane Schilaro Santa Rosa
2018
“ESCRIBE UNA CARTA DE AMOR”
The project used poetic sentences to activate subjective spaces in Downtown Miami, creating the possibility of public interaction, promoting new possibilities for political and social discussion, and activating conversation beyond the artist's native Brazilian territory while allowing borders to dissipate.
"I am very interested in this ambiguity of phrases, which permeate politics and affection. In addition to this, there is the idea of presenting a work far from the space of the white cube that allows reaching people completely alien to the art but never alien to the politics or to the love.” - Ivan Grilo.
Mateu Velasco
In collaboration with AnnexB/ NYC
Curated by Tatiane Schilaro Santa Rosa, 2017
2017
Mateu Velasco was born in New York City but spent the better part of his life living and working in Rio de Janeiro. He is one of a small group of multimedia artists from Brazil’s arts capital who have caught the attention of international collectors in recent years. Known for his distinctive, explosive style, Velasco has been hailed as one of the few young Brazilian talents who can move with ease between innovative styles, unexplored themes, and deep into the murky depths of the social conscience.
His work, whether it be paintings on public walls or gallery canvases, objects, or animation, flips the everyday humdrum on its head, presenting the viewer with a new vision of the unnoticed, awe-inspiring interpretations of those crevices in the waking hours that otherwise would escape our thoughts.
