2025 Residency:
Bel Falleiros & Renata Cruz

In his Art of Poetry, Borges wrote: “They say that Ulysses, weary of wonders, wept with love at the sight of his Ithaca, green and humble. Art is that Ithaca of green eternity, not of wonders.” Brazilian artists Renata Cruz and Bel Falleiros' tandem residency — organized by The55Project in collaboration with Espacio 23 — was precisely an experience of “green eternity.” Synchronized, it was lived as shared movements, a dance of creative encounter open to others.

The work of both artists possesses the quality of leading us back to a vision of the essential through diverse means. Renata Cruz fills the world with her watercolor drawings and paper collages that portray beings of many species, binding them to one another, for she knows that all dimensions of life are connected. She also gathers stories of knowledge among people, often woven into books created by and for many. In her pedagogy of the Earth (a planet we have torn to pieces, yet which she insists on poetically rebuilding in her works) hands often hold leaves and stems, while living forms multiply in installations where birds, fish, skies, wings find a place. Those hands almost always duplicate the way her own paint and touch the other realms with infinite delicacy. The silhouettes of cut-out creatures, at times projected as shadows, or drawn on paper over found educational or explorer's books that contain something of herself trace a path of return to unity with the Earth.

The watercolor works that Bel Falleiros also painted for the residency by placing her daughter’s hands within the cosmos, radiated a mode of communion. Her oeuvre endlessly repeats the names of origin: water, earth, tree. And she recreates gestations in the womb of the cosmos through sculptures and land-art installations, as well as through paintings on canvas that gather not only forms but the very voices of plants and peoples. She travels through her ancestral territories and returns to sacred memory. From that learning she poetically reactivates the forgotten centers of origin within cities, seeking to heal the fissures between them and the natural environment upon which they were built.

But the residency was not only a setting where, together, they expanded previous learning from collective practices. While Renata lives in São Paulo and Bel resides in New York, they built the habit of meeting for extended times through online encounters where they still share their doubts and their discoveries. Sometimes they spend long stretches in silence while creating. There was a moment in Renata’s artistic “career” when she felt that living in pursuit of visibility and the demands of galleries was taking away her clarity. She chose to slow her life down, following the teachings of the Indigenous leader Carlos Papá, rooted in the oral transmission of knowledge and in the Guaraní worldview, which today illuminates the project of the two artists: “to step out of the noise in order to listen, to immerse oneself inward to awaken.” Thus she returned to others from her pure language, which is a slow process of drawing, and from her deep love for books that she unbinds, remakes, and intervenes in order to tell other stories, to “speak truthfully” of what she believes should be spoken about.

Both have coincided in feeling a call to the truth of being, understanding the urgency of building safe places to share vulnerability not only between themselves but with an ever-growing number of others, in virtual workshops or in those they have already carried out in person in various museums and art spaces in cities across the Americas. Each artist brought to Espacio 23 in Miami works that they had made independently, but there they also created pieces together with four hands, showcasing a significant capacity for convergence in their way of extending their senses toward the polyphony of the beings of each realm. They began dialogues with many visitors in which words resonated in the depths of each person with a deeply moving meaning. These encounters were conceived as binding ties that led us inside each participant, and, at the same time, outside of ourselves. We leaned out toward a threshold where the truth of each search illuminated visions that later flooded the residency space and gave rise to new works.

There is something important that should be said: their works, individual and joint, are logbooks of their vital journeys, in a certain way images, scenes, or physical spaces of encounter where traces remain of what has been seen, lived, and understood. But they are not aesthetic objects as an end in themselves. They are works open to their ultimate meaning, which is the potentiality of shared learning and the desire — high in its aspiration, deep in its heart — to create atmospheres for dreaming other common futures. And for this reason, at different moments, both have long since stepped aside from the rules and know-how of the art market, from the social codes that demand modes of insertion and ascent inscribed in the tables of success, yet devoid of soul. What they seek is Diogenes’ lamp, the nakedness of other truths. And a tenderness that, in Renata Cruz’s words, is inseparable from a “feeling of extended family” that advocates not only for the members of the human tribe but for small creatures such as the Amazonian warrior ants, whose prodigious march with its cortege of countless species she has painted. Or like the vermilion flycatcher that crosses the Americas from the southern United States to Chile, and whose silhouette she repeated on the pages of a book that tells the story of how its feathers were dyed red while saving a human brother. “The forest has more eyes than leaves,” Renata wrote in a series of drawings, repeating the phrase of the Brazilian Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak. In 2011, she made as many watercolors as a full rotation of the Earth around the sun (one for each day of the year), drawing objects exchanged with people in parks. She paints in her watercolors what she learns from other beings, something that includes people, plants, and all the creatures that move in water, air, or earth. In collaboration with Laura Gorski, she handcrafted an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge and Medicinal Plants, gathering testimonies among communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, and among Indigenous and Black communities in Brazil, as well as on the streets of Avenida Paulista in São Paulo.

Renata and Bel understand art as a form of imaginative pedagogy of love; a word that cannot be named without being thought in relation to another, and that calls for co-existence. Love repeats the phrase Bel has inscribed in her clay installations or in her works on paper: “We are one single heart, we are one single Earth, we are one,” echoing the words of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. Both have converged in this pedagogy, which they partly conceived after walking long stretches alone, as a refuge for artists eager for truth in their creation. They know from experience that to travel that uncertain path and to create far from the stages of spectacle, one needs the sum of others, and of conversations, confessions, and the legacy of those who long before dared to walk along trails often distant from easy or immediate recognition.

The project they brought with them to Espacio 23, Árvores do América, contains in notebooks written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English the stories of those who, as Agnes Martin wrote, “dared to seek their own path.” From the helplessness of the time when they and other close artists who were exhausted by soulless meetings stepped aside from what was advisable for advancing their careers and decided to walk with less clamor and greater meaning. They were sustained by the discovery of the experiences of women such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose vision of “Maintenance Art” carried the notion of the care present in everyday tasks into the field of art. Or that of Carmen Herrera, who learned not to be intimidated by anything; and Cecilia Vicuña, who spun on the margins of the world the mythical spiderweb of her work. They also found inspiration in the story of one-of-a-kind creators like Felipe Ehrenberg, a neologist by his own definition, who always made art on a tightrope anticipating practices that radiated alternative meanings around him. They've sat in the shade of thinkers such as Parker J. Palmer, seeking to bring together, in a life inseparable from art, the ethics of a way of living in inner communion and in community with others. Like Ana Mendieta, the artists sought to restore bonds with the universe, and to attend, as Doris Salcedo does, to the need for suffering to be heard. In this way they extend the echo of other men and women, tree-beings, whose experiences they transcribe very simply onto living pages, creating guides of encounter with which they activate other possible ways of being in the world and of moving among all the kingdoms of the Earth. Each visitor to Espacio 23 received a copy of the publication in an atmosphere that invited them to walk through their inner space and to draw seeds of knowledge in a meaningful process of exchange entirely alien to the idea of relationships of convenience that usually dominate art spaces. In their workshops, they often ask about the people who have illuminated others in their way of moving through the world. And so, they keep gathering tools to survive in the open, in that space propitious for experimentation. They are “happy to serve as a path of growth,” but also feel the responsibility of being artist-watchers before our shared present.