Curitiba, Brazil, 1958

When we get closer to the vital traces that make up Laura Miranda’s work, we realize that her artistic work has deep affinities with alchemical investigation. Gestures, objects and distant places, apparently disconnected, collaborate in a bodily and ritualistic work of magnetizing spaces and altering meanings. Transmuted by the artist, they acquire a new vibrancy and become vehicles through which we can communicate with many areas of the world, reconnect with possible others and dilute the boundaries between subject and environment, between imaginary and real.

In 1985 Laura Miranda points to her main interests and methods with the exhibition Impressões Digitais, made in partnership with the artists Denise Bandeira and Eliane Prolik. The show, consisting of works in painting, metal, outdoor and video, presented aspects that were consolidated throughout Miranda’s work: working with the body, experimentation in different media and collaboration with other and other artists in the formation of a rich poetic mesh, open to intersubjective differences and exchanges. It is also this awareness of what is common that distances Laura Miranda from the privileged point of view assumed by the ethnographer, thus enabling her travels around the world to be a link between delicate and powerful nodes of a network of shared creation and aesthetic experience. , which extend in time and space.

An example of this sensibility are projects such as Spirare (2003 – 2004), in which Miranda weaves relationships between typical Japanese clothing and calligraphy and the history of European immigrants who, in the 19th century, colonized the region of the Passaúna environmental reserve, close to Curitiba. Integrating this project is the Vestes series (2003 – 2004), which addresses issues about the displacement and constitution of symbolic heritages from ghost clothes: kimonos and latex shawls molded on the walls and floors of the wooden houses that form the fragile material inventory of foreign occupation in the region. The Vests are like archaeological items from this site, carrying with them the ineradicable power of memory and making the immigrants’ bodies presentable precisely by virtue of their absence.

Research on the body also stands out in Lichens (2014 – 2015). Connected to Miranda’s trips to India and carried out in partnership with artist Mônica Infante, the project speaks of the symbiosis between the mineral, plant and animal world, locating in the body the space open to this triple relationship. In the video work that opens the project, we have the presence of the bodies of the two artists who, in white robes, move through the bed of a stream in dense forest. The gestures they perform are slow like the silent and constant becoming of nature, immersed in the temporality of transformations that tend to infinity. Dyed with animal milk, vegetable indigo and mineral gold powder, this tributary of the Ganges in the middle of Passaúna surrounds bodies, provides them with a primordial shelter and recovers their identities as an irreducible axis of synthesis and transformation.

GG