Brama

Mané Pacheco’s artistic practice investigates unstable contact zones between nature, technology and industrial production, proposing hybrid ecologies in which organisms, materials and infrastructures become indistinguishable. The artist incorporates potentially toxic or contaminated substances that function as far more than critical traces of a waste-based economy. Her work gives rise to visual devices that evoke intruder-creatures — ambiguous forms suspended between organism and artefact, seemingly emerging from disturbed ecosystems.

In Brama, Mané Pacheco transforms the exhibition space into a territory traversed by a vibration that runs through a landscape recognisable in its ontological (de)formation. Brama— the deep call emitted by deer during the rutting season — is a sound of presence and dispute, a gesture through which the creature occupies territory and asserts its body. More than a zoological reference, Brama introduces an almost ritual intensity into the exhibition, establishing a field of tension between attraction, confrontation and reproduction. Within this environment, the works appear as hybrid beings, constructed from organic matter and waste derived from vernacular economies of reuse. The exhibition thus (re)configures an ecosystem of materials, bodies and debris reorganised into mutant organisms, suggesting resilient forms of life in the friction zones between nature and industry.

— Ana Cristina Cachola, curator