This talk takes currently exhibiting artist Chico da Silva's artworks as a point of entry into his life story - and into the worldview that shaped both. Moving between formal analysis and biographical narrative, Cecilia Vilela will trace how the paintings illuminate three interconnected dimensions of the artist's practice: his rootedness in land-dependent ways of living, inherited from both Indigenous and coastal-dwelling culture; his relationship with the fantastical, shaped by both Indigenous cosmogony and his own psychological world; and the collective nature of his creative process and production, which complicates conventional notions of authorship and sits uneasily within the contemporary art system.
Cecilia Vilela is an independent curator and writer working with contemporary art, focusing on participatory and socially situated practices. Her work centres on artistic explorations of ecology, language, displacement, and geopolitics. Her writing has been published internationally in Prospect, Folha de S.Paulo, ArtNexus, and Arts of the Working Class. She curates exhibitions at 92 Webster Road, an independent project space she manages in London, and serves on the curatorial team of the International Circle – Latin America at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.