‘I don’t have a medium,’ says Brazilian artist Aleta Valente of her art. ‘I find a problem and I try to solve it.’ Valente incorporates photography and social media in her problem-solving practice – including her @ex_miss_febem_ account, banned by Instagram once before, and now primarily used to show memes. Operating within (and outside) Rio de Janeiro’s cultural scene, Valente employs banal images, often of herself, ‘scenarios’ that often include the public, and more recently, painting and sculpture. A mix of bleakness, humor, and raw vulnerability, her work is meant to shake people into taking the threats facing women in Brazil seriously.
In Bárbara (2019), Valente poses as Bárbara Oliveira de Souza, an imprisoned woman in Rio who gave birth in solitary confinement. In the image, Valente holds a newborn in her arms, umbilical cord still attached; she looks defiantly at the camera. In another piece, titled Material Girl (2020), the artist crouches seductively atop a pile of rubble. After spending an hour on what should have been a 15-minute commute – and with the stripping of abortion rights in several US states weighing heavily on her mind – Valente spoke over Zoom about Brazil’s anti-abortion propaganda, the urban geography of Rio de Janeiro, and the new directions her work might take.
Rob Goyanes: I’m curious how you got into making art.
Aleta Valente: I wish I could have studied cinema, but it’s very difficult to get in. I chose the easiest major that was offered – education for the arts. I was pregnant when I did the [entrance exam] for university; and I spent almost ten years there. I always thought I was more like a critic, or that I could be a curator. I never really thought of myself as an artist until later in life, when I was 27 or 28. I started my work through social media because I was addicted to taking pictures with a little Nokia phone. I had this compulsion – before Google photos and cloud storage, I started to upload photos as a way of taking care of them.
RG: Let’s talk about your latest exhibition, ‘Av. Brasil 24H’, at Galeria da Gávea in Rio de Janeiro – a series of photos of 24-hour motels on your bus routes.
AV: When I lived in Bangu, a neighborhood in the west zone, 50 kilometers from downtown Rio, where I grew up and where three generations of my family have lived, I normally spent six hours of my day on the bus. This exhibition is about pendulum migration: when people go from their house to work every day – it’s about the counting of hours. I worked as a bartender, would stand for hours at work, and then stand on the buses. One year, I lost the feeling in three of the toes of my right foot; it was thrombosis. Then I had an epiphany: a problem for the city becomes a problem for my body.
RG: What work will you be bringing to Art Basel in Miami Beach?
AV: I don’t know yet! I’m working on ceramic pieces, sculptures of Misoprostol tablets, a drug that can be used to induce abortions. I’m thinking about making one gigantic pill, or doing eight or ten of them.
RG: A lot of your work is about the stigmatized female body and the illegality of abortion in Brazil. Can you describe the climate in Rio right now in regards to making this kind of work?
AV: I suffer a lot from bullying. I’m talking about women in prison, abortion, early pregnancy, domestic labor – and suddenly I’m accused of transphobia. I received five death threats. Here in Brazil, there is a way of portraying abortions as very dangerous. [In Brazil, abortion is only allowed to save a woman’s life, and in cases of rape and incest.] I got pregnant at 17. I didn’t have an abortion because I never heard about abortion. Still today, the women that speak to me think that they will die if they have an abortion. This is propaganda. Fear is a means of control.
RG: What is it like to work on the outside of the art world, but yet, inside it?
AV: When I started, people were pushing things like, ‘This girl doesn’t have a job, she spends all day long on the Internet.’ It was real – I had no job, and I had depression. When I started making art, it made my days make more sense. I don’t believe in artworks that aren’t critical. How can you do art and not think critically about that shit? I thought art was a kind of free thing, but now for me, they are like cows – [people in the art world] just want to see the grass. I’m not the ideal peripheral figure – I think they have problems with me because of it. I can see things coming, like dogs when they sense fear. Artists are like dogs: they can feel the trembling.
Aleta Valente is represented by A Gentil Carioca, who will present her work at Art Basel in Miami Beach 2022.
The photographs and videos by Aleta Valente presented in this article were realized thanks to a research grant from the ZUM 2019 Photography Scholarship, from Instituto Moreira Salles, in addition to the artist's works shown in her exhibition 'Av. Brasil 24H'.