Shinji Nagabe: Devorações do Amanhã – Brasil em Rebento - Brazilian Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea
Shinji Nagabe has been selected as one of the participating artists in the first Brazilian Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale. The inaugural Brazilian Pavilion will bring together 35 artists from different generations and regions across Brazil. Taking Brazilian Anthropophagy as its point of departure, the exhibition reflects on contemporary transformations and the imagination of possible futures.
Shinji Nagabe created Arroz, feijão... o resto é Mistura especially for the Brazilian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale, taking a popular expression as a starting point for investigating identity and belonging. In different regions of Brazil, “mistura” designates what varies on the plate and accompanies the everyday base of rice and beans, such as meat, eggs, or vegetables. Nagabe transforms this organization of the meal into an image of Brazilian cultural formation as the result of living together with different experiences. This question runs through his own trajectory as a Brazilian artist of Japanese descent, shaped by childhood in Paraná, the experience of living and working in Japan, and later moving to Europe.
The installation consists of a four- meter textile composition, hand-sewn and supported by two sacks: one of rice and one of beans. The weight of the food keeps the fabric stretched and suspended, turning the title’s metaphor into a physical operation. What usually remains at the base of the plate also becomes the structural base of the work. The hand stitching extends Nagabe’s research with layers of fabric and with oshie, a Japanese technique for creating relief images, while the repetition of stitches recalls his memory of repetitive work in a factory in Japan. By bringing these references together, the work presents belonging as a continuous construction: a composition sustained by everyday elements, migratory experiences, and cultural inheritances that do not cancel one another but remain visible in their differences.
