Flavia Sampaio, a graduate in Communication, has worked for major Brazilian newspapers. For the past six years, she has been developing photographic projects, with a focus on investigating memory, the passage of time, and its transfigurations. In her projects, she uses captured images and vernacular photographs. She has participated in various calls for projects, and her work has been featured in national and international exhibitions, including a group exhibition at the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil. She was a finalist for the Best Photobook Award at the Imaginária Festival in 2022. In 2024, she participated in the group exhibition Andanças at the El Rule Cultural Center in Mexico and at the Página Gallery in São Paulo. She develops poems inspired by her photographic projects.
Tempo Esculpido / Sculpted Time
Tempo Esculpido presents beings created from bio-botanical fragments in a reinterpretation of what deteriorates. The created bodies have unique and ephemeral physiologies: it highlights evidence and traces that indicate a state of cycle closure (death) and the reformulation of matter (life). Nature is a source of discovery of life forms both familiar and nonexistent. The collection of natural remains has become a poetic and playful task in the reinvention of the scientist. Fragments collected to be manipulated and reformulated.
The material mimics itself between decomposition and a new configuration, resulting in a hybrid structure, which passes from raw nature to the realm of imagination and infinite possibilities of recreation. Forms sometimes fresh, sometimes faded and dry, the certainty of the impermanence of the state of things. The invented creatures, now brought to life, whisper their existences in photographic portraits. In the creation of these transient and fleeting sculptures, photography is a tool of aesthetic and creative elaboration while attempting to stop the process of decomposition of these rearranged organic fragments. Between what exists and what has not yet been created, sculpted time is a process of modeling in time, space, and form. Fractions of different species combine to create a sculptural harmony. The beauty of freshness confronts wear, affirming new perspectives of presence centered more on its journeys than on its destinies, thus proposing a new mode of being. A visual and conceptual investigation into the transformation and revaluation of perishable nature.
Sculpture, photography, poetry. In the articulation of these languages, in the openings and folds produced by the contact between codes and supports, Tempo Esculpido promotes a kind of cosmogonic ritual. Beings, generated from an exercise based on the artist’s body, which collects from nature its mortal remains – organic waste destined to decompose – to transmute them into new sculptural realities which, in turn, undergo a new mutation, through photographic recording. Reconstructed through poetic performance into verbal images, therefore, the species of Tempo Esculpido gain a new lease of life, revealing their metamorphic nature.
