Artwork and text by Sandra Cattaneo Adorno
On April 20, 2024, Sandra Cattaneo Adorno unveiled 10 Years at the 7th edition of Personal Structures, which runs parallel with the 60th Venice Biennale. Organized by the European Cultural Centre, the 2024 edition focuses on the experience of foreigners, émigrés, exiled, and refugees, especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Throughout her practice, Cattaneo Adorno embarks on journeys around the globe with camera in hand, capturing glimmering flickers of daily life that evoke scenes from a dream, floating between reality and illusion.
Hailing from Brazil, Cattaneo Adorno’s life, work, and worldview have been shaped by a lifetime of traveling the globe, fostering a sense of belonging in multiple places by the act of making art. Curated by the photographer and Andrea Verganti, 10 Years charts Cattaneo Adorno’s evolution as an image-maker and author, creating a new space for experimentation that elegantly blends the essence of her previous series in The Other Half of the Sky, Águas de Ouro, and Scarti di Tempo into a modernist masterpiece.
Cattaneo Adorno’s new monograph appears as the centerpiece of her exhibition, which also features thirteen prints and a six-minute video installation. Drawing inspiration from artist scrapbooks and leporellos (accordion books), 10 Years adopts the accordion format to imagine the photographs as notes one would make in a diary to record feelings and impressions. The images in the book are printed with the same gold metallic ink and black paper as the prints on view, transforming the picture into a glimmering sliver of reverie that recalls the delicate splendors of Gustav Klimt’s symbolist paintings and the golden paint of Brazilian dancers at Carnival.
Resisting the notions of beginning and end, Cattaneo Adorno envisions 10 Years as a scroll where stories unfold in fragmented and layered narratives, much like travel itself. The photographs meld one another, unveiling the complex interplay between dislocation and interconnection equal parts enigmatic and profound. These glittering scenes of Mauritius, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand, Singapore, New York, London, Italy, Portugal, and Japan become surreal meditations of otherness as mysterious as existence itself.
Sandra Cattaneo: 10 Years is on view from April 20–November 24, 2024, at Palazzo Bembo, Riva del Carbon 4793, 30124 Venezia
Hardcover accordion-fold with booklet
10 x 13.25 inches
