Rodrigo d'alcântara

Digital photo collage

Rodrigo D’Alcântara (Rodrigo de Alcântara Barros Bueno - b. Niterói, Brazil) is a visual artist, film/video-maker and PhD student in the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University (Montreal, CA). His doctoral studies are supported by Concordia University Graduate Fellowship and Concordia International Tuition Award of Excellence. He holds a Master degree in Visual Arts from the School of Fine Arts of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and a Bachelor degree in Plastic Arts from the University of Brasília (Brazil) - with an exchange term in the Los Andes University (Colombia). Rodrigo’s works have been screened internationally, in countries such as Austria, Brazil, Belgium, Chile, Germany, Greece, Italy, among others. His theoretical research focuses on analyzing some of the concepts and imagery that have been perpetuated through Western Art History and have contributed in maintaining a colonial and straight structure in contemporary times. He is interested in recent contemporary art movements and theories that have been created through the subversion of hegemonic historicity. 

The pandemic and the intensification of life's uncertainty made me connect more with my ancestors. During the quarantine I have been developing a video art alongside the relatives I share my house with, which are my grandmother and my mother. In parallel of this video process, I’ve been creating a series of digital images and photo-collages entitled Self-declarations. In this series I intervene on my family's photographic archive to invoke my matriarchal heritage, as seen at the 3  Matriarchal Ensigns artworks. A mixed-race and syncretic Brazilian iconology is then channeled through symbolic interventions on my genealogical imagery.